Fuels, Consumables, Power, Relativity and Warp... Oh My!

[GaeasSon]

I'd have done these seperately, but they all interlock.


Fuel and consumables:

We could add consumables containment based on the current energy tank blocks. All of these could become valuable trade goods, particularly if there were some trade-mechanism for refilling a ships tanks. Just like energy tanks, these blocks add storage capacity for these consumables to a structure.

• Deuterium (2H) containment pods: Fuel for Fusion reaction.
• Oxygen (O2) Containment pods: Oxidizer.
• Hydrogen (H) Containment pods: Oxidizee and reaction mass.
• Positron (AKA Antimatter) (+e) Containment pods: Antimatter containment requires constant power, so they are constantly using part of their own stored power to maintain containment.

Energy generation and Consumable Replenishment:

• Elemental separator: engaged via "T" menu. Alters the function of the mining beam such that mining ice replenishes H at 66%, O at 33% and 2H at 1%
• Deuterium Synthesis Unit: Consumes -e, and H over time. Replenishes 2H.
• Hydrogen scoop: Replenishes H over time in interstellar space (void systems) at a rate proportional to the speed of the ship.
• Solar Collector: Produces -e. Production rate based on inverse square of distance to star. 4X resistant to solar damage, doubles as heat shielding
• Positron Collector: Produces +e. Production rate based on inverse square of distance to star, but capture rate is at most 1% of solar capture.
• Current generators(Gravitational wave capture?) Produce -e Free energy! Yay! Great for alpha versions of the game, but can we nerf output severely as we approach production, or make it server-settable?
• Fuel cell: Consumes Hx2 and O. Generates -e. spawns an ice block in the vicinity of the ship
• Fusion Reactor: Consumes 2H. Generates -e and H.
• Antimatter Reactor: consumes +e per second. Generates VAST amounts of -e.

(note: it's best not to run fusion reactors and Deuterium synthesis units on the same structure. They cancel each-other out, or maybe bleed energy



Propulsion:

Relativity?: I'd like to see the addition of relativistic effects. on high speeds. I don't see a good way to really do time dilation, but we could make the approach to the server speed limit asymptotic. Treat it like the speed of light. Let ship mass increase with speed such that as you approach the server speed limit, your mass increases without bound, so you can never actually reach the limit, just get closer and closer to it.

So, if m is the resting mass of the ship, C is the standard server speed limit, x is the speed of the ship and m' is the effective mass of the ship after relativistic acceleration:

m'=(-Cm)/(x-C) So as x approaches C, m' approaches infinity, and acceleration approaches zero. So even if you have a nimble ship with big engines, no more bang-zoom to maximum speed.

• Current coil thrusters (Impulse drive?) Reactionless drive! Yay! Consumes -e. high thrust. symmetric thrust. Great for alpha versions of the game, but can we nerf thrust severely as we approach production, or make it server-settable? I'd drastically lower the thrust per energy consumption and per block.
• Chemical Rocket: High thrust. relativistic. Consumes Hx2 and Ox1 very quickly. Rockets only provide thrust if they are the rear-most block in their longitudinal row. Thrust is asymmetric, imparting pitch or yaw if not aligned with ship center of mass.
• Ion Drive: low thrust. relativistic. Consumes H and -e very slowly. Ion drives provide thrust only if they are the rear-most block in their longitudinal row. Thrust is asymmetric, imparting pitch or yaw if not aligned with ship center of mass.

Warp Drive:

Not really a drive exactly. Warp changes the rules of acceleration within a "bubble" around the ship. Normally, your ship mass is described as m'=(-Cm)/(x-C). Warp locally changes the speed of light by a "factor" of W: m'=(-CWm)/(x-CW) allowing you to exceed the normal server speed limit. W is normally 1 This process should consume VAST amounts of -e per second, probably requiring at least one antimatter reactor. As the speed of the ship exceeds an actual hard speed limit set on the server, the client no longer renders the universe, and the server no longer instructs the other clients to render the warping ship. The star-field on the client is replaced by a streaking stars effect. The ships position is tracked virtually by the server until the ship decelerates to render-able speeds.



Warp relies on a 2 part system.

• Warp coil: The size and geometry of the warp coil should determine the factor W, where W= (2 (5 x-11))/(x+5). Warp coil blocks must all be contiguous. Each must be touching exactly two other warp coil blocks. Each block must be touching exactly 2 Antimatter reactors. Each antimatter reactor consumes 1 +e per second
• Warp Enhancers: The second part of the system is the warp nacelles or "enhancers" that expand and shape the warp bubble around the ship in exactly the way the docking and turret enhancers define the docking space. All of the blocks of a ship must be within at least one defined field or the warp drive does nothing. Overlapping fields have no negative effect. Fields are generated around the bounding box of each enhancer cluster, as well as around the warp core to a radius of half the average longest dimension of all the enhancer clusters

 

[Ciber]

No one will ever agree to adding fuel to the game.

Treating the server speed limit as the speed of light would be pretty interesting.

I dislike the idea of warp in general, but your is not too bad

 

[GaeasSon]

It\'s nice to be disliked least. (laughs) See, I\'m a physicist and an economist (the disciplines are more similar than you might imagine). So for me \"something for nothing\" breaks my sense of immersion even more than the fact that everything is made of 1M cubes. Every game needs a challenge. My favorite challenge is creating efficiencies in resouces, creating the greatest benefit for the cost. If nothing has any cost, then there are no efficiencies to create.

Besides, all of the above could be easily configurable by the server admin... set all your fuel consumption rates to zero, and everything runs like it does now. Energy and thrust, just happen in copius amounts. Or you could have bastard admins set the consumption rates so high you\'ll be weeks between worlds.

 

[me2005]

I like the idea of consumables, but figure that *in this game,* consumables of much complexity would baffle players.

If you want different resources, use propellant and fuel - propellant makes you go and fuel makes power (which is, I suppose, a third resource; but it\'s one we already have).

I also don\'t like using chemical (ala rockets) propulsion, it\'s a terrible idea in real life and we have (well, know about) better. Using fission or fusion would be better for the \'tech\' of the game, but I\'d rather just call it something completely foreign and have it use some propellant. If you\'re worried about the \"reactionless drive\" we have now, call it a photon drive and enjoy the rest of your day.

I love the idea about using the speed limit as C. Right now, \'speeds\' feel too pointless. There is no way to escape from any other ship, everyone has the same max and gets up to it essentially instantly. Making it so ships with a higher portion of their mass devoted to producing thrust can get to higher speeds faster than ships with a lower portion of their mass devoted to thrust would fix that, and give different ships more character.

Your warp suggestion is one of the more reasonable suggestions for such a thing in a game I\'ve seen. Basically, \"I know this is going to glitch out, so the suggestion is to let it,\" which is pretty awesome. Personally, I wouldn\'t mind warp being something for faster (but not instantaneous) travel you can mount on a ship, and warpgates being instantaneous travel objects that are built. Travel between Star Systems (if they\'re implimented) might only be accessable by warpgate, or it might just require you to warp to the edge of a system.

Not sure about the shipbuilding specifics of your warp suggestion, but the basic idea sounds good. Maybe add a hue-shift instead of just a star-streaking effect so the player can know something else is going on.

 

[GaeasSon]

Turn the starfield blue ahead of the ship and red behind. That\'ll please our science geeks.

I think you might be underestimating our fellow players though. Multiple drive types and energy sources add flavor and variety to the game. Wouldn\'t be awesome to be out cruising the asteroids looking for raw materials, and see another player cruise by behind a solar sail, or see the blue glow of a ships Ion drive and know to ask him if he wants to buy some of your excess hydrogen for reaction mass?

 

[Hierarch]

I officially love you now, in a bro way. You actually implied proper mathmaticall equations into a sugestion. And the warp idea is awsome. Go check out my thread on a new more realistic docking system.

-H

 

[Ciber]

How about instead of having the players be in the same world when they warp, we create another game world like minecrafts nether where your coordinates are divided by X when you enter and multiplied by X when you leave.

This would allow the game to show you the locations of planets and other objects while in warp but at a very low cost by rendering a single bilboard of say a black dot at the location of every object in the game.

So you would be able to have various effects like droping out of warp or dieing when you collide with planets, but the game would not have to load sectors any more quickly than if you were in normal space.

Make it so your direction and speed do not change or change very slowly while in the warp.

As an added challenge you could make it so that you do not control how far you travel in the warp.

Say you have a sort of warp capacitor block and the number of these blocks you have decides how long you stay in warp, so how far you travel could still depend upon your speed at entry to the warp, but you would travel slower.

 

[me2005]

I think you might be underestimating our fellow players though. Multiple drive types and energy sources add flavor and variety to the game. Wouldn\'t be awesome to be out cruising the asteroids looking for raw materials, and see another player cruise by behind a solar sail, or see the blue glow of a ships Ion drive and know to ask him if he wants to buy some of your excess hydrogen for reaction mass?


Well, when you put it that way, it sounds good. I\'m thinking more along the lines of naming all the different fuels you could possibly use, and instead just having one propellant and one fuel. You could still have reactionless drives (solar sails, photon drives) and different reactors (Antimatter/nuclear fusion/nuclear fission/solar/etc; or better yet, just made-up name drives that behave differently depending on which they are - an AM drive exploding violently but producing the most power, for example), but just have a \"fuel\" that goes into your reactor (if it needs it) and a \"propellant\" that goes into your drive (if it needs it).





How about instead of having the players be in the same world when they warp, we create another game world like minecrafts nether where your coordinates are divided by X when you enter and multiplied by X when you leave.

This would allow the game to show you the locations of planets and other objects while in warp but at a very low cost by rendering a single bilboard of say a black dot at the location of every object in the game

....

As an added challenge you could make it so that you do not control how far you travel in the warp.


And void a big point of going to the effort of making it so you can know where you are when at warp? If you were only able to leave warp at certain locations visible from this warp dimension, I\'d go for it. Otherwise, I\'d prefer the OP\'s way, and if you want to make it dangerous make it so coming out of FTL in an object kills you, or so you hitscan for large objects and colliding with one at FTL kills you. The odds of doing that are pretty small for short trips where you can see roughly where you\'re headed before you start, but the longer you go, the more likely it becomes that you\'ll hit something. Still, even in this game space is pretty empty, it\'s probably not worth including a death-on-bad-FTL mechanisim. Just imagine the complaints - \"I went FTL and randomly blew up, what gives?!? RAGEQUIT\"

 

[ShadowHunter12]

I still like the idea of static warp controller entities, akin to stargates or mass relays, specifically mass relays. We could have the long range 2 way gates that have massive range, but require an ungodly large reactor and a huge amount of resources for a player to build one of their own, and then there are secondary systems that let you pick any sector to jump to within range. I just really think we should avoid the moving at warp speed because of the possibility of server crashing physics calculations, such as ships being stuck inside one another or inside a planet, this could be exploited so a very fast small ship could warp into a big one and have the pilot exit out and screw with internal systems like missiles.

 

[me2005]

I still like the idea of static warp controller entities, akin to stargates or mass relays, specifically mass relays.


I don\'t think this is suggesting that Warpgates/etc. wouldn\'t exist, just that player-ships could also have warp drives (maybe they\'re less effective, or slower, or whatever; they\'d cost the player power and maybe that\'s pain enough).


I just really think we should avoid the moving at warp speed because of the possibility of server crashing physics calculations, such as ships being stuck inside one another or inside a planet, this could be exploited so a very fast small ship could warp into a big one ...


The physics problems were addressed at the beginning - you\'re not using physics on a ship at warp. Only when they go in and come back out, so you might have a ship coming out of warp inside another ship/planet/star/etc., but the odds of that are pretty low and there are a few simple solutions:

1- Block the ship in warp from coming out

2- Blow the ship in warp up if it hits something coming out

3- Allow it to come out and shift it\'s position so it\'s not inside something (as the game does now at low-speed collision problems)

 

[HadrasVorshoth]

I like the idea of fuels full stop. It gives purpose to stations beyond... um... looking cool and giving places for people to defend. Fueling points need to be a thing. Maybe possibly fuel-based propulsion systems (no reason why we can\'t have multiple types of propulsion system, to my mind. Vehicles have more than one kind of engine across different makes, don\'t they?) are a bit faster, drain none of your electrical energy, but means you\'re dependant on refueling points and fuel sold around the Galaxy to get around, with the possibility of getting stranded if you run out of gas.

I like it. It also decreases people jumping into abandoned junk ships and flying around merrily in them: players would likely want to check what the internal systems are like before flicking the ignition switch and heading to the space-shop at full speed, in case they cannot actually get anywhere.