It is the first disadvantage coming to mind, but not the only one that makes sense.
The high mass itself is the disadvantage:
- The ship is very expensive, sometimes up to the point where they are too expensive to be efficient.
- Inertia. While it is true, that bigger ships have more space for thrusters to cancel that out, these thrusters need power, which doesn't scale linear, effectively forcing big&fast ships to allocate more space to power, resulting in them having weaker other stats.
- They are a bigger target and thus more likely to get hit by shots.
If someone has a huge titan; then they just use it for everything. There's no incentive (after the initial purchase) to use anything else for anything else. The end result is that (for multi-player at least) you end up with an "arms race" where each faction strives to acquire the largest ships, and nobody has a reason to use smaller special purpose ships. This is where fuel is needed - e.g. if someone is just running to the shop to get a few docking modules, I want them to choose a smaller scout ship (with cheaper running costs) instead of taking their massive behemoth. More importantly; I want factions to leave their capital ships at strategic locations (and only use them during war) and use small ships for most things (mining, exploring, cargo transport, etc).
For large ships, power scales linearly. The formula is "power regen = number of internally docked power cells * 1 million".
They are a bigger target; but they also have more shields. For example, I've been watching the "drone research" thread and seeing figures like "300 K damage every 15 seconds" and doing the maths ("300 K in 15 seconds = 20 K DPS", therefore shield regen under fire needs to be 20 K or higher, therefore shield regen when not under fire needs to be 200 K shields/sec or higher) and realising that these drones won't be able to get my shields down, even if I don't fight back at all and just let them attack my ship for several days.
My main problem with fuel is "what happens when you run out?" Does it explode? Or leave you stranded in space? both are no fun (to e anyways, apparently some people like starting from scratch for no reason.) because it just interferes with fun (IMO).
If you run out of fuel (and don't have any solar power or anything that you can use to "limp") then you're stranded in space, and would need to either ask a faction member or other players to come and rescue you, or suicide and come back in a fuel tanker yourself. This makes game play more interesting.
At no stage. Fuel is a grinding component, and grinding sucks.
Grinding would be optional; as (I'd assume) every shop would sell fuel (and it wouldn't be "annoyingly over-priced"). Also; if you want a boring game that small children can play in their sleep, then it'd be possible to add a "fuel consumption scaling factor" in the server config (that can be set to zero to disable fuel consumption).
I want fuel to be harvested from planets and regenerate itself slowly over time so planets will be more valuable.
Ideally; I'd want several options. The first option would be just buying it from trading guild shops. The second option would be "fuel scoops" that harvest gases from stars. The third option would be "hard fuels" (e.g. uranium) that are harvested from planets and asteroids.
When you add a fuel component it will probably more like you add different engine types with different fuels that belong to those. Different propulsion systems could certainly be a balancing factor for ship sizes, but would also heighten the complexity of ship design and the game overall. Not to mention all added peripherals like were and how does one get the resources, are refining or other processes needed, how abundant will those resources be in the universe, how much is needed for propulsion of the different types of engine and last but not least how are the different fuels stored and distributed to their corresponding engines.
I've been imagining 2 different thruster types - a "rocket thruster" that uses fuel directly and is harder to control (e.g. maybe only 100% thrust or 0% thrust with nothing in between); and a "hyper-coil thruster" that uses power that is much easier to control. I've also been imagining solar power, which can only be used for the hyper-coil thrusters.
Mostly; initially "basic fuel" could be added (fuel tank blocks, fuel consumed by the existing power generators, and cheap fuel purchased from shops); and once this is done it opens up a large number of possibilities (e.g. ship to ship fuel transfer, different fuel sources, different thruster types, solar power) that can be added to the game later.
