Help with calculating jump system

[Panpiper]

I am having a hard time grasping the concept of jump systems and how much I need on my ship in order to get good results. I do know that having 5% of the blocks of your ship in jump modules results in a very fast to charge jump system that takes you a long way, in a small ship. The key word there is small. Getting a permaclock/permajam ship (by definition low mass) to be able to rapidly jump long distances is rather easy. By contrast...

I have found large ships to be utter slugboats, not just with their regular thrusters, but also with jump systems. I just tried putting 25,000 jump modules on a ship of 250K blocks, so 10% of it's blocks, and the difference in jump charge speed compared to having only a single jump module was so trivial, that I was not even sure I could discern it. (I should note that the ship in question also had ~300K blocks of docked entities, turrets and power generators. Still, the 25K jump modules I put it would still have brought the combined total close to 5%.)

Am I missing something here? Are jump systems so hampered by ship size as to be virtually not worth the effort (other than a single block)? Sacrificing 5-10% of a ship's bock total which could otherwise go to shields or what not, is absolutely not worth it solely to gain a truly minute difference in recharge speed. What is it that I am failing to understand?

 

[Panpiper]

The ship's turrets mass almost exactly 30K mass (that's 300K blocks that work out to almost 30K mass). It has four docked reactors totaling 3700 mass and the ship itself currently sits at 31,885 mass, for a combined total of 65585 mass. However the ship's interior is still being filled and when done, I expect it will have an extra 20K mass beyond that.

It has four docked reactors that give it somewhere between three and three and a half million power regen per second. It can very likely handle jump recharge requirements. That of course does not include the seven million power generation in it's turrets.

 

[Panpiper]

You are a scholar and a gentleman Sir.

When I ran my very informal test, I was eyeballing the results very subjectively, not with a stop watch. I found the time to charge with one jump module to be 'very long'. I found the time to charge with 25K modules to also be 'very long'. Being told now that one was 46 seconds and the other only 30, is very believable. They both remain 'very long'. ;-)

I think what I will probably do is to experiment with the idea of a 'jump tender', to which the warship proper docks. Command then transfers to the jump ship which is capable of both high power generation and huge jump engines. That tender carries the warship to it's desired destination whereupon the warship undocks. This may not be practical (or even legal on some servers), but perhaps worthy of experimentation. Obviously the jump tender itself will have to have docked power reactors of it's own.

On the warship proper, I expect what I will do is to have a bank of jump drives. Now that we can have more than one hotbar, I shall fill an entire hotbar with charged, single module, jump drives. That way I will be able to get a fair distance in 'very' little time, and then recharge them all at my leisure while listening to a YouTube video or something.

 

[Keptick]

You don't necessarily need power regen to be over the jump drive's charging cost. Having a large enough power buffer (capacitors) also works pretty well.