I’ve been making my floating island base bigger and better before I move on with the storyline, and the thing that absolutely tickles me the most is fiddling with the electrical systems.

The core of the base is a 4-story tower made of round Deepwater modules with lots of branching arms connecting other rooms in a series of stacked figure-eights. Top floor is my office, big teleport portal, and save point. Bottom is entrances and a short teleport to the top. Middle floors have staircase access from the outside and one is the “power room” with 8 batteries. Those batteries are charges by a collection of 11 solar panels mounted on the roofs of 3 of the outlying modules. But you see, that’s only the backups. A measely 275kp!

No, waaaay down below my floating island, and on the shore of the lake beneath it, there was a power hotspot just barely inside the base range. That’s where I built the “power plant.” A gorgeous wooden building with sail roofs that houses nine Electromagnetic Generators pumping out a combined 1300kp. This feeds into a distribution panel with control lights that lets me switch the main power off and on at will. And then this runs through a single battery acting as a test rectifier, and then flows down a cable on the lakebed until it runs right under the edge of the floating island, where I built an underwater “power sub-station” in a natural crevice at the bottom of the lake. This facility is a single deepwater chamber holding six batteries and a short range teleporter that connects to the power plant for maintenance. A small, T-shaped tower projects just above the water’s surface with ladders and an access hatch from the lake itself. And in the upper section is a set of 8 Biofuel Reactors that can supply emergency power.

And then I ran miles of wires and complicated circuits that let me control all of this energy flow from my desk at the top of the base tower. Switching from main, to auxiliary, to backup, or even putting the whole base on lockdown. There’s even a booby trap for prisoners. It’s a short range teleporter that looks important but only turns on if the base is in lockdown mode, and if anyone steps into it they get teleported into a single glass cuboid on the bottom of the lake, where a proximity switch circuit sees them and shuts off the teleporter inside so they can’t get back out.