How many thrusters do I really need?
Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2024 1:22 am
Anyone have any idea how you would decide how many thrusters to have on a spaceship? Clearly you could hobble your way across space with one thruster and enough production to sustain it but that's boring. Then I noticed the thruster performance curve in the Factoriopedia: (blue: fluid usage, green: thrust, orange: efficiency)
It got me excited but then I realized the x-axis here is fuel consumption rate, which I have no idea how to even begin controlling that. The graph seemed to be rather useless in gaining any kind of information I could put to use. Any other calculations I tried to do for how much fuel to stock, thrust for acceleration, etc are just all over the place. I'm no rocket scientist but my math diverges from the game by 6 or more orders of magnitude. Only other thing I could find out (via in-game testing) was that each thruster gave a top speed increase of roughly 10km/s.
Maybe I'm meant to just guess and slap a couple of thrusters down and call it a day but it seems rather bland.
It got me excited but then I realized the x-axis here is fuel consumption rate, which I have no idea how to even begin controlling that. The graph seemed to be rather useless in gaining any kind of information I could put to use. Any other calculations I tried to do for how much fuel to stock, thrust for acceleration, etc are just all over the place. I'm no rocket scientist but my math diverges from the game by 6 or more orders of magnitude. Only other thing I could find out (via in-game testing) was that each thruster gave a top speed increase of roughly 10km/s.
Maybe I'm meant to just guess and slap a couple of thrusters down and call it a day but it seems rather bland.