Auxiliary Reactors

[hookoa]

Oh, I forgot.

If you have too much power in your fusion reactor, just throw less helium atoms at eachother each minute. (Don't rev the engine. It wastes gas. <---- hah! A chemistry pun.)

[dvlenk6]

Hey Hookoa, you must be happy with all the new Ares ships and stations, huh?
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Only thing about double (or more) reactors is that it might take a complete rebalancing of the energy usage of devices. Some of the weapons and shields aren't able to be used with smaller reactors. That seems to be a planned part of the game balance.

I guess with them taking up slots now, it wouldn't too feasible to have many reactors. I could maybe see using a slot for another reactor. It would give a little flexibilty to the ship configuration if, for instance, you can't find a BM shipyard. You would be able to use a slot for another 100MW reactor so you could use bigger badder better guns and shields; but you would lose the slot and have to decide what device you would go without in favor of the second reactor.

More choices is better most of the time.

EDIT - realism is an aside for a video game, IMHO.

[Fossaman]

I would be inclined to give at least the freighter the option of trading cargo space for a reactor slot. That could be an interesting option also...

[Sponge]

I could see doing the same for a Sapphire with the Cargo Upgrade. Maybe traye 50 tons of space for a reactor? Of course, going off that, every ship would have to have a minimum of two reactor slots otherwise the Wolfen would be stuck with 1 reactor, and that would make it a horrible choice for a ship.

[OddBob]

Of course, going off that, every ship would have to have a minimum of two reactor slots otherwise the Wolfen would be stuck with 1 reactor, and that would make it a horrible choice for a ship.

If a second reactor is required, you're implementing it wrong. It shouldn't be a problem.

[Sponge]

I may have been unclear. If all ships but the Wolfen can have a second reactor, why would you want to play a Wolfen? It's the difference between 1GW and 2GW. The Sapphire is nearly as fast, and with twice the potential power output, and more cargo room, it would totally squash the Wolfen. If this isn't how you think it should be implemented, then I'm not the only one out of line. It's basically the entire idea behind this thread.

[Fossaman]

I agree with OddBob. Dual reactors should be optional. They're not really that necessary, but it would add 'optional depth' to the gameplay.

Just thought of something; dual reactors could be a good way to deal with fuel problems. There's a period in the middle of the late-game that is a bit short of fuel, when you've got a 500MW reactor. A pair of 250s would kill a lot of that.

I also just had a thought about adding more variety to the reactor market; With variable slot devices, reactors could be larger or smaller, with more or less efficiency to go along with that; Something like three different types per MW range would be awesome.

[OddBob]

I may have been unclear. If all ships but the Wolfen can have a second reactor, why would you want to play a Wolfen? It's the difference between 1GW and 2GW. The Sapphire is nearly as fast, and with twice the potential power output, and more cargo room, it would totally squash the Wolfen. If this isn't how you think it should be implemented, then I'm not the only one out of line. It's basically the entire idea behind this thread.

Sure, if the second reactor is free, in which case both the freighter and Sapphire get something for nothing.

It's not. It takes up cargo space or device slots or both (I'd actually recommend scaling it: Hyperion is like 80 tons and 2 slots while a 10mw is 10 tons and no slots, etc).

So you can have your 2 GW Sapphire that has 50 tons cargospace WITH a hold expansion (fill your cargohold that full and tell me how fast you can turn, so might as well take another slot for a Megadrive that acts like a Titan...) PLUS twice the fuel consumption, or you can have a 1GW wolfen with same Megadrive (which can run rings around a Hornet) and [extra powerful weapon] you bought with all the cash you're not spending on fuel as well.

Alright that was just me arguing for fun:

If you give every ship two reactor slots (for free), you just went from "optional trade-off" to "required item". Yeah, you don't have to install it. You don't have to install a shield either, but I don't see people doing that (Much.). Shields are required. And so will that second reactor if you allow it's use for free. Thus my comment.

If you scale the reactors instead, with each reactor taking up an increasingly large amount of cargo space and slots, then you have nice balance.

The freighter will be right at home with two Hyperions at the cost of what makes it freighty- almost all of it's cargo space and a good chunk of it's device slots. Now you just have a slow Wolfen. Well, a slow wolfen with a lazarus, transuranic armor and an ion flamer, but hey - 2 GW of power drain and you'll see that fuel bar draining noticeably (and that's a heck of a lot of fuel with a Hyperion), not to mention you had to ditch your patcher arm, CPU and ICX just to fit the thing on there.

Likewise with the Sapphire, albiet a less drastic change, because the biggest auxillary reactor it can fit on is (say) a 500MW, or whatever.

The Wolfen can only fit a 250MW (again, example, do not focus on why 250mw is too low or whatever). Now we see that a Wolfen with an extra 250MW and NO cargo space and minus one precious, precious device slot might have been better off with some missiles in that hold and an extra weapon in that slot. That is why I don't think it will be a problem.

[Sponge]

I see what you're saying, and it's a great point. I think I may be overvaluing a second reactor. I figured 2GW would be able to run just about everything you could want it to run, but then again, this was before we started in with the scaled weights. I really like the idea of scaled weights which would prevent just about anything other than the freighter from grabbing two Hyperions.

However, I still feel that very slow and few device slots will beat fast and lots of slots. A freighter with 2GW could easily run a Lazarus, a nice weapon, and still have plenty of room for armor and cargo if it has a hold expansion. I think such a freighter would have no problem taking down the slightly faster Wolfen with 1.25GW, just barely running its Lazarus with no additional power for a big weapon. Not to mention it would have to settle for crap armor and have very little cargo room remaining.

Although I was initially overestimating the power of two big reactors, I still hold that if a craft did not have the ability to have a second, it would pretty much stand no chance against the ships that DID have that ability. The fully loaded freighter could most likely take down a fully loaded Wolfen with ease, but why? I'm starting this whole dual reactor thing would cause so many balance issues that it may not even be worth it.

[dvlenk6]

I think it would depend a lot on the pilot if the loaded freighter would take down the loaded Wolfen or not. The freighter would have to rely on an omni; likely a Omni Ion Blaster.

The wolfen could hit the freighter with heavier weapons (a Fusionfire only takes 100MW, a lazarus takes 900MW, MAG Launcher only takes 2MW to run, that would still give the 1.25GW Wolfen plenty of power to spare). The Fusionfire and the Mag can fire simultaneously. The frieghter ICX can only block one of them. Either one hits much harder than the Omni Ion Blaster.

I'm not sure if an Omni Ion Blaster could take down a Lazarus (and what if the Wolfen Lazarus has Ion Reflecting?); I'm fairly certain that heavy missiles or Hi Flux Mags with an occasional FusionFire hit can (there is no thermo reflecting).
So the equipment choices would matter a lot also.

If it started to get too bad, the wolfen could run away, come back and try again. The freighter doesn't have that option. It can't escape the Wolfen if it is losing the battle. Unless it can reach a planet or some other safe zone to lick it's wounds.

EDIT - Cargo Hold Expansion doesn't add any cargo space to the freighter player ship.

[Fossaman]

Slight clarification here; I don't think that extra reactors should add however many dozen tons of mass. Just take up the space that would otherwise go to cargo. There would be some extra above the weight of the reactor, but too much becomes absurd.

I like the idea of limiting extra reactors to certain sizes, but remember that this will need to carry over to version 2. Perhaps limit them by number of device slots a reactor takes up? Maybe a 'ReactorSlots ="x"' attribute? That way there could be (presumably) more efficient, smaller reactors in the second half that would fit in the same space as the human ones.