Fuel, ALL opinions accepted and wanted!

[wolfboyft]

Totally agree man. DOOD!

But seriously, I've always wanted fuel. And food.

 

[starhaiden]

I think fuel and food should be a survival mode

 

[whooplaah]

My suggestion is to keep the current blocks but make them less efficient. If there is fuel on board, they work as normal. This requires either a fuel controller block or an inventory system for the ship.

I would also like to suggest that we consider different fuel options. I find fossil fuels on space craft a bit odd to think about when there's all the radiation out there. Fission/fussion crystals, radioactive isotopes, and solar panels are all possible suggestions. You could even go really sci-fi and have gravity engines, dark-matter reactors, and plasma generators. That's not even talking about tapping into planetary cores or lava-blocks, or siphoning energy directly from a star.

Depending on which type of engine/technology you decide to implement, the gameplay surrounding the fuel sources themselves can be drastically different. And you wouldn't have to worry about trying to make oil a renewable resource.

Afterthought: current jets and spaceships use hydrogen/oxygen. So why not make water/ice crystals/snow a fuel source as well?

 

[starhaiden]

water the energy source of the future once we find out how to split the hydrogen and oxygen efficiently our fuel problems will be over

 

[Unnamed25]

I remember reading that it won't be possible because it would take as much energy to split a molecule than the hydrogen would release as energy
Just in the middle of making a sentence, i realize that this is about fuel to move not to make energy
EDIT: completed the first sentence anyways

 

[GaeasSon]

There's two related subjects here. Energy is easy. It's everywhere. The two tricks are making a usable energy potential, and then making it portable.

H-O bonds are energetic, but it takes more energy to crack them than you get from them, so water (while portable) doesn't count as fuel.
Stars produce vast amounts of usable energy, but they aren't very portable, so they don't really count as fuel either.
BUT! You could use solar energy at a fuel cracking station near a star to break water into H and O, which ARE portable, and which when combined produce chemical energy.
Similarly with time and energy water can be centrifuged to isolate heavy water, which can be cracked for deuterium. Deuterium is a lovely fuel for fusion reactors for nuclear power.
Even more expensive in terms of time and energy is antimatter, which can be combined with trivial amounts of normal matter to create vast amounts of usable energy in an annihilation reactor. Antimatter is tricky though because it requires energy just to store it... or boom.

So yes.... let's have an optional survival mode with fuel that players need to craft or buy in order to keep flying. Beyond pure creative shipbuilding the challenge of a sandbox is leveraging natural resources to overcome scarcity. It's all about economics.

 

[Byamarro]

needing for fuel is a bad idea in sandbox stile games. Players always gona be searching for methods to get automaticaly the fuel because if you don't do this you are gona be the 50% the time of the game searching for more fuel, with is bored and always the same, something like farming in rpgs. I saw people in minecraft with mods covering mountains with solar panels to avoid be the most of the time searching for uranium to feed reactors. Futhermore than unbalanced the game, if you go to a server where the first 25 sectors are all reclaimed by factions, new players are doomed, they wont be able to move.

Can't agree. Tekkit is good example. If players will be able to gather resources automatically, problem will not exist.

 

[GaeasSon]

Can't agree. Tekkit is good example. If players will be able to gather resources automatically, problem will not exist.

At first (in minecraft) You scavenge fallen apples, and chase down pigs, beating them to death with a stick. After a while you have a ready store of apples, gathered from farmed trees, and a chest full of pork chops gathered from farmed pigs. Along the way you fend off skeletons and creepers, suffer and overcome setbacks. You could just hide in your hole, but the need for food sends you into harms way. "There must be a better way" you think, and you are right. Once you build up enough consumable resources that survival is not an immediate concern, then you go on to expanding your house, hunting diamonds, or chasing the nether-bosses. You establish control of your world, creating easy sources of food, and relative safety in a garden of your own design. GREAT game.

So in Star-made, you start with a simple mining rig and a few credits. You go gather ores and either process them directly, or sell them for supplies. You could just float in a protected sector but the need for energy drives you out. At first you are powered by a simple zero-point energy generator that trickle charges all your systems for free, but your new shielding system requires more power. So you buy Hydrogen, Oxygen, and a fuel-cell reactor. Now you are prepared to make a run past the pirates at the planets of the nearby star-system. On one of those worlds you find a supply of deuterium rich water. It takes a couple runs past the pirates running heavy water to the trade-station, but on your third return you have a new fusion reactor powering not only your shields but a couple hefty guns. Now you can do more than run past the pirates. You thin their numbers as you go. When you arrive at the planet you set up a deuterium refinery of your own powered by your old chemical reactor. One more run of refined deuterium, and you have enough credits to return with some solar panels to run your refinery without additional fuel. But you know this supply of heavy water is finite, so while your refinery chugs, you fuel up with your own refined deuterium and set out to explore and prospect the nearby planets.

The story drives the game, and need drives the story. If nothing is consumed, you don't need. At each stage, resources are gathered through time and personal labor. The fruits of those labor make gathering quicker and easier until it becomes an incidental background process as you take on greater challenges.

 

[Valiant70]

I really like the idea of a hydrogen fuel cell or something that behaves similarly (albeit more efficiently to prevent tedium) but is given a fictitious Starmade name. Here's my idea:

Two power sources:
1) High efficiency solar panels. The imperial TIE (Twin Ion Engine) fighters from Star Wars were powered by their iconic solar panels, which also made up most of the fighters' bulk. These panels would gain bonus power output for being within a star system, making star systems more useful tactically.

2) Fuel-based zero-point reactors. With the energy from the solar panels on a space station or a medium to large ship, dynamium (Starmade fuel) can be synthesized with a factory-like block. The dynamium can then be loaded into a ship and used as a high-yield energy source. Alternatively, one might outfit a specialized long-voyage ship with solar panels so that it can regenerate its fuel during prolonged missions.

This adds yet another benefit to one's home station or large mothership, and does not require tedious farming or limited natural resources. ENERGY REMAINS UNLIMITED. It just requires some infrastructure to make it into a convenient form.

In the config files, reactors may still be set to have unlimited fuel.