Ship Drive Ideas

[Aeonic]

Fusion Drive - this is the equipment which most/all ships come equipped with standard.

These are some alternatives or upgrades for the standard fusion drive technology:


Chemical Propulsion Rockets - "This rocket burns a solid propellant inside a pressure tube. The solid propellant consists of both a fuel and oxidizer, and there is no separate combustion chamber." no top speed bonuses, but high thrust and high power usage. Used for early game maneuvering bonuses if your ship has a good reactor.

Fusion Pulse Drive - "The fusion pulse drive uses small fusion bomblets which are serially detonated within the combustion chamber to produce thrust." This provides no performance boost over the standard fusion drive, but is somewhat more energy efficient.

Anti-matter Catalyzed Fusion Drive - "This is a hybrid anti-matter-fusion engine. It uses anti-matter to initiate nuclear fusion, then hydrogen is forced into fusion by catalysis with anti-matter." This drive provides good top speed (~30), average thrust (100) and an improvement to energy efficiency over the standard fusion drive.

Thermal Anti-matter Drive - "Uses anti-matter to heat a working fluid, converting the propellant into thermal energy." Moderate top speed (~27) with a considerable boost to thrust (~500), but about twice the energy usage of a standard fusion drive.


The reasons why I don't use anything SLOWER than, such as a slow but ultra-efficient Ion Drive, is because you can't downgrade your ship's drives. Aside from having all ships start out with 0 top speed and acceleration and coming equipped with a drive. The reason why I'm not including anything FASTER than this is because everything else seems like it would be TOO fast, TOO advanced, or it just plain kills everything nearby and would be outlawed by everyone.

Aside from those variations, all there really is to come up with within my realm of belief would be improvements on the same device, such as the Titan 440 version. Like bigger badder engines for cars, space ships get bigger, badder fusion drives. I'm not sure which would be preferable, but I'd have a hard time coming up with names for these fusion drives. Of course, provided we come up with some cooler icons for them, having brand-name fusion drives might be kinda fun.

By the way, does anyone know what the rendering environment for item graphics is? Is it the same as for ships?

[Prophet]

Sounds cool.
I started making engines, but only having thrust, speed and power use to work with it's difficult to make variations. Inertialess too but only the Iocrym seem to have this technology so far.

Some things I dabbled in were making engines for capital ships. With their huge mass they need equally huge thrust. It's not really an issue using vanilla ships and any modded ship can have it's thrust increased to any value.

You could always get into the zero point energy technologies for thrust, where power use is nearly zero.

You could have a 'space fold' engine that will check to see if you have a proper reactor and allow folding to other parts of the same system.


The items are rendered at different positions and with different lighting, just play with what looks best. (camera at x +2, Y -6, Z+2 seems to be the base)

[Bobby]

what I think we really need is a few steps between the titan and the pteracnium fusion drives, the jump from 30mw to 200mw is rather extreme. It leaves plenty of room to play with.

we could have variations of every engine class, for example, the titan is a good balance, but there could be a heavy version, with higher thrust and fuel usage, and a lite version with less of those, perhaps a little less speed.

perhaps a drive could be "U"sable, so you could change how much power is sent to it on the fly, have a high power and low power mode, or a temporary turbo boost that overheats it and is automatically disengaged in 20 seconds.

[dosbox-gamer]

I've read that some people install an inertia-less drive extra, just for use in nebula systems (Sanctuary, etc). Always thought it would be cool to have a ramscoop-fed engine, something that would get a little boost in normal space but a big boost in the dense nebula areas. No idea how to make one, though.

[Bobby]

it could be possible, by combining onUpdate with something to check for nebulae and adding fuel as needed.

[WCSII]

Problem with ram-scoop tech is that when sitting still there's next to nothing being collected, so you're probably getting less that 10% efficiency operational capacity, and even when moving, through normal space, still only getting 50% at best, less than that through asteroid fields... And then, depending on the type of nebula anywhere between 65% to 92% efficiency. The only counter to any of these figures is proximity to a star. The nearer one is, the more likely to gather fusion-able material. I think its, what, a 1% increase in density of particulate matter available per 1mill Kilometers closer to a sun? And that's only from what we know about yellow suns, which are still young in nature, and a small yellow at that. We don't know PM/mill Km values for red, orange, violet, or dwarfs of any varying "ages," or sizes.