How to know remaining charges in a battery?

[bookrat]

What are all the ways to know how many charges a battery has on it?

So far, I've found two.

1) Charge it up fully and you know you're at full charge based on what type of battery it is (20, 40, 80, 100).

2) On page 203, under Power Armor:

SFCRB pg 203 wrote:

Once you have entered a suit of powered armor, you can tell how many battery charges it has remaining, if any.

What other ways can we find to know what the charge level is?

[Jimbles the Mediocre]

I would assume you can glance at a battery and a little LED gauge on the side shows how many charges are left. If a character can count the rounds in a magazine, they should also be able to count the charges in a battery.

Heck, my IRL portable battery pack has this feature, so I'm certainly putting it on all battery packs in SF for my players.

[bookrat]

That's what I'd do for my home game.

What about SFS? Is there a rule in the book for it? The only rule I've found so far is under power armor. This suggests that it's the item, not the battery, that tells you the charge. And so far, only power armor does that.

[Pakishi]

I would assume that the battery itself or the device that you put the battery in has an indicator of number of charges available. Much like a mobile phone with interchangeable batteries will tell you what percent it is at when you turn it on.

Or you like when you plugin a tablet while it is offline it gives you a re charge indicator.

I don't expect it to be much different and that the designers leave that to the imagination of the players.

[Claxon]

It does seem silly to not innately know how much charge is left in a battery.

Our cell phones have it, my electronic cigarette has it. My laptop has it. Most electronic devices have some sort of indicator for battery charge.

Personally I'm just going to assume we can tell, even if it's not in the rules to do so.

[bookrat]

Claxon wrote:

Our cell phones have it, my electronic cigarette has it. My laptop has it. Most electronic devices have some sort of indicator for battery charge.

My portable radios don't, my hand held two way communication radios don't, my watch doesn't, my TV remotes don't, none of my kids toys have an indicator. The majority of my actually batteries don't, except that one I bought where you press a finger on either side and it gives a color indication of a general amount remaining (but it's really vague). None of my power tools have an indicator. My car battery doesn't have an indicator.

We can cherry pick items that do and do not have charge indicators on them to prove a point, but the better point is that all of these are item dependent, not battery dependent.

It's not the battery itself that tells you the charge, but the item it's connected to.

So far, the only item I've seen say that in the game is Power Armor.

Do any of the weapons have a digital display?

[Tiersis]

If something comes out for a whitelist in the future, I'll go ahead and change my thoughts on this, but in general this is probably going to be one of those things where some level of discretion and common sense is required on part of the players and GM to take a step back from the hyper rules language focus and focus on the game.

If I'm in space, and shooting things generally keeps me alive, I'm going to want a weapon that doesn't have a mystery number of rounds left.

Making a gun that runs on a battery charge that doesn't provide a method of knowing how many charges are left on it would just be bad design.

Would I wear a watch that doesn't tell me? Sure.

Gun? No.

Also, the purpose of the game is fun. If I made all the players unaware of how many shots their guns have left, tracked it secretly, had them run out of ammo randomly in the middle of an encounter, etc, without anything specifically telling me I should; I would feel like a major a-hole.

Regardless of what modern day items do or do not have a charge readout, I'd rule that a space faring society had a way to tell.

My 2 cents.

[Jimbles the Mediocre]

bookrat wrote:

The majority of my actually batteries don't, except that one I bought where you press a finger on either side and it gives a color indication of a general amount remaining (but it's really vague).

This was the first example that occurred to me, but I could not for the life of me come up with a search term that I could Google to find a picture.

bookrat wrote:

We can cherry pick items that do and do not have charge indicators on them to prove a point, but the better point is that all of these are item dependent, not battery dependent.

You're 100% right here, but I suppose we could cherry pick batteries as well (in addition to the squeezy ones, you can go buy a lithium ion battery pack with a digital or LED readout). I would posit that knowing the amount of remaining charges is critical when the battery is ammunition and because of that all (or nearly all) standardized batteries found in Starfinder have some sort of easily readable indicator as to their current charge state.

[BretI]

Assuming you have an engineering kit, it should be a trivial thing to determine.

Given the technology, a simple computer check to access the battery should also tell you.

Unfortunately neither of these are covered in the rules.

There are plenty of places where they warn you of the potential of overcharging and make it sound like you don't automatically know how many charges. I couldn't find how you were supposed to be able to determine that other than a full recharge.

[SirShua]

I'd probably just have it as a standard feature of the weapons, count and display charges. Doesn't explicitly have to be numeric or even digital so long as it works.

[ENHenry]

There's no reason not to know from a game perspective. Just as there are no rules in Pathfinder that explicitly state that you can tell how many arrows are in a half-empty quiver, there should be no reason a soldier would not know how many shots are left in their laser pistol.

[SirShua]

You could have a niche case where the pc needs a weapon, and doesn't have any of his on hand. At that point he would be picking up weapons and might not know how charged or maintained it is as hook for creating tension.

I don't think it'd be a widespread enough case to impact the rest of the adventure, and you could always through in an excuse like goblin "workmanship" for features not functioning to get the same effect

[sunderedhero]

Yeah I see no reason why a battery wouldn't have an indicator built in(we have batteries that have that feature now) but the "Recharge" and "Transfer Charge" spells have these lines:

Recharge:

If you restore more charges than the item can hold, the
item must succeed at a Fortitude saving throw or take
1d6 electricity damage for each excess charge. This spell
provides no knowledge of how many charges an item can
safely hold, but you can choose to bestow fewer charges
than the maximum allowed to reduce the risk; you must
declare how many charges you are restoring before casting
this spell.

Transfer Charge:

You must declare how many charges you are transferring
before casting this spell. If you transfer more charges from
the source than the receiving item can hold, the receiving item
must succeed at a Fortitude saving throw or take 1d6 electricity
damage. This spell provides no knowledge of how many charges
a receiving item can safely hold, but you can choose to transfer
fewer charges than the maximum allowed to reduce the risk.

[bookrat]

Ok, so there's a few lines of evidence that suggests batteries do not state the remaining charges:

1) It doesn't actually say it anywhere
2) Power Armor specifically states it tells you the charge remaining
3) At least two spells have verbiage stating you gain no knowledge of remaining charges on a battery via the spell.

Regarding point 3, if a battery told you what the number of charges left was, there wouldn't be any need to point out that the spell does not grant that information, nor would there be any risk in overcharging a battery and blowing it up.

[kaid]

It would make sense you get at least a battery level indicator but it could also be like a phone where you don't know exactly how many minutes of charge it has just an aproximation. So you could have an indicator that shows the battery is near full/half full/empty to give you a feel for your situation without giving a numerical value which would still make the spells somewhat dangerous if you get to aggressive with them.

[Voss]

So, if charges are a mystery (for whatever reason), doesn't this dump tracking charges for the entire party on the DM? How... nice.

[Hiruma Kai]

Voss wrote:

So, if charges are a mystery (for whatever reason), doesn't this dump tracking charges for the entire party on the DM? How... nice.

As long as all charge uses are within sight of the characters and the batteries are fully charged at the start, they by rights know how much charge is left. So the players can certainly keep track of those.

If you really want a "readout" in character, get a tier 1 computer with a control module for your battery operated weapon or device, give it wireless range and put it on your wrist, and have it have a program to count shots or minutes of use for you. That strikes me as falling under the "simple" control module options and basically is free.

You could also get a control module which batteries plug into. Strikes me as something well within a control module's use. Clearly the technology exists in recharging stations and power armor.

Lastly, the Engineering skill includes the "Identify Technology" use, which lets you identify the properties of technological items. Current charges is a property of that battery. Any engineer's tool kit worth its name should include a multimeter at the very least.