What is the proper way to handle a power sink?
It's blatantly obvious when one's in use, but of course, IC wise, I should look to the obvious failure points of the system first.
This is the typical timeline surrounding a power sink:
1. Power starts dropping out around the station. Everyone starts yelling IC (and often OOC) about how the engineers are obviously incompetant, and all demand to be let in to engineering to 'properly' set up the singulo.
2. I run over to the singulo cam, to verify everything's ok. Then I check the SMES's. Which are both fine, obviously. I relay this to the crew.
3. CALL THE SHUTTLE!!!
4. I recommend we investigate the problem before we abandon station. After some checks of a few APCs, it becomes apparent that the power grid doesn't have enough power.
5. Announce to the crew there is a mysterious power drain. Let them know i'm working on it.
6. The station is in dark chaos. All doors can be crowbarred, almost nobody can do their jobs. I'm running around checking the wiring, looking for the power sink.
7. The power comes back on somehow.
So my question is, what's the right way to deal with this? There's a lot of possible places for the sink to be, and the only way I've found that even approaches being able to narrow down where it might be is to just cut cables out from engineering, hoping to find the area with the sink. Every time i've tried this it ends up gone before I even find it.
If you could check current flowing through wires, it'd be easier, but all you can check is the power in the system, which is just the total output of the SMES's.
I've heard if you connect the radiation collectors directly to the power grid, you'll blow up the sink, but I can't think of a reasonable IC justification for that, since my character shouldn't know about power sinks, in my mind. I always play it IC as assuming there is a short or something somewhere, and putting more power to a short is likely to cause a fire, not fix it.