Extra fuel tanks in 1.3 - like cargo racks?

[Lord Lucan Onion Head]

Did we discuss the coming extra fuel tanks coming in 1.3 in a dedicated thread?

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=135952

"For ship customisation you will also be able to fit more than one fuel tank to your ship – although this obviously takes up space you could have used on other modules!"

I hope that they are like cargo racks.

In the case of the Vulture the maximum fuel tank is 8 tons, which is pitiful if you want to go very far, it means you have to scoop on nearly every star. For me, the least I would want in a Vulture to get to a remote location is a 16 ton fuel tank (then swap it back out for a SCB). This would be possible if the size 4 slot was able to take a fuel tank of either 2, 4, 8 or 16 tons. In fact, that would give you a combined 24 tons of fuel tanks: 8 + 16. Very nice.

But will the fuel tank capacity match those of cargo racks? It would be a bit mad to able to add 200 tons of fuel tank to your Python. Or would it? Jump range wouldn't change, it would just mean less scooping.

I'm looking forward to 1.3 for this reason alone.

 

[Drelthar]

I guess it's 'balance reasons ' but it would make sense to me if cargo racks WERE extra fuel tanks. Buy hydrogen fuel. Store in cargo bay. Refill tank from cargo hold. For now, could be a module to auto fill tank. (a pipe and a pump...) and it could take a little time to refuel, when we can walk around ship, could manually refuel.

 

[Magic Man]

Additional fuel rank will be a module and take a module slot.
Cargo fuel and manually refueling from cargo hold doesn't make sense.

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In the case of the Vulture the maximum fuel tank is 8 tons, which is pitiful if you want to go very far, it means you have to scoop on nearly every star

Which really is as it should be, the vulture being a dedicated fighter rather than an explorer

 

[Mephane]

I would expect them to fit the current cargo rack sizes. E.g. class 4 fuel tank = 16 tons.

 

[Pyrion]

I think no extra module is needed as was said before. Just make it possible to refill your tank from your cargo. Easiest, most flexible solution, just one more option under "functions".

 

[Zplintz]

Easiest may not be the mechanic FD are looking for.

It may be that we can only supply/fuel other ships using the drones from the additional fuel cargo we carry. If we can refuel our own tanks it might be by the same method rather than the equivelent of an extended fuel tank.

 

[Lord Lucan Onion Head]

Yes, good points. Perhaps you could buy 16 tons of fuel to pop into your cargo rack and then press a "refuel" button.

 

[uncle bulgaria]

Additional fuel rank will be a module and take a module slot.
Cargo fuel and manually refueling from cargo hold doesn't make sense.

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Which really is as it should be, the vulture being a dedicated fighter rather than an explorer

Yep, it's not even a major drawback either. If I'm crossing the inhabited bubble I just drop a class 4 scoop on my Vulture and away I go, a 4C scoop will fill a Vulture's tank in seconds. There's rarely a consistent run of unscoopable stars in the inhabited area too and you can get 3 decent distance jumps out of a tank.

 

[Lord Lucan Onion Head]

Easiest may not be the mechanic FD are looking for.

It may be that we can only supply/fuel other ships using the drones from the additional fuel cargo we carry. If we can refuel our own tanks it might be by the same method rather than the equivelent of an extended fuel tank.

Yes, forcing us to play in Wings or in Open play, perhaps?

 

[Sandmann]

Apart from the idea that having a 100T fuel tank would imbalance the game (allowing you to just keep jumping from the core systems to Sag A pretty much without stopping for gas if you put it in an asp), there's good "in game, role play" reasons for it too. A rack to hold some cargo canisters would be much less rugged & complex than a safe fuel delivery & storage system - the resulting extra complexity taking up a good amount of mass. I'd expect to see something like an "average" module slot on any given ship being able to hold an "average" fuel tank for that same ship. If you've got four empty "average sized" slots on a ship like a T6 you could install four extra standard fuel tanks at the expense of standard cargo racks (giving you a fuel tanker type ship to support smaller fighter types in a wing). If you've got one "average" slot spare on a vulture that would give you the possibility of installing one extra "average" tank on it.

 

[EDbubba]

...But will the fuel tank capacity match those of cargo racks? It would be a bit mad to able to add 200 tons of fuel tank to your Python. Or would it? Jump range wouldn't change, it would just mean less scooping.

Huh? If you filled the tanks, the jump range would certainly change! 200T of fuel would halve your jump range, just like cargo.

The one thing that absolutely needs to be done is the tanks need to be "powered" somehow, so you can selectively use them. The route planner would be basically useless since it must assume full tanks for any planned route, so you'd end up with a route of ridiculously small jumps as your tank slowly drained, not taking advantage of the ever-increasing range. (that's the way it works now, but in most ships the difference between empty and full range is pretty minimal, usually around 5%, 10% at most)


The flipside would be that they are simply reserve "siphon" tanks that allow you to stop & refill your main tank. This might be a better mechanic since you could be pretty much oblivious to fuel level until you ran out, and then need to look for a scoopable star along the way after tanking back up.

 

[Stormprooter]

I'm expecting the extra fuel stores will have a power requirement - as a balance. But I may be wrong in my guess there.

 

[Lord Lucan Onion Head]

Huh? If you filled the tanks, the jump range would certainly change! 200T of fuel would halve your jump range, just like cargo.

Yes, that's right. I meant that the min/max jump range of the ship would be the same as if carrying regular cargo. I should have made that clearer.

 

[Mephane]

I'm expecting the extra fuel stores will have a power requirement - as a balance. But I may be wrong in my guess there.

The mass alone will be enough for most people to not fill their ships entirely with fuel tanks unless they want to play some kind of tanker role. And sure it may be nice to get that extra 16 tons into your Clipper, but it'd be pretty pointless to fly around with 64 tons of fuel instead of just having one of the slots occupied by a fuel scoop.

 

[DrakeAurum]

I'd assume that they'll just turn fuel tanks into interchangeable modules, and probably leave the largest tank size as it is now.

 

[jgm]

They'll be internal modules in the same way as the hull reinforcement modules are.

Depending on if they can be bothered or not the fuel capacity might be a little less than the equivalent cargo capacity for a given module slot, taking in to account the fact that realism suggests that the fuel tank itself needs both decent shielding and a mechanism to move the fuel to the power plant.