Engines

Engines


(Engines Chart by Prolbo)

Engines provide thrust for your ship. The higher the total thrust, the higher your maximum speed will be with any one design, keeping in mind that larger ships require more thrust to achieve the same speed as a smaller ship. Engines can end up taking a lot of power, so plan accordingly. Engines can only be placed on down/south facing interior-exterior surfaces (the bottom edge of the ship usually).

Engines have an internal storage of power. When in use, they'll take power from their own storage and when an engine's integral storage is not full, it will attempt to refill every game tick/update (usually five times a second) recharging every second at it's own rate of power/second (for reference, this is the power/sec in the tables above).

Larger engines will typically provide more thrust per unit width but have stricter requirements on how many 'exterior' tiles they need to be placed. The tier 2 small engine can be placed on the left or right edges of a ship as it needs very few exterior edge tiles.

Typically engines are very vulnerable to damage and firing on a foe's engines is an easy way to prevent them from escaping or hamper their movements as they'll be limited to their lateral thrusters. Keep in mind that quite a few ship designs do not have access hallways close enough to the engines to allow you to repair them, so if you intend on capturing a ship it's wise to leave at least one main engine intact to make sure you can still use travel drive to escape with your prize.

If for any reason an insufficient supply of energy (any supply lower than the engine's rated maximum consumption per second) is provided to an engine the thrust produced by that engine will drop accordingly. For that reason it is important to have more than one conduit running into an engine and especially in the case of the two largest tier 2 engines which consume 32 power/sec and 72 power/sec for the Huge and Extra-Large engines respectively. When designing your ship's propulsion consider having your engines connected directly to capacitors or to have a large capacitor bank nearby fed from reactors elsewhere on the vessel to provide a back-up supply.

=Tier 1 Engines=



Tier 1 Engine Statistics Table
=Tier 2 Engines=

For the most part tier 2 engines provide greater thrust for the number of tiles they consist of, are more compact (the tier 2 small engine provides 1800 thrust and fills 16 tiles which is only a little less than the tier 1 small engine which provides 2000 and fills a whopping 47 tiles) and present a wider range of sizes.



Tier 2 Engine Statistics Table
=Tier 3 Engines=

Whilst no tier 3 engines or their blueprints have been introduced or are otherwise available to players in any mode yet, they have been confirmed and are close to completion. They should be introduced along with other tier 3 modules and Shavala Corporation ships.

=Thrusters=



(Trusters Chart by Prolbo)

Thrusters are used to rotate your ship or provide lateral thrust, the more thrusters you have the faster your ship will rotate or move laterally, with thrusters further from the center of mass more effective than those close to the center.

They will also stabilize your ship from inertia (the force, not the stat), so if you lose control of your thrusters while spinning, your ship will keep spinning indefinitely. To move sideways instead of rotating, hold down the LMB while in navigation mode to rotate your ship, then press the normal rotation keys to move sideways (in relation to your ship's facing). This can be really important for docking properly. Keep in mind that airlock connections are fragile and attempting to move whilst docked will rip and damage the airlock to the point of being inoperable, you will have to repair it in order to attempt docking with that airlock again.

When you place them in ship editor, be aware that they need at least 1 empty tile in the front along the whole area exposed to the space, to function properly. So if you place shield tiles directly in front of the truster, it will not work.



Thruster Statistics Table
=References=