Propellant/Gas/Fuel mixing and Propellant/Fuel Industry.

[Kap]

The game is missing something that I consider crucial.
You're already planning a big gas system, with gas separation towers and all of that, so this almost seems like a no brainer.
You have an opportunity to create a whole new type of industry revolving around Propellant and Fuel production.
This industry could also be split into fuel for generators, especially for the larger ones that run on liquid, that we're going to get in the near future.

I think it's a bit of a shame that thrusters just need hydrogen, that's it. You get hydrogen, you burn it, you get thrust.
It could be expanded in the future to allow for more interesting stuff, and open up for what I'd call a propellant industry.

Suggestion: Different types of propellant.
Let's say we have 5-10 different types of gasses, that we can mix in different ratios to get different effects on our thrusters.

We still keep all our standard hydrogen fuel, but we can burn any of the new gasses for different effects.
Maybe some of the gasses boosts overall thruster max output, but it takes longer for the thruster to reach max thrust.
Each gas has positive effects on the thruster, and negative downsides as well:
Some more ideas regarding positives and negatives:
a. Standard Hydrogen
b. + Max Thrust, - Acceleration, + Consumption.
c. + Max Thrust, + Radiation Signature, + Consumption.
e. - Max Thrust, - Radiation Signature, - Consumption.
f. - Max Thrust, + Acceleration.
g. + Top Speed (!), -- Acceleration, ++ Radiation Signature, ++ Consumption. (Top speed as in breaching 150m/s, to perhaps 175m/s) (Could make this one very rare/expensive), or be a hidden ratio mix for the community to find.

Doesn't necessarily have to be 1 downside, 1 positive, could be a whole slew of different effects on each propellant.
There should be more than just Max Thrust, Consumption, Acceleration, Radiation Signature and Top Speed, but I'll leave the ideas open for the comments/devs.

This naturally ties in with how we already can enable and disable our propellant tanks. Say you have 1 small tank of very good and expensive propellant on your ship, for use in emergency pirate escape/pursuit scenarios, then cut the standard propellant off, enable the good propellant.
You would need just one change to existing tanks: Don't transfer propellant into tanks on the pipe-network that have their IsOpen set to 0. I'm not sure if it does right now, I believe so.

Stopping here would be a bit dull. Let's move on to the next suggestion.

Suggestion: Mixing of propellant gasses.
That's just the base propellant gasses though, now allow us to mix them in ratio's.
Maybe mixing 25% Propellant A, 50% Propellant B, and 25% Propellant C turns out to be a pretty good propellant in terms of economy, on the use of long-range travels, it may lower your max-speed, but the reduced consumption makes it worth it.
The mixture combines the properties of the different propellants, and maybe there's secrets hidden inside of the ratios, for all of us to explore and find out for ourselves.

I think if you do this, you should make the properties of each gas something that is up to the community to explore, research and share as they wish.
Not something that is immediately put up on the wiki on day 1. Let the players handle that stuff.

Say, that I found a good mixture, that is very economic, or perhaps a secret one with good performance, then I want to sell that mixture.
I could start making that propellant and store it in big propellant tanks on my station, give it a name and start advertising it.
Word could get around that this is indeed good fuel, and boom there's my propellant business.
People would show up in big propellant tankers to buy this propellant for use on their min-maxed fighters.
I could also sell the recipe for a lump-sum to highest bidder, if I'm not interested in starting my own propellant farm, but just wanted to do science..

Suggestion: All of the above, duplicated into liquid fuel and fuel rods.
Different Fuel sources, right now we have Exorium, Nhurgite. Add 5 more, give them different properties.
Allow mixing the liquids, allow printing liquids to rods.
Allow me to sell the liquid, allow me to sell the printed rods.

Final note, there's the option to make this dangerous as well. Bad mixtures could result in damage to genrators/thrusters/tanks, and booms.

Final final note (I promise): Each base gas has a colour associated with it, that is used in the thruster trail. If you burn maybe propellant c, you have yellow trails. If you burn propellant d, you have red trails. If you burn 50% c, and 50% d, you have a mix of yellow and red trails, so orange trails.

You could make gentleman's agreements for sieges, that one side flies green trails, the other red trails. And then suddenly switch to different tanks that produces the same thrust trails as the enemy, but they saw that coming so they switch on their own 2nd tanks, that produce yellow trails. Hmm.

How cool would it not be, to know that the secret super propellant is X colour, and now you just witnessed some hauler switch from what you think is economy propellant , to that super propellant .. hmm. I like it.

Final final final note ( i lied) : Some gasses could be gated behind thruster tiers. Say that tier 1's and tier2's straight up just start stuttering and damaging themselves if they attempt to burn straight propellant g, or a mixture that contains >25% propellant g.
^ And don't inform us about that, let it be a science.

 

[Venombrew]

i read through your post and be honest im not 100% familiar with all the fuel ideas, and i dont mean yours, all in general, ive not delved hard into that during alpha play. but i did like your idea on multitude of resources with multiple device uses. With multiple ingredients some players could find better combinations and concoctions that others didn't think of. With more material we can have more rarer material that is much harder find(giving better objectives to farmers and better goods for pirates, in turn makes exploration more important), and honestly crafting is never successful without an abundancy of material. It gets really boring when there is about 5 things you can pick from and thats basically it.

Are you familiar with Elderscrolls Online's crafting with alchemy? That has a system much closer to what you are pitching and his by far a lot of gamers favorite crafting because of the extremely wide range of material to use, the several combinations that can be used, negative and positive effects, OR using really really rare material to remove negative effects, not to mention the many different qualities you can make in potency, durations, etc. That system is much closer to what your pitching and is one of the most successful crafting systems out there right now in games, since FB is wanting to add a very indept crafting system, they should take a que from that.

EDIT: BTW if you look at their roadmap they talk about the gas refinement factories, crafting and research tree, they also talk about q4 having more alloys being able to be combined to make new metals, but nothing much more about gas. i hope they have more for it in the plans cause it does seem like they could expand more here.
Roadmap
https://www.starbasegame.com/roadmap/Starbase_roadmap_2021_1440p.jpg

 

[Lionard Freezer]

Love this idea.
Im not sure, but since the fuel rods already say what they are made of, it could very well be on their list of doing.
While im not sure of that, since its not on the roadmap as @Venombrew said, it would indeed create a wide variety of jobs and opertunitys.
Maybe have each moon hold a special gas thats only there, or simply much more abundant, thats good at one thing.
Then mix the gasses of a few moons together to get the best travel or other affinity gas (as op mentioned).
Since you have to travel to multiple moons with a big af gas carryer, it would be a good place for pirates to attack.
But those gases can be used as fuel right? and fuel is flamable. So flamable that it would explode if shoot.
Becourse of this the pirates have to be extremly careful not to missfire and destroy any valuables the carryer holds.
This also adds some Purpose to fighting in deep space. The Value of the carryer is, after all, not only that you can sell it for a lot, but you can also use superior fuel mixtures for fighting if you get your hands on it.
Since those fuels have to travel long distaces, even if the gasses themselves are abundant, and becourse of that, are cheap at their respective moons, they would be really expensive at other places, giving traders another opertunity to make abundant amounts of money.
Standard fuel, hydrogen, could be abundant in the basic asteroid ring and as such new players could get a constant supply of cheap, standard fuel (just like now).
Different radioactive materials might be better for fuel rods, but radiate much more, to the extend that you have to shield it a lot for it to not damage other componments. As such it would be a much more viable method in bigger, already heavyer ships than on small fighters.
Just some ideas i immediatly came to. Havent thought much of the negatives, since i see it so, that you could simply still use the old stuff, since that would probably be the best cost to travel ratio.
You only want other fuels if you can only take a low amount of fuel with you, as such you need very efficient fuel. Or you want to fight, as such you want fuel that gives you more thrust, but depletes rapidly, and becourse of that you only use it while turning and as a boost.
Im not sure about the "break top speed" as such things would be quite gamebreaking. Depends on how you would balance it so you cant use it continously in combat (like it uses 10 times the fuel than standard).