Why Having More Thruster Modules Would Be Pretty Neat

[Landar]

(Cross-posted from reddit)

So, there are these purple and blue things you can stick into your thrusters, you might've heard of them before; they're called the electricity and propellant converters. According to their in-game description, they "can be attached to the combustion chamber of a thruster" to increase the efficiency of their power/propellant usage.

Does anyone else see the problem here? It says that they "can" be used, implying that it's a choice, but I've yet to see anyone not using them. After all, why wouldn't you? For how cheap they are (save for tier 3 since they require xhalium), it's basically free real estate. While this is fine and dandy on its own, why don't we try spicing things up a little?

Thus, here are a few ideas on additional thruster modules to make things a little more interesting, as well as provide some more nuance and utility to your average, everyday thruster. Of course, the material costs would be balanced to make these modules sidegrades rather than direct upgrades to the "default."

• A module that alters the thruster efficiency scale to mimic that of the plasma thruster, where it starts off being slightly inefficient, but warms up over time to eventually become slightly more efficient than a normal thruster with "default modules."
• A module that simply increases thrust power in exchange for higher power/fuel consumption. This would essentially be a way to make thrusters more powerful without having to go through the trouble of actually making more tiers. It would also serve to help reduce thruster wall spam as well as help out in designing longer ships that have less room for thruster walls than wider ones do.
• A module that decreases thruster efficiency in exchange for a smaller corrosion hitbox, allowing you to put thrusters in more narrow locations. Alternatively, a module that works similar to the one above but increases the corrosion hitbox in exchange for being slightly more efficient.
• A module that greatly increases thrust power and power/fuel consumption, especially propellant consumption, but the effect on thrust scales inversely with time spent active. This essentially makes for short bursts of powerful thrust, making it useful for things like afterburners and quick maneuvers.
• A module with an active and inactive state. While inactive, the module provides no benefit, but when active would essentially let a thruster be converted into an ion thruster, allowing it to only consume electricity in exchange for having a pathetic amount of thrust. This would make for an emergency option in situations where you've run out of propellant but have plenty of generator fuel left.
• Edit* A module that decreases efficiency in exchange for reducing the visibility of your thruster trail, allowing you to move more stealthily.

Something, something, thanks for reading and all that.

Cheers,
- Lan

 

[Womble]

Just having the choice to go "2 electric" or "2 propellant" instead of being forced to be one of each would be a great start. If you just make the sockets "generic" and able to accept any module, the available options become pretty endless.

I like the general thrust of your ideas.

I'd like to see different sizes and form factors of thruster. Longer ones (say the volume and mass of 8 box thrusters all packed 2-by-2-by-2 with their long axes parallel) would again reduce the need for thruster walls. They wouldn't need to be much more than scale models with scaled power and propellant requirements, as they'd just be an assist to designing shapes of ship with a bit of variety.