Explain Thruster Performance Curves

[CheeseMcBurger]

Can someone explain the thruster performance curves?

11-03-2024, 12-04-49.png (18.49 KiB) Viewed 1585 times

The thruster consumes thruster fuel and oxidiser for 120/s each.

The fluid usage says "200% when fulfilled to 80%". I don't understand that. Is that related to how much fuel I feed into the thruster? If so, what does 120/s refer to? Is that the 200% usage already, or the 100% usage? That makes no sense to me.

[shopt]

Well I think I can answer half of that question. Filled to 80% would mean that the smaller of the fuel/oxidiser buffers in the thruster is 80% full. As for what 100% or 200% consumption is, I don't know if that's 120/s or 240/s, though I suspect the latter.

[MeduSalem]

To set a base: A thruster can store 1000 units of fuel and 1000 units of oxidizer in inside. And obviously the one you have less off will be the limiting factor since it will consume them 1:1.

The fluid usage says "200% when fulfilled to 80%". I don't understand that. Is that related to how much fuel I feed into the thruster? If so, what does 120/s refer to? Is that the 200% usage already, or the 100% usage? That makes no sense to me.

The 80% fill-level corresponds to 800 units of fuel inside the thruster. If that amount were inside the thruster it would consume 120/s of fuel while running.
And yes, the 120/s in this case are the 200% usage.


100% fuel usage would be 60/s for a standard quality thruster. That would correspond to a fill-level of about of 430 units (=43%) of fuel in the thruster.


The x-axis of the graph corresponds to the fill-level of the thruster. So whatever percentage of 1000 units are inside.

So you can read from the graph that increasing fill-level of the thruster increases the fuel consumption up to a maximum of 200% consumption (=120/s) at 80% fill-level.

You can also read from the graph that with increasing fill level the additional thrust doesn't increase linearly but rather with a diminishing return until it caps out at 100% thrust at 75% fill-level.


So basically what this means in return is that the thruster is starting to become really wasteful about fuel if it is running at higher fill levels.

You consume 60/s of fuel to get 75% of thrust.
But you have to throw ~112/s of fuel to get 100% thrust. 1.86x more fuel for only 1.33x more thrust.

That is where you can see that is wasteful. Not that it would really matter after certain points in the game where you can easily make tons of fuel. But at other game stages or specific purposes it might be of interest. ^^


Here is also the wiki-link with the table:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Thruster

[JOndra91]

The fluid usage says "200% when fulfilled to 80%". I don't understand that. Is that related to how much fuel I feed into the thruster? If so, what does 120/s refer to? Is that the 200% usage already, or the 100% usage? That makes no sense to me.

The 200% makes absolutely no sense. The consumption is relative to the half of maximum consumption. If the curve was adjusted so that 100% is the maximum consumption, it wouldn't really change anything in game, but would more clear to understand.

Otherwise it's not clear how is it 200% of any value mentioned anywhere.