Ok, I have to ask an obvious question. Can you scoop water from Gas Giants or obtain water from any other source besides starports?

After I merged this to master I went out into the garden, and this was something I realised we missed. I suppose the only real options will be to collect it from lakes on earthlike planets or mine it as ice (ground or laser-mining, your choice).

That said, its highly unlikely that under "normal" circumstances (appropriate to the type of ship) you'll actually run out - most of the ships have been balanced to perform their designated task on a single tank. Your average traders or long-range fighters will have enough for a typical launch-hyperspace-autopilot-dock sequence. If you try to use something designed for short-range work for long-range stuff, then you'd better stock up.

Remember that for the video, Brianetta deliberately almost emptied the tank before he left. If he'd gone with the full tank as is normal it never would have come close to being empty. And of course, it will all be balanced and rebalanced as game mechanics change. Don't stress it too much. Try it out and let us know how it goes 🙂

In Frontier, the MB4 could mine water, among other things.

Ice is plentiful in space; many asteroids are made or coated in it, and gas giant rings can contain it (Saturn's are almost pure water ice).

I'm not sure that scooping is the method you want, since scooping is a fairly fuel-intensive activity. I like the idea of having to go to different places for water and pure H. Scoop one, land and gather the other.

Some sort of water syphon will have to be part of the explorer's kit, along with the fuel scoop and a mechanic...

Yes that sounds right. Although in normal operations, I am sure the tank will be sufficient, my main concern was for exploration. Playing Frontier, I used to use a Sidewinder for most of my exploration as it had a good range and the ability to get fuel from gas giants and stars. Strictly speaking though a Sidewinder could be classed (at best) as a scout ship, not an exploration vessel. However the flexibility of Frontier allowed a much more varied choice of ships across various roles. Some of which, they were never really intended to fulfil. If it has been decided that water is only obtainable from mining (or star ports), that is going to restrict the size of the ship that an explorer can use. Mining machines (or Mining Lasers) require a decent sized cargo bay and that will rule out the smaller classes of ship, using what little cargo space they have to store fuel for the jump engines. Thinking about this, the smallest ship that could usefully explore then would be "corvette class" or a smallish mid range sized ship.

Those engaged in criminal activities or actions behind enemy lines for any future military missions might also face a problem if they cant dock at an unfriendly star port.

Fantastic!

Ship manteinace and ship refueling makes the game more interesting. Great idea the propelant is water. It makes things less confusing. And more ecological

Another new change I saw in nightly is the way FOV works. Which is the difference exactly?

For those with the FOV modified any tweak more must be done?

Greetings

Ship stats (PDF). The delta-V stat is the amount of velocity change your ship can produce on one tank of fuel. This can't easily be calculated (it involves calculus, yuck) but can be measured.

I directly measured those values. That's how much attention I have been paying to balance.

Geraldine, the Sidewinder's very much a short range ship now. Long range exploration is well suited to the E.Y.E and the Eagle, of all things.

Just like Frontier, your actual range is limited by drive maintenance.

Gudadantza, the FOV is now measured vertically. If you've changed it, you should calculate a new FOV_Vertical from your aspect ratio.

For those who want to sort those data on any column, here's the original spreadsheet.

It's now the vertical field of view instead of horizontal, which works better with widescreen aspect ratios (previously wide aspect ratios would have parts of top and bottom of the image chopped off compared to narrow aspect ratios). Find the FOV_Vertical parameter that suits you best, try somewhere in the 60 range - the original FOV parameter is deprecated and you can remove it from the config file.

BTW.. Re that vid the game is starting to look sensational! Well done lads!!

Ok, thanks for the infos. I´ll play a bit with the numbers.

Are the fuel tanks internal or external or both? In case external tanks are available, would be any difference in ship´s performance having them mounted or is something irrelevant now?

It could be cool managing the ship as a lego external kind of pieces. 😀

greetings

There is one tank. It is internal. It does affect performance - and empty tank is lighter than a full one.

External tanks should probably arrive at the same time in the future as external cargo pods. If ever.

Is it possible for the changing mass of your ship to screw up the autopilot calculation of the changeover point (although I guess it makes you stop a little faster than you start so it's not so bad) Also...

Can we have some kind of estimate in the autopilot screen of how much fuel is required for long trips? And maybe some kind of option for changing the fuel conservation of the autopilot? If fuel consumption is a problem for a given ship it might make sense to coast for a while instead of accelerating right to the changeover point.

The autopilot is very clever. It's always had to deal with the possibility that you might jettison cargo on the way.

If you want a fuel estimate, feel free to make an issue of it on the tracker. Frontier had no such thing, and it was rarely a pressing issue. I find that once you've done a couple of trips in a ship, you get a good feel for how it uses fuel.

If fuel consumption is a problem for a given ship, then you're almost certainly not using the right ship for the job, and a more hands-on experience is the price you pay for that. Having said that, an economy mode on the autopilot is actually one of our very oldest issues, predating the fuel feature by several months.

For maximum fuel economy you can use the autopilot to get moving in the right direction, then coast in manual mode until you arrive at the general vicinity. That's what I did in Frontier. 🙂

Yeah... I think Scurvy's hoping that the autopilot will handle that for him.

This is a fantastic improvement! It means you have to think properly about what ship you want for what you're doing.

I had previously noticed that you could forward thrust until you were travelling in excess of the speed of light, which was meant to be impossible(without hyperspace I mean)if you ask Newton. Could you do that now or would fuel run out? Technically the more fuel you carry the slower you'll accelerate meaning more fuel needed and so on.

That was the primary motive!

You might be confusing your scientists, there. Einstein was the one who realised that the speed of light in a vacuum was universally constant, and that exceeding it was a meaningless idea. According to Newtonian physics, the speed of light is just how fast light goes, no more special than the speed of sound - and irrelevant to acceleration and gravity, which were held to be two distinct ideas.

Since we're in a Newtonian universe (actually, it's more like Jules Verne's version, since only one gravitational body exerts force on you at a time) there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to travel as fast as you like, except that now you mightn't have enough fuel.

300Mm/s is about the speed of light. Looking at the table of ship information I linked earlier in the thread, three ships can reach the speed of light on a single tank, if you remove all cargo and equipment (including the hyperdrive). These are the E.Y.E and the Eagle marks 1 and 2.

If we remove all the cargo, equipment and hyperdrive, and fill the hold up with water, then going on the fully laden stats alone, only the Adder is incapable of making it to light speed. Bearing in mind that after the first time you empty the tank you are no longer fully laden, it's likely that the Adder can, too. If you fancy a challenge, take one out and see what speed it can reach. Just set the speed really high, whack the stardreamer on full and keep feeding it water as it runs low.

well in summary is this: e = mc2 it means that energy and mass are the same thing. It doesn't matter whether the energy is electrical energy, chemical energy, or even atomic energy. It all weighs the same amount per unit of energy. In other word we cannot reach the speed of light because as more faster you goes the more "heavy" you becomes and ergo more energy it needs, by the time you reach 90 percent of the speed of light, the ship has so much energy in it that it actually has about twice the mass as the ship has at rest.

It really is a bumer that humans cannot go faster than light even if we have the technology 🙁 But there are some ways to "cheat" this problem wormholes, warp (the theory not star trek lol) and yes even hyperspace (theory is sound IF we find evidence of more than 4 dimensions) but as of right now our knowledge is limited and the stuff of science fiction.

Quite so. Anyway, we *have* hyperdrives... and there's an outside possibility that you'll be able to use them to hop around within a star system, at some point. That depends on whether it can be used as a solution to the interception problem. You'll not generally have noticed any pirates; they couldn't sensibly chase the player in the first place, although now they'll be running out of fuel, too.

Micro-jumping across the system would, of course, need to be balanced with fuel. It's an interesting thing to ponder.

And I consider jumps should have safety rules too.

For example. Jump not available into gravitational field of n object, Jump is available from a safe distance from a ship or station, The ship must have a minimum velocity to jump etc....

Excuse should be the electromagnetic turbulence, etc...

And the reason should be limit the abuse or extreme use of jumps to do everything.

Greetings.

😳

Back to school for a physics lesson for me... 🙄

See, that would be believable if we had a really good idea of what minimum velocity meant. When you start the game, you're already travelling at 30km/s relative to the system, and you're parked on a pad.

Turbulence is pandering to the Space Is An Ocean trope. I'm not the greatest fan of it, although clearly it's very, very popular. It's responsible for many things about space that jar with me. Concepts like being stationary, or having a top speed. People understand it, though, so I understand why spacecraft get called space ships, and why we like fleets and admirals and decks and the front of the vehicle not being the same thing as the top of it, etc.

Anyway, I'm distracting myself. Yes, we need to make it possible to actually catch up with other ships, but not so much that nobody ever travels through space any more. That's a huge challenge. If somebody has a moment of inspiration, do let one of the devs know your thoughts. It might be something we hadn't thought of.

I filled an Adder up with water and took off. Reached C with 9t to spare in the hold. So there you have it, there's no ship unable to reach the speed of light.

So, the Adder could (in theory) reach Epsilon Eridani in about a decade... but wouldn't be able to slow down when it got there!

In caso di attacco un salto all'interno del sistema può essere una difesa.... una mia ipotesi..... studiare equipaggiamento della nave che impedisca alle altre navi di balzare. ma anche il contrario, avere un equipaggiamento anti disturbo interplanetario. io son convinto che sia strategicamente divertente, seguendo i balzi ci si potrebbe imbattere in una campo minato, o qualche altro stratagemma. ottima l'idea delle distanze di sicurezza per i salti, 12 km dalla superficie dei pianeti come in frontier

mentre per i viaggi interstellari ( system to system) pensavo a distanze di 2 AU dalla stella più vicina. così da rendere più difficile la fuga verso un'altro system