Singularity Power Plant

150 power out of one two-by-two footprint: three times an Advanced Power Plant, and seven and a half of the first Power Plant plants. It is upgrade-only, 700 metal and 36 seconds on an Advanced Power Plant, and it is what a Tier-3 base runs on: deep-core mining, advanced factories, radar and a turret line together draw more than a field of small plants can carry. Per unit of power it costs about what a first plant does, so it is never a bargain; what it buys is ground and concentration.

How to use

Upgrade instead of sprawling. Every plant you do not build is a two-by-two of buildable ground the base gets back, and a grid of five or six singularity cores is far easier to defend than the forty small plants it stands in for.

That is also the catch: the fewer plants carry the load, the more a single loss costs. Power shortfall does not black the base out, it slows it, with production, repairs, turret reloads and mining all running at the power factor, so a base that loses one core keeps fighting at a fraction of its speed, which is worse than it sounds when the attack that killed the plant is still going on. Put the cores at the back, inside the turret ring, and keep one plant of headroom above what the base actually draws.