Ship supply use per turn

[dumbluck]

Geo: What, your ships don't have to maneuver around space debris while in transit?

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
So in effect, you do get penalized slightly because it is using more supplies than it should. The standard engine using 10 supplies per move should only cost you for the first sector of movement. The remaining sctors should be free of any supply usage. But at least it's cheaper than 6 engines.

You're presuming 'Newtonian' propulsion again. If the propulsion system is not Newtonian, not a 'reaction' drive, but some sort of 'propulsion field' that must be maintained for the ship to move then supply usage would be constant.

[capnq]

your ships don't have to maneuver around space debris while in transit?

In general, no.

There's an article in the July 2002 issue of Discover about how mind-boggling empty space is. It mentions that dark nebulae like the Great Rift, with a density of 2000 hydrogen atoms per cubic inch, is still effectively hard vaccuum.

AFAIK, the only place that something as dense as the classic sci-fi asteroid swarm would really exist might be inside a comet's tail, or the accretion disk of a black hole.

Debris will be a problem in places that see a lot of traffic, like planetary orbit, but otherwise there just isn't that much out there to run into.