Engines. Fuel consumption. Boost

[pavvvel]

1. Right now, if an engine is running even at 1-200 units of thrust out of 10000, it consumes almost as much fuel and energy as an engine running at maximum. i suggest changing the mechanics of the fuel calculation.
2. Mode with flight control disabled. So, it's possible to switch to a mode where your ship won't try to line up its trajectory towards the front, so you will be able to coast for a while (with gradual deceleration).
3. add a boost. a boost that temporarily powers up the engines but generates a lot of heat and temporarily increases fuel consumption. during the boost the fire plume should increase - it's nice. the boost would allow heavy ships to be able to avoid firing, especially during U-turn when you need to fight the inertia.

 

[Sylwester]

1. It's true for propellant, as for energy, it can got down to about 50% as you throttle down the engines (according to wiki). If you want to have "eco" mode that runs slower and consumes less propellant/fuel, then you should be able to create yolol script that disables whole engines rather than throttling them down.

 

[Daddystu]

An eco-mining mode would be good so we dont use so much propellant while turtling to the next roid. Difficult to script when using large rear thruster groupings.

 

[The Wayfarer]

An eco-mining mode would be good so we dont use so much propellant while turtling to the next roid. Difficult to script when using large rear thruster groupings.

Not really, the Sutler uses a script and a spedometre to decide how far it can scale down the thrust while keeping the same speed.

Additionally, the near constant propellant usage per thrust is intentional. Though it is annoying watching your manuvouring triangle thruster fire at 1 thrust (0.01% maximum) while draining similar to your main forwards thrusters, you can safely disable this with a button and some yolol trickery. That being said, valves (similar to network relays but for pipe connections) would be nice so that we can stop unneeded propellant flow to a thruster, or have break points just in case the ship is damaged and is leaking propellant.

So in summary, yeah it's annoying but it can be mitigated by just adding an extra propellant tank or two. Any ship design in which the propellant drain from manuvours can significantly affect performance definitely needs to be reconsidered.
And in the case of an extremely long range moon ship, just have network relays. You can cut the data connection to the thrusters (mfc and fcu are connected to the network via a network relay), then set the thrust for each thruster that is not used for main thrust to 0 with yolol. Or, physically cut the cables while you're travelling. Two easy solutions.

 

[ChaosRifle]

Use network relays to turn the engines off entirely. My mining ships see up to a 20x flight time increase doing that. It is a bit more setup, but I think a valid tradeoff. I would like to see it changed a bit, but then the engineering takes a hit to the gains for putting in the effort on the design. all tradeoffs, though i do agree its too much use for prop right now. The energy curve is pretty fair I think. maybe mirror the prop curve to the energy use curve.

 

[Askannon]

I use two main flight computers (with different domains, so mfc1 has 1 to 50 and mfc2 has 51 to 100) for my ships with one FCU each and just turn the multiplier to 0 if I don't want to use them (and as I am only using them for controlling forward thrust turn off the rotational etc by changing their name in the FCU... first iteration didn't and it was interesting how much forward thrusters can change yaw, pitch just by being addressable for it).

Gets a bit finicky when setting the thrusters' device fields but allows good control for medium to large ships, while smaller ships in most cases don't have enough non-essential thrusters (needed to balance the thrust/weight) to warrant this approach.

 

[Daddystu]

Interesting - i've always used 1:1 MFC to FCU when necessary although I tend to use groupings of late keeping it simpler. I do have a smaller ship though where I want it to use my rear boxes for pitch/yaw... and it does until I add a single man. thruster pair up front for a slow roll. The algo then tries to switch everything to the man. thrusters. Ultra responsive pitch/yaw become sluggish as a result. First world problems.

 

[pavvvel]

Addition to the number three pukntu from the first message of this thread. Now the mechanics of heat are being introduced and it is very strange that the engines are not involved in this. The afterburner mode, which I briefly described in point number three, involves the release of a large amount of heat. The "stored heat" parameter can be added to the engine housing And a certain rate of heat dissipation depending on t1/t2/t3. This will limit the frequency of boost use.

At the current stage of the game's development, boost will not increase the maximum speed of the ship. But by increasing the thrust, the ships will be able to diversify the PVP, instead of circling opposite each other, as it looks now (it looks monotonous).
Ships equipped with a sufficient number of maneuvering engines will get a good stretch during the boost. This will diversify the gameplay and shipbuilding. .. And enlarged fire plumes... It would be very beautiful! The modified powerful sound of the engines during the boost would add atmosphere. In addition, it would be possible to burn an opponent with such fiery plumes))

Players will need to make sure that they do not fall under the fire plume - this is very good. During the boost, you can add effects of shaking and partial distortion of the image at the edges. This issue can be discussed and supplemented

.. sorry for my english)