Fast ships are fuel hogs?

Ed Kolis · #1 November 18th, 2002, 02:22 AM

So wait, you've got a 2-engine Baseship and a 6-engine Escort, now the 6-engine escort uses the full supply use of every one of its engines for every sector it moves??? So the baseship is actually 3 times more fuel efficient... and an escort with 5 damaged engines is twice as efficient as the baseship??? This is weird, yet somehow almost right... at least with QNP where big ships also have more engines and so become fuel hogs as well... I would have expected something like the first move of a turn uses the engine with least supply usage, the second move uses the second best engine, etc...

Fyron · #2 November 18th, 2002, 02:42 AM

Yep, that is how it works. With no supply pods, the ships still use the same percent of their feul to move each sector though.

Suicide Junkie · #3 November 18th, 2002, 02:48 AM

And without extra supply tanks, every ship has a range of 50 squares.

Fyron · #4 November 18th, 2002, 03:13 AM

This is part of the beauty of Quasi-Newtonian Propulsion: larger ships use more supplies instead of less to go 1 sector.

Grandpa Kim · #5 November 22nd, 2002, 06:44 AM

In time there will be a "Kyoto Accord" of the spaceways and we will all have to build ships with fewer engines to reduce pollution.

Kamog · #6 November 22nd, 2002, 08:46 AM

This fuel usage calculation always seemed weird to me, too. Let's say you have a ship with 6 quantum engines. You travel 9 spaces and use up 540 supplies. If you travel only 6 spaces, you use up 360 supplies.

If you have another ship with 3 quantum engines and travel 6 distance, you use only 180 supplies.

So the fewer engines you have, the more efficient your fuel use. Can't the 6-engine ship simply turn off 3 of its engines and attain the same efficiency as a 3-engine ship?

Anyway, the fewer engines you have, the greater the distance a ship can travel before running out of supplies, even though it is slower...

geoschmo · #7 November 22nd, 2002, 03:48 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kamog:
Anyway, the fewer engines you have, the greater the distance a ship can travel before running out of supplies, even though it is slower...

Provided, as the others pointed out, that your ship has some extra fuel storage. WIth only the fuel stored in the engine components all ships regardless of number of engines have the same range.

To make fuel use dependant on distance travelled instead of number of engines used you could mod it so that there is one main engine component for all ships. Make it a required component that is max one per ship. Give it the fuel usage and supply storage. Then to that you add an auxilary engine component that has no fuel usage and no fuel storage. Allow multiples of these up to the engine limit for your hull size.

However this would be a bit hinky as if your main engine were destroyed in combat, you could still move using your auxillary engine comonents but you would not use any fuel doing so.

Have to think about this some more.

Geoschmo

Spoo · #8 November 22nd, 2002, 04:13 PM

Quote:

However this would be a bit hinky as if your main engine were destroyed in combat, you could still move using your auxillary engine comonents but you would not use any fuel doing so.

Hmm... but when your ship runs out of supplies it's movement is decreased to one. Is this because engines use supplies (and engines that don't use supplies are immune), or is it hardcoded to happen no matter what.

Now I'm getting a tad OT, but what exactly does running out of supplies affect? Are only the components that use supplies affected, or all succeptable components affected regardless of their actual properties? i.e. Will weapons that don't use supplies still fire when the supplies run out?

Suicide Junkie · #9 November 22nd, 2002, 04:27 PM

Weapons that use zero supplies will actually continue to fire! Don't attack out-of-supply PDC ships with fighters

Shields will be disabled, and your speed is set to 1. Ships will be forced to decloak as well.

geoschmo · #10 November 22nd, 2002, 05:05 PM

[quote]Originally posted by Spoo:

Quote:

Hmm... but when your ship runs out of supplies it's movement is decreased to one. Is this because engines use supplies (and engines that don't use supplies are immune), or is it hardcoded to happen no matter what.

It's hardcoded. I wasn't sure so I did a test. I modded the engines so they don't use any supply at all and put a cloacking device on the ship. With the cloak turned off I can fly around indefinetly at top speed and dont use any supply. With the cloak turned on the supply drops every turn until it's gone. At that point the cloak turns off automatically, and the ship slows to one space per turn. Despite the engines not requiring supplies to move. Hence it must be hardcoded.

Geoschmo