You can already scoop water if you have a cargo scoop and a mining cannon. Get close to an asteroid (so far it has to be an asteroid) and blast away until a cargo cannister of water appears. Make sure you have the HUD turned on so you can see it! There will be a lot of rubbish, ores, alloys and the odd precious metal along with the water depending on the asteroid type. As a way to refuel it doesn't really work, though... since any ship worth carrying the 17 tonnes of combined mining gear will need a LOT of water to refuel...

I like the idea of scooping reaction fuel while landed, myself. I don't think it should be automatic, though... harder than at a spaceport but easier than sifting through a hundred tonnes of metal alloys for that water you saw <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

Is there a simple way to make it "solar powered"? Land on water in the sun... landing on an object close to a star will let you refuel much faster but water is far more common farther out from a star, that's actually the basic definition of a star's "snow line" anyways.

I prefer the idea of landing on water/snow/ice rich worlds than mining water from asteroids.

Or perhaps I should say in addition too. If you land on a world with an ocean but can't refuel there then something seems wrong to me! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Once pull request 1719 is complete, a water syphon was always going to be part of the plan. It would be an additional piece of equipment that would be activated upon landing on a water-bearing planet (there's code for that knocking about somewhere now) which would either work automatically, or would be activated by an on-screen control (with the new UI) and would slowly replenish stocks of water in the tank or in the hold, depending how it was written.

Importantly, this would be entirely written in Lua. The core engine will soon be completely agnostic about water; water will not be a special commodity, and we'd be free to use anything else as propellant if we wanted to make a mod. We could fill the tank with liquified passengers, if we really wanted. We could also extract other stuff from planet surfaces or atmosphere, as we saw fit - basically, have a whole suite of mining equipment.

Again: None of this would require a modification of the core. It would be written in Lua. That means that a mod could provide any of this stuff.

Ultimately, the same would happen with hyperspace jumping. Hydrogen or military fuel would only be special because we script them as if they were special. We could run the jump drive on kittens, or cash, or from the fuel tank (those poor passengers again), or something even more zany - like being hit by enough missiles without exploding.

The idea here is that it all becomes moddable, and Lua is king.

I like this idea of everything coming moddable. I didn't even know there was a water scooping functionality (probably myself to thank for that), all tho it seems abit hard to use at the moment (judging by NaturalKernels comment)

I'd like to think in year 3200 spaceship might have another fuel source than liquid, like a nuclear fuelcell which might be very expensive but it would last a long time before it is empty.

I'm also looking into the need to consume other things in order to stay alive out there in the void.

How much water and food and oxygen is consumed by one person every day?

According to Wikipedia's article about spacecraft life support systems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_support_system

A human needs an average of "0.84 kg of oxygen, 0.62 kg of food, and 3.52 kg of water" a day... while producing "0.11 kg of solid wastes, 3.87 kg of liquid wastes, and 1.00 kg of carbon dioxide".

Most of this can be recycled, given enough energy input (distill the water, power lights for a hydroponic farm, etc), and a variety of medical procedures could reduce these needs, especially if the pilot will never need to leave the cockpit ever again... <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

As for fuel, it's technically mis-named in the game, what the gauge is showing you is Reaction Mass... fuel is the energy source and until there is an energy management system in the game (another planned feature!) all the ships basically have an infinitely powerful powerplant that will crank out the joules forever <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

I'd like to see a variety of other engines and fuel types included in the game, myself... with the engines purchased as distinct components like weapons and shields. That way you could choose whether your Cobra III has a Thermal Fusion drive for extreme tactical manoeuvres or an antimatter catalyzed particle beam for high speed cruise (why not both?)... maybe a mass driver loaded with nuclear shaped charges and a heavily armoured rear end... boom boom boom <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

Water makes the most sense to use as fuel for in-system flight, it's plentiful, easy to store and handle, is needed anyways for life support and can serve as a highly effective radiation shielding material... though in an emergency I WOULD like the option to pour whatever is handy into the tank... been through too many systems without asteroids or gas giants to take fuel for granted <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

On a sidenote, using water as a primary fuel source is consistent with technological extrapolation. Water may be used for thermonuclear fusion and is much more efficient than nuclear fission (about 5 times, and about 7 million times more efficient than petroleumm). For example, 1 cubic meter of water contains about 34 grams of deuterium (D) which provides as much energy as 700 tons of petroleum. Therefore with 1 ton of water you get about 10 cubic meters of water i.e. the equivalent of 7'000 tons of petroleum (the yearly energy consumption of Togo, or 1/1000th of Norway's yearly energy consumption). Therefore hydrogen or water are the best "nuclear fuel cell" you can think of. There is no other source proven to be more efficient (other sources being purely theoretical and maybe even out of reach for year 3200...).

But since water is mainly used in order to extract hydrogen and then deuterium (or tritium), I would say that indeed using hydrogen as a primary fuel instead of water would be even more consistent.

In that sense I quite do not understand why Pioneer is requiring water as fuel source while Frontier required only hydrogen. Indeed 1 ton of water contains about 3 times less energy than 1 ton of hydrogen for a D+D or D+T fusion reaction. Moreover both elements are quite equivalent for a fusion reaction, water is just requiring one more step in order to extract hydrogen. Therefore running out of water fuel but still having plenty of hydrogen doesn't seem consistent to me. Sounds like starving in the middle of a corn field because you are used to eat wheat. And finally hydrogen is the most frequent element in the universe (90% of all atoms).

So why requiring water fuel at all?

Water isn't "fuel" it is Reaction Mass... hydrogen would also be a good choice and would actually be more efficient for cruise, but would provide lower accelleration. Once you get to a certain level of specific impulse the extra DeltaV you get from hydrogen isn't worth sacrificing the extra thrust for, especially for ships meant to operate within planetary gravity wells.

The ships in stock Pioneer basically use ClarkeTech (aka Magic!) as a power source at the moment <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//wink3.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' />

I'm keen to explore different ideas for energy management in the game, not much coding experience but I think I know my stuff well enough for napkin level engineering <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_biggrin.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

Good basis for a kind of tech-level / sub-faction system for the game too. Chemical, Fission, Fusion, Antimatter, Total Conversion as a spectrum?

Oh, thanks, of course... then we should be able to use almost anything as reaction mass, and again running out of fuel but still having hydrogen in the cargo sounds odd.

What is "ClarkeTech", a reference to some ideas in one of Arthur Clarke's books?

Clarke famously said something along the lines of "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". It was back in the golden age of science fiction writers, who all seemed to have their own sets of laws about things now that I think about it...

The term is used frequently in the Orion's Arm worldbuilding community to describe devices so advanced that no human can hope to understand them

http://www.orionsarm.com/

Heinlein also exploited the principle in one of his book. Was it Revolt in 2100? The one where the theocracy ruled and the scientists invented the halo thingy and performed other miracles using science.

Not to mention of course Contact (Special Circumstances) in Iain M. Banks' Culture novels who were not above using their tech to pull the wool over others eyes.

 A human needs an average of "0.84 kg of oxygen, 0.62 kg of food, and 3.52 kg of water" a day... while producing "0.11 kg of solid wastes, 3.87 kg of liquid wastes, and 1.00 kg of carbon dioxide"

.

This is interresting, so with our current tonne system (which is the cargo measurement) one tonne of food and water would last one pilot 1612 days (food) and 284 days (water).

Maybe it should be in kilos.