Help me understand clean drive thrusters

[Cdr Voorheez]

I like a good decisive reply. Ty Cmdr.

 

[Hairbear]

I have g5 dirty drives on my explorca and have found the additional heat efficiency from a low emissions power plant to be helpful when speeding over hot / high g planets

 

[Shir]

I explored a bit with an anaconda with dirty drives 5 and then changed back to clean 5, both were decent to good rolls. Not much of a difference in sc handling, clean IS a bit better at scooping while frame jumping with my ship though. Landed with both drives in planets close to 3g so both would work. Overall the difference was more noticable with an Asp that pushed the power plant more, with an anaconda it was very small.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

the main difference between clean and dirty drives is above higher g surfaces and/or high ambient temperature, and i invite anyone to test that with dirty drives at skardee 1 (high ambient temperatur) or achenar 3/ wasp-77 (high g).

anyway, powerusage adds to heat generated per MW - whether your ship runs hotter or cooler before thruster usage with G5 clean drive tuning depends to some extend on its heatcapacity (8% of than is the max cooling rate) as well as your powerplants heatefficiency. in most cases an exploration set up will generated far less heat than is vented.

skardee with Dirty drives is ... intense!

skardee with clean drives is like having a cool gin with a ice and a slice of cucumber in a glass watching the sunset.

equally high G planets with Clean drives are also my preference after self testing, the difference between my grade 5 DD and CD is about 50m/s but the difference in heat can be 20% more with DD on the extreme planets! ofc every ship is different, it also depends on power % used so PP fitted etc and I aint got time to test them all.

so that all said I would advocate clean drives just because I don't need to get anywhere quick exploring, even planet side I would use SC to travel around it...now if they sped up SC where i spend the majority of my time it would be another debate.

Interesting fact ** Dolphin with either drives fitted turning on planets (more so right than left) cooks you in any case, a bug they still need to fix grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

 

[Nazdakka]

I'm flying an Annie explorer with grade 5D drives. Should I go with CDT or DDT then? Bit confused on this subject to be totally honest. I have access to the Prof.

'None of the above' is also a perfectly valid option. You're using a 5D drive on your Annie because you're willing to sacrifice performance in order to improve weight, heat and power draw. Dirty drives make the opposite tradeoff. What are you doing that needs a high-performance drive?

 

[Cdr Voorheez]

As per OPs original question: Exploration.