Luckily at this stage of the game we can mod it pretty heavily. As i said earlier, fuel is possible with block and config changes.
Yes, it is unfortunate that the devs seemed hellbent on forcing the game into a power change, but hopefully the strong community backlash against it will keep that from happening.
So, fuel has been done! Good news to fuel fans, yeah? Mushroom Fleet server tried out a fuel only server about 2 years ago, for a few months before we went to the Shogunate model/economy. It was really cool, just not popular enough to sustain... at that time.
Basically, capacitors get a huge buff to capacity. Depending on how big you want to go with that, you can get deep into tweaking the energy use of shield regen, thrust, weapons, jam, cloak, scanners, etc etc etc.
You can keep reactors in the game or delete the block... But keeping the block will allow easier import of designs and allow reactors / regen on capital ships... Which you know makes sense. You can force fighters and small ships to remove reactors and not use them by drastically reducing regen and increasing mass & cost.... But that will hurt cap ship mass & regen a lot. You can compensate for that with the capacitor buff and a thrust buff. Any thrust buff helps fighters a lot, and will lighten them and make them more efficient and thus create a trend towards smaller & cheaper fighters.
Ultimately, the goal of a fuel server will probably be managing drones as a capital/carrier pilot, or having tons of dogfight action with some capital ships in the background hammering each other while fighters & fuel management decide the battle. Sounds exciting, yeah? I'd be in.
Maybe co-op with the tiny server idea guys?
