It shouldn't make a difference on Jump range, the experimental (whichever you chose) may make a slight difference but not much
O7
Frame shift drive and over all weight controlls jump distance ...
Normal space drives control "thrusters"...
The weight of the thruster drive system will increase or decrease the jump range...
Normal space drives control "thrusters"...
The weight of the thruster drive system will increase or decrease the jump range...
The simple answer to this is, there is virtually no circumstance in which anything other than Dirty Drives plus Drag, or if a light weight ship with maybe enhanced performance thrusters, Dirty Drives plus Drive Distributors, is the right thruster modification to use.
Clean vs Dirty makes no difference to heat in supercruise. In silent running your only doing it a short time and there are heat sinks. If building a stealth combat ship, you'd need to mitigate heat with a thermal vent beam laser and / or heat sinks anyway, so you're better off with the fastest thrusters you can get which is dirty drives + drag/distributors.
The optimal mass figures for thrusters are about at which point extra mass on the ship starts to reduce your top speed on thrusters. If building a light weight racing ship with Dirty Drives plus Drive Distributors, it only takes a small amount of mass over a certain level to see top speed rapidly reduce.
Experimenting with configurations in https://coriolis.io/ shows all the effects on speed.
Neither.
The optimal mass parameter on the thrusters defines how your thrusters will interact with your ship's total mass in regular space, so how fast your ship can fly/boost/turn.
The (completely independent) optimal mass parameter on the FSD defines how your jump range will depend on your ship's total mass.
And the (completely independent) optimal (hull) mass parameter on the shield generator is one of the attributes that defines the connection between hull mass and shield strength.
As mentioned, though, the mass of your thrusters will add to the totel mass of your ship and therefore indirectly influence the jump range - but neither dirty nor clean thrusters change the thruster's mass. Thermal Spread gives you a 5% increase in thruster mass (decreasing your jump range), stripped down gives you a 10% mass decrease (increasing your jump range).
And as @CMDRQuainMarln said - there's only some extremely limited value to clean drives, for >90% of all builds, dirty is the way to go. IMO, the exception here are ships that need a low heat signature in real space - smugglers and pirates for me. It's fun to have a cold DBX as NPC pirate, and then get the NPC comms complaining about there being nobody out there...
I built a thargoid tissue sampling Cutter to run as cold as possible, so I can just sit there without being attacked while my limpets do their job. Clean drives reduce the temp under thrust from 17% to 14% with 13% stationary in either case. Not sure whether the reducing in heat really makes that much difference in practice though. Note Edsy doesn't have class 5/6 CRCR which are fitted in this build. Still awaiting field testing, a similar setup in a Dolphin worked pretty well but I wanted to scale it up.
I could be wrong, but under heat 20% and you cannot be targeted. My exploration Phantom runs at 17%, mostly down to grade 1 low emissions and thermal spread on the 3A power plant and power consumption that fits in its output limit.