Electrical Skill and Ideas

[coolzach]

I was thinking about some good ideas for Project Zomboid that would make the game much more exciting as a realistic zombie apocalypse simulator. The thought that stood out in my mind was an idea that my brother and I were discussing, adding an electrical skill and,or trait. When the games power goes out you, could make your own power through solar panels, coal generators etc. We even thought this could inspire new structures that could be added to the game such as power plants and hydro dams. Depending on your electrical skill you can craft more durable or a wider range of weapons and traps like tazers and electrical fences to keep zombies away from your base. This could even be a new profession added from when you pick your character at the beginning of the game, the profession could be an electrician so that you could have or start with more skill points to the electrical skill. This way there would be no worries once your power went out so you could power fridges, stoves, sinks and have working lights. With this there can be new items added to the game like scrap metal to use for wiring or for new tech and machinery for your base. Making special work benches to craft new weapons and traps. Maybe even making chargers for drained batteries to work your flashlight again. Also it would be a great time for coal generators to use as backup power in case of your regular power source going out or needs repair. With making new technology you could make satellites to broadcast or talk to other survivors for recruiting or talking to the game to call in supply drops or something neat like that. If you had a great enough electrical skill you could take over dams or power plants and get them up and running, or if not, you could loot the place of its valuables and tech to use in your own place. But this shouldn't be a skill that you could master easily so that everyone could do this but for people who would devote their character entirely to this skill and eventually pay off for their hard work. It also seems like this could be better for farming as well, like having an automatic set time for watering your crops or even automatically harvesting them when fully grown. If you wanted to be even more technical, you could have an alarm attached to your doors so if your base was breached a siren would go off so you could tell if you were in danger. Or even make secret electrical doors that couldn't be broken down. The idea (in my brother and I's opinion) would be a very entertaining skill trait to get into on Project Zomboid. The possibilities for weapons, traps, bases, fortifications, technology, and even communication could potentially be a vast expansion to this already great game. It would take time but seems like it would pay off. I hope you guys take our idea into consideration and please send your feedback, I would like to know what you guys think about, thanks.

[Rathlord]

As per the Commonly Suggested Suggestions list here: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/192-commonly-suggested-suggestions-read-before-posting/ most of that is already planned.

 

I won't go into exact details, but some of your ideas are a bit off kilter. Coal generators aren't really found… well… anywhere, at all. Afaik there's not a hydro dam anywhere close to Muldraugh, and even if it were… a few people with no technical knowledge can't run a power plant, period. Tasers and electric fences would be largely useless on zombies due to the amount of charge it would take to stop one- they work mostly on pain, and zeds don't feel pain. They aren't capable of handling enough charge to actually incapacitate a zombie. Etc, etc but the tl;dr is that electrical wiring and such is planned, and you need to learn paragraphs =D

 

And welcome to the community!

[Fj45]

Wish schools taught more on electronics.

[Kasix]

I would also like a occupation - electican. I personally think that in zombie world some sort of warning system with wire or motion sensors would be extremely useful. Besides floodlights at nights could make surving in the night easier. And a skilled electrician could make an improvised solar panel, which of course wouldn't be as efficient as professionallly made, yet could get some power. And maybe we could get battery chargers and car acumulators or batteries to store energy for night. Also even if the solar panels would be craftabe, they should get damaged by wind so they wouldn't be useful, but rather be regullary fixed and bring more realism into the game. And that would be an ideal action when the NPC come in, so you have one guy checking panels/generators/batteries on regular basis.

[gabrek]

This does bring up the question- where in Knox county IS the electrical plant? Does it have one, or is it a relay station? What about the water pumps?

With the technical manuals that are always present inside such facilities, a sufficiently motivated individual should be able to get them up and running again, at least on the short term.

And if they are all piped/lined in, and the area is simply under quarantine, why would they cut the utilities?

[Kasix]

Well after all if the containment is still holding and the rest of the country unaffected, the local institutions would cut off the power and water supply, because why shoud country support a dead city?
Yet if the containment fails and all the country is affected, the power , water and heat fails at most of the country. I hope, when the map gets bigger, they might add in the powerplant and other utility stations.

[Rathlord]

Neither power nor water plants can be run by individuals. I have a bit of experience at a power plant and there's no way in hell. There's a reason it takes a full crew. Further, most of it is computer controlled now and without system access it's be even more impossible.

[Elliohow]

Tasers and electric fences would be largely useless on zombies due to the amount of charge it would take to stop one- they work mostly on pain, and zeds don't feel pain. They aren't capable of handling enough charge to actually incapacitate a zombie.

I don't know about electric fences but in regards to tasers, pain is merely a secondary effect of them. The main effect is the 'victim' losing voluntary control of their muscles as the electricity racing through their bodies produces muscle contractions/contractions. Therefore tasers would work on walkers, sorry for being nitpicky.

[Rathlord]

 

Tasers and electric fences would be largely useless on zombies due to the amount of charge it would take to stop one- they work mostly on pain, and zeds don't feel pain. They aren't capable of handling enough charge to actually incapacitate a zombie.

I don't know about electric fences but in regards to tasers, pain is merely a secondary effect of them. The main effect is the 'victim' losing voluntary control of their muscles as the electricity racing through their bodies produces muscle contractions/contractions. Therefore tasers would work on walkers, sorry for being nitpicky.

 

 

This is somewhat true, though most publicly available tasers don't actually lock your muscles- without the pain involved, you can still continue to move, albeit a bit jerkily. I've seen a (real) video of a guy getting tasered three times in a row by military issue tasers and still fighting. It took the fourth to take him down- and they were clean hits with both barbs piercing flesh they found out afterwords. He was, of course, on drugs and was feeling very little pain.

[booner352]

Stun guns affect everyone differently. Elliohow is right about the muscle contractions. It takes 3mV to cause a nerve to fire an action potential. Most tasers are at least 10^6 times stronger than this. Now you have to imagine how many nerves are in your body and what they do. From a medical standpoint, I'd imagine that the taser would cause massive cramps in the area that has been "shocked". Now, Rathlord is also right. Nerves control a lot of things, probably their most popular function is pain. So when you get "shocked" all these nerves in that area are firing action potentials making you feel pain. This is a massive shock to your body, aiding in the "paralysis".

 

My opinion as a biomedical engineering STUDENT who has studied the electro-physiology of the human body, Rathlord is right. You'd need two tasers hitting the zombies legs to cause it to fall over for probably no more than 5 seconds.

 

TL;DR: Tasers would be practically useless for zombies. Great idea though.

[Rathlord]

Nice post booner, very informative.

[Kidlonewolf]

Wish schools taught more on electronics.

Lots of schools do allow you to take a trade skill class, but most only offer it a college course. I took basic electronics and electrical 1&2 in high school. They all counted as half credits toward college, too.