SpaceSimCentral

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As we've already stated, your thrusters are reactionless drives.
Ah. I wasn't quite sure wheather they were reactionless drives with exhausts or rocket engines without fuel consumption. Most of the ships have some kind of nozzle, though, so It seems kind of weird to declare them as reactionless. Although their power output would be more practical to handle when they don't throw ravening particle streams of death around, but if they don't throw anything out, where do they go with the heat? I get a feeling that I'm too much nitpicking here... Consistancy is kinda hard to establish afterwards.

UncleBob wrote:


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As we've already stated, your thrusters are reactionless drives.
Ah. I wasn't quite sure wheather they were reactionless drives with exhausts or rocket engines without fuel consumption. Most of the ships have some kind of nozzle, though, so It seems kind of weird to declare them as reactionless. Although their power output would be more practical to handle when they don't throw ravening particle streams of death around, but if they don't throw anything out, where do they go with the heat? I get a feeling that I'm too much nitpicking here... Consistancy is kinda hard to establish afterwards.
The heat comes out of the back of your PC. It's why the fan blows warm air.The difference between reactionless drives with exhausts or rocket engines without fuel consumption is entirely semantic. Our ships will stop being reactionless when they accelerate by ejecting mass. This would mean getting lighter as they do so, and it might well never happen. Almost all space games use reactionless thrusters; one notable exception is Orbiter.

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one notable exception is Orbiter.
How on Earth could you forget Frontier/FFE

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The heat comes out of the back of your PC. It's why the fan blows warm air.
So that's why my CPU overheats while playing Pioneer
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The difference between reactionless drives with exhausts or rocket engines without fuel consumption is entirely semantic.
Yes it is. But the whole consistency question in Space Opera is more or less semantic, but it's still important for the immersion.
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How on Earth could you forget Frontier/FFE
While they technically had fuel consumption, they had constant weight. Even regardless of how much you loaded. Oh, and FFE had a nice Bug that would half gravity when the display switched from AU to km...

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While they technically had fuel consumption, they had constant weight. Even regardless of how much you loaded.
Oh yeah of course I forgot ship's mass was constant But thats probably down to simple limitations of the engine, I mean cargo and other goods had a mass of 1ton per unit, its just the ship didn't take that into account... I think how I'd like to see it done is to seperate engines and power systems out. You fuel the power system with hydrogen or whatever, which in turn will fuel the hyperdrive and other systems or charge a capacitor which feeds the systems.With actual thrusters we could either drain the power/fuel reserve of the power plant, or actually provide a seperate propellant which uses the heat from the powerplant to expand the gasses ect.Having a seperate propellant is the most plausible of the two but it might be unnecessarily complicated.. But to me it seems the better option for added depth...

Propellant != fuel.Modern rockets use the spent fuel as propellant, but electric motors (such as an ion engine) use electricity as fuel and an inert gas (normally Xenon) as propellant.In all cases, acceleration happens in two directions with a net acceleration of zero; propellant goes backwards, spacecraft goes forwards. The mass of both added together remains constant, but the ship must get less massive because it is literally throwing its mass away.Fuel is fun, but it's even more fun if you can take on too much propellant to lift off! Time to refuel/restock in orbit before heading out...