Okay, this is driving me nuts.
Currently the SMES holds power.
Doors and lights consume power.
And Solar cells produce power.
Orange conduits hook into the SMES units and APCs.
APCs need a neighbouring terminal to work.
Red cables hook into terminals to deliver power to doors and lightswitches.
Blue wires hook into lightswitches and terminals to deliver power to light fixtures.
What am I doing wrong here?
APC direction.
You need the APC facing in the direction of the terminal.
Also, about the source engine?
It wouldn't work.
There is just too much complexity in unneeded directions, and all the optimizations are for mostly-unchanging maps.
Plus, it will require steam and a source game to run.
For a 3D SS13, I would reccomend the torque game engine, with some sort of octree optimization similar to blockland. However, the retail version is infested with noobs and terrible mods. If you can get your hands on the old alpha, it would make a great(though outdated) game engine.
Pluse, the TGE supports in-game script changes. Also, every object is given a unique numeric ID, so you can say 173523.setposition("183 2578 -234.8724"); rather than right click->x->num->183, repeat for y and z, and worry about finding the object after each jump. Also, the skybox is a visual-only cube stretching to infinity around the player, not a finite box.
However, the best solution is C or C++, writing an entirely new engine, since physics would be relatively simple(especially if everything was constrained to a 3D grid, though could be at any offset in the grid "tile", so the player can wander around 32, 76, 1 and still block it properly.
Bottom line: the source engine is the worst engine for dynamic worlds because it can't precalculate the bsp tree to improve render times, and it is optimized to show only tiny bits of highly detailed map at a time.
ALso: SS81: finally working on airflow again!