Deep charge should completely uncap the fuel consumption limit per jump

[DemiserofD]

Deep charge has always been useless. It gives you a worse benefit compared to mass manager, but it also costs you extra fuel.

Why not change deep charge to just uncap the amount of fuel you can use for a jump? This would allow you to, if you wanted to, make a single massive jump, far beyond the normal jump range of your ship.

The downside to this, of course, is that fuel usage becomes increasingly inefficient the longer your jump is. Jump 100 light years, and you will probably use up the majority of your fuel in a single leap. You would need to carefully calculate where you are going in order to avoid getting yourself in trouble.

This would have numerous benefits. It would be quite nice for trade vessels, which would be able to jump around the bubble more effectively. It would also increase the benefits of ships with larger fuel tanks.

In terms of how it would actually be implemented, I would not change the default pathfinding. It would still route you based on your presumed normal range. If you want to override that and use the Deep charge feature, you would have to manually Target your destination.

Of course, you could slap a whole bunch of fuel tanks on and make one enormous jump, if you wanted to, but again, due to the increasing inefficiencies of longer jumps, this would not increase your range as much as you might expect. And, of course, when you get there, you will be looking at one mother of a fuel scooping time!

 

[g0oglyeyes]

The problem with this is that you would have to recalculate the optimal mass of the FSDs themselves and the entire formula while you're at it. At the current state, the amount of extra distance gained per extra unit of fuel consumption drops asymptotically to 0. You can double the amount of fuel consumed and it won't appreciably get you much further, and this will actually hurt your travel time since you need to scoop that much more often. You can see the formula yourself here:
https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Frame_Shift_Drive

I don't think it's worthwhile to rework this and it could open up a can of worms.

 

[St0rmFury]

Deep charge serves no purpose at all.

IMO it should be changed into something with more utility like an effect that recycles some of the fuel used after jumping. This will give combat ships a little more mileage if they don't have a fuel scoop equipped.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Deep charge gives you a bigger range than mass manager on the smallest FSDs. Someone ran the numbers a long time ago. Something like size 3 and below benefit more from deep charge while bigger ones benefit more from mass manager.

 

[DemiserofD]

The problem with this is that you would have to recalculate the optimal mass of the FSDs themselves and the entire formula while you're at it. At the current state, the amount of extra distance gained per extra unit of fuel consumption drops asymptotically to 0. You can double the amount of fuel consumed and it won't appreciably get you much further, and this will actually hurt your travel time since you need to scoop that much more often. You can see the formula yourself here:
https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Frame_Shift_Drive

I don't think it's worthwhile to rework this and it could open up a can of worms.

That's what I meant by the default route plotting still working normally. It would just allow you to manually plot much longer jumps, if you wanted.

Honestly, the fact this wouldn't increase your jump range too crazily is what would keep it from being OP.

Deep charge gives you a bigger range than mass manager on the smallest FSDs. Someone ran the numbers a long time ago. Something like size 3 and below benefit more from deep charge while bigger ones benefit more from mass manager.

True, but it also reduces your fuel efficiency. Even in those cases, it's basically not worth using.

This change would make it usable for ALL ships - in the right circumstances!

 

[Agony_Aunt]

True, but it also reduces your fuel efficiency. Even in those cases, it's basically not worth using.

This change would make it usable for ALL ships - in the right circumstances!

Not arguing for or against, just correcting an incorrect statement.

Small ships with a fuel scoop, can quickly recoup the extra fuel lost, its not an issue at all unless you're plotting through multiple unscoopables for some strange reason.

As things stand, mass manager is better for bigger ships, deep charge better for smaller ships. The risk of this change would make it so that deep charge is always the better choice, unless you're putting a small fuel scoop on a big ship or wanting to go distances without a fuel scoop.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Using a Mandalay as an example, with a v1 G5 SCO +MM, gross mass (full 32t tank, no cargo): 302.243t:

Full 32t tank / 5.2t remaining in tank, with G5 GFSB: 72.296LY / 79.330LY; Total range: 7 jumps; 491.249LY.

188t Fuel Jump (no MM, all optional slots as fuel, i.e. 156t fuel as cargo): 217.484LY; Total range: 1 jump, 217.484LY.

The scooping time for the 188t fuel jump would be 5.88x that of the 32t tank - if there was a fuel scoop installed, which there wasn't in this example. The addition of a fuel scoop would reduce the range of the "all the fuel" jump.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Using a Mandalay as an example, with a v1 G5 SCO +MM, gross mass (full 32t tank, no cargo): 302.243t:

Full 32t tank / 5.2t remaining in tank, with G5 GFSB: 72.296LY / 79.330LY; Total range: 7 jumps; 491.249LY.

188t Fuel Jump (no MM, all optional slots as fuel, i.e. 156t fuel as cargo): 217.484LY; Total range: 1 jump, 217.484LY.

The scooping time for the 188t fuel jump would be 5.88x that of the 32t tank - if there was a fuel scoop installed, which there wasn't in this example. The addition of a fuel scoop would reduce the range of the "all the fuel" jump.

So, how much fuel to make a jump to Colonia in a single jump?

 

[DjVortex]

The downside to this, of course, is that fuel usage becomes increasingly inefficient the longer your jump is. Jump 100 light years, and you will probably use up the majority of your fuel in a single leap. You would need to carefully calculate where you are going in order to avoid getting yourself in trouble.

I'm not sure of the exact formula, but fuel consumption increases exponentially with the size of the jump (which is the reason why you can traverse a significantly larger distance using "economic routing" than "fastest routing" with the same amount of fuel). I think this would mean that even if you uncap fuel usage for the jump, you are getting ever so faster diminishing returns. Doubling the amount of fuel used for the jump will give you only a very moderate increase in jump range.

Of course you could fill up your ship with extra fuel tanks and use something like 10 times your normal fuel tank size in order to make a double-distance jump, or something along those lines. However, it might be less practical than you think.

(Of course all this is just speculation from my part, as I'm not intimately acquainted with how jump range and fuel consumption work.)

 

[DemiserofD]

I'm not sure of the exact formula, but fuel consumption increases exponentially with the size of the jump (which is the reason why you can traverse a significantly larger distance using "economic routing" than "fastest routing" with the same amount of fuel). I think this would mean that even if you uncap fuel usage for the jump, you are getting ever so faster diminishing returns. Doubling the amount of fuel used for the jump will give you only a very moderate increase in jump range.

Of course you could fill up your ship with extra fuel tanks and use something like 10 times your normal fuel tank size in order to make a double-distance jump, or something along those lines. However, it might be less practical than you think.

(Of course all this is just speculation from my part, as I'm not intimately acquainted with how jump range and fuel consumption work.)

Hey, I'd be fine with that. Heck, that'd be pretty cool. There are all sorts of places I'd love the ability to just get a little extra range without needing to synthesize. There are loads of times where I get to the end of a trip and I've got one like 8ly jump left. If I had this, I could just do the last jump like that!

Using a Mandalay as an example, with a v1 G5 SCO +MM, gross mass (full 32t tank, no cargo): 302.243t:

Full 32t tank / 5.2t remaining in tank, with G5 GFSB: 72.296LY / 79.330LY; Total range: 7 jumps; 491.249LY.

188t Fuel Jump (no MM, all optional slots as fuel, i.e. 156t fuel as cargo): 217.484LY; Total range: 1 jump, 217.484LY.

The scooping time for the 188t fuel jump would be 5.88x that of the 32t tank - if there was a fuel scoop installed, which there wasn't in this example. The addition of a fuel scoop would reduce the range of the "all the fuel" jump.

Hah, fun numbers. So doing giant jumps definitely wouldn't typically be viable. Even so, imagine you only needed to go, say, 120ly. You could just do it, no problem! Refuel when you dock!

 

[Robert Maynard]

So, how much fuel to make a jump to Colonia in a single jump?

Far more than it can carry.

A 521.2t (gross weight with full 32t fuel tank) can jump 85.307LY; with 8.3t in the tank it's 89.371LY.

With 502t of fuel filling all of the optional slots, a 534t fuel jump would only be 204.214LY.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Hah, fun numbers. So doing giant jumps definitely wouldn't typically be viable. Even so, imagine you only needed to go, say, 120ly. You could just do it, no problem! Refuel when you dock!

.... or use a 50% boost jumponium synthesis, or neutron boost.

 

[DemiserofD]

.... or use a 50% boost jumponium synthesis, or neutron boost.

That'd still be an option, for sure.

I'm not trying to make something outright BETTER than Mass Manager here; just meaningfully different, in a way Deep Charge hasn't really managed when compared to Mass Manager. I definitely wouldn't use this new thing on ALL my ships. But my trade ships? My Beluga? I'd definitely at least consider it!