Curious Fuel Survey

[zigyzigy]

I think Fuel is a good idea because
1. I like the idea of having to make the most efficient and large scale automated fuel farm. (hopefully including rails and lasers and all things awesome)
2. I think it would be far more immersive and also fun to design and use some type of refueling system on stations and planets giving you a reason to actually dock at a station in starmade!
3. can be purchasable meaning it is effectively optional for players who don't like the above but prefer other aspects of the game
4. makes both ship and station design more challenging and therefore more creative.

5. I dont think ships below a certian size should require any kind of fuel. perhaps thrusters can be run on power at 25% capacity and the remaining 75% by fuel. something along those lines.
6. exploding fuel dumps.

7. lava as fuel is bad for 1 reason There is a very limited amount of it. This means that either 1) you spend your whole time looking for lava. 2) lava produces so much fuel that it is effectively meaningless.

I would much prefer a system that has a renewable source of fuel that involves a completely different mechanic to the current system as mining which is incredibly tedious.

 

[Snk]

Either the reactor is too small to work, or the weapon is too stronk. Power supply is technically a weapon of sorts, so it draws from the main ship if the docked reactor does not have enough power to supply to the main ship (Stupid I know, but it's what we got).

Still, I think I will use the pull beams instead.

 

[Kaamio]

I wouldn't really mind seeing the large ships mostly using fuel free but volumetrically inefficient solutions and smaller ships having the more power per block generators. I think that's what it will end up being anyway, with bigger ships enabling auxillary fuel reactors when in combat to prevent cripplingly huge fuel drain during routine use, such as whacking smaller pirates, traveling or doing some asteroid nomming.

Could also distinguish premium drones from stuff you just spam around in dozens or hundreds at whim, though it would still be nice to be able to refuel all docked entities without much hassle.

 

[ChJees]

A more effective source of power generation for bigger ships would be a godsend. Right now getting enough power for huge ships is so bulky you need to design your ship around the huge block of power generator.

Keep the old infinite power source which is good enough for smaller ships but have power generators that require different fuel sources to generate massive amounts of power in a smaller block space. Maybe even have them be multi-block structures where you start with a reactor chamber block and add things like fuel rod & dynamo blocks to make it work.

tl;dr: Fuel power generators are more space efficient in exchange for greater power generation. Old infinite power source works as backup system.

 

[Knack]

Everyone could just try out a fuelsystem by simply editing the blockBehavier.xml

Just turn up the powertank amount from 1000 to 100.000
And turn down the Powerbonuscap to 1000 or 0.

Build big Stations with many power reactors to refill your ships and look how long you can operate like this. (If no more power, there is no more thrust )

I did this for myself just for fun, it was awsome until i tried to attack a piratestation. You have no idea about how much energy the weapons need XD

But very similar to this there could be secondary powertanks, storing an enormous amount of energy, but can only be refilled on a station or by a special fuel material / by a Fuel-Refinery only placeable on stations and using f.e. lava as fuel

 

[QuantumAnomaly]

Everyone could just try out a fuelsystem by simply editing the blockBehavier.xml

Just turn up the powertank amount from 1000 to 100.000
And turn down the Powerbonuscap to 1000 or 0.

Build big Stations with many power reactors to refill your ships and look how long you can operate like this. (If no more power, there is no more thrust )

I did this for myself just for fun, it was awsome until i tried to attack a piratestation. You have no idea about how much energy the weapons need XD

But very similar to this there could be secondary powertanks, storing an enormous amount of energy, but can only be refilled on a station or by a special fuel material / by a Fuel-Refinery only placeable on stations and using f.e. lava as fuel

I actually really like this and have used something similar for some of my larger ships. I think that if you take this conecpt, but maybe have fuel basically as "condensed power". Where you have a fuel block that is more like a real capacitor, where it stores 10x the amount of power of a regular capacitor but can only be recharged by a fuel source (and discharges fully when used). When your main power depletes below 50%, it will draw from the fuel blocks to get you back up to 100, then wait for that percent to drop again, or something like that.

 

[Valiant70]

I liked the idea of fuel being required for ships using over 1m e/sec. There was another idea derived partially from someone else's idea that I posted in another thread: All ships get a certain amount of free power. The ratio of free power to fueled power diminishes up to a hard-soft cap (asymptote). Both the asymptote and the base ratio of free to fueled power would be server configurable so servers can create the meta they desire.

An ideal configuration would diminish power in such a way that a larger ship always has more total free power (until the cap), but always has a smaller percentage of free power than a small ship. A ship reaching the cap has the maximum amount of free power, but must burn fuel to gain any more at all. Thus the power cap would become the "free power cap."

This would not require the removal of (or even a nerf to) docked reactors, as an unfueled ship with docked reactors would still be easily overwhelmed by a fueled one with only built-in reactors.

The overall effect of this system is that small ships are exponentially more resource efficient to run, making the whole thing easy on newbies as a small starter ship would have no need for fuel to work well.

I may need to compile the best ideas so far and put them into one suggestion thread.

This would be non-linear up to the soft cap, just like now. This would seem to cover most of the concerns listed here.

I would much prefer a system that has a renewable source of fuel that involves a completely different mechanic to the current system as mining which is incredibly tedious.

Agreed. We need methods of resource acquisition other than shooting beams at stuff. We need the ability and a reason to build facilities and farms and such to get resources. Agricultural stations and planetary installments would be interesting.

 

[QuantumAnomaly]

any kind of farming would be really cool. Even something kinda different, like crystal farming, where you grind up crystals and put em in a cave to grow more like THIS lol XD

 

[Dire Badger]

I don't like fuel per se, but I like the idea of 'ammunition'

it would give beams a reason not to suck

 

[QuantumAnomaly]

I don't like fuel per se, but I like the idea of 'ammunition'

it would give beams a reason not to suck

It feels like if you had to craft (and store) ammo, that there should be a reduced power cost for cannons and missiles to offset the amount of effort going in to using them, making them a more reliable source of damage compared to their power consumption, but with more limited uses. Although, with the current system, ammo almost has to be cheap to obtain, to benefit new players, and if that's the case you have another issue of abundance where ships generally carry millions to billions of missiles, and never really have to rearm. I'm not wholly against the idea, i mean hell, it would be cool to use different missiles instead of effect modules.

Ion missiles are crafted from 1 ion module and one missile tube, or something like that, instead of having to use the effect. Then a ship could store all kinds of different ammo.

 

[Dire Badger]

If ammunition were based on the number of blocks in a system, it would be self-correcting. new players would have minor ammo costs, while titans would have very large ammunition costs.

 

[Valiant70]

I don't like fuel per se, but I like the idea of 'ammunition'

it would give beams a reason not to suck

While beams in many games do not use ammunition, it makes just as much sense to use a chemical laser which is more powerful, uses little or no electricity and requires ammunition (very expensive ammunition IRL).

 

[shadowulf]

I think the ideas presented here are a good way to implement fuel, but maybe implement them as an extra, producing large amounts of power but consuming a lot of fuel, so much so that you'd have to be very efficient to build a ship running solely on them. I love the idea of farms and solar sails, but I'll stay on subject. To refuel, a refinery could be connected to a 'tank' that is connected to a rail system that a ship docks to, auto-refilling any ship that docks on or runs over the particular rail that is connected to the tank. In a ship, the docker would have to be connected to a tank to take advantage of this refueling aspect. What if by connecting the tank to the rail/docker creates a sort of logic line between the two, to add realistic vibes?

 

[Valiant70]

I think the ideas presented here are a good way to implement fuel, but maybe implement them as an extra, producing large amounts of power but consuming a lot of fuel, so much so that you'd have to be very efficient to build a ship running solely on them. I love the idea of farms and solar sails, but I'll stay on subject. To refuel, a refinery could be connected to a 'tank' that is connected to a rail system that a ship docks to, auto-refilling any ship that docks on or runs over the particular rail that is connected to the tank. In a ship, the docker would have to be connected to a tank to take advantage of this refueling aspect. What if by connecting the tank to the rail/docker creates a sort of logic line between the two, to add realistic vibes?

That would be a good method for refueling and fuel transfer. I would like to see a way to purchase fuel directly from a dock like that so people can build public refueling stations.

 

[shadowulf]

That would be a good method for refueling and fuel transfer. I would like to see a way to purchase fuel directly from a dock like that so people can build public refueling stations.

That would be easy. Just add a resource in shops that says fuel and connect shops to the rail as well.