I'm currently producing 20 nuclear fuel a minute and am curious about how many locomotives that will support. (I already know just based off observation that my current ~40 active locomotives are barely causing any action from the centrifuges.)
So, we know the locomotive has a listed power consumption of 600 kW, and nuclear fuel has 1.21 GJ of energy. So, in theory that leads to a fuel lifetime of 2016.67 seconds (convert to MW and MJ and you get 1210MJ/0.6MW = 2016.67s) and means my current 20 nuclear fuel a minute can support 672 locomotives.
1: Does the 50% thermal efficiency of boilers apply here? (would mean the fuel consumption is double the listed rate)
2: Does the fuel consumption change when the train is at top speed versus when it's accelerating? A friend thinks that it does but I'm not so sure.
3: None of the following consume fuel: a train that's braking, a manually-driven train that's coasting, and the 'towed' locomotives of a double-headed train (in auto mode). Is that correct? (This doesn't actually matter for my main question, just curious)