Fuel in Infinity

I had an idea come up while chatting in Discord.

It would be nice if we had sublight fuel and FTL fuel added later, separate from the fuel used to power the ship:

  • Large quantities of Hydrogen/Deuterium for ship fusion reactor and warp drive.
  • Tiny quantities of Antimatter for FTL (future FTL used to get to other stars in TQFE)

That way we can still have the need to refuel in I:B and then the need to also produce antimatter in a future expansion/TQFE.

Hydrogen should be stored in large fuel tanks that would take up quite a bit of space in a ship, and would last for a few hours of crazy maneuvering around a solar system before having to scoop/refuel at a base or a carrier.

Antimatter should be contained in a special magnetic compartment, which wouldn’t take much space as you only need a small quantity to produce huge amounts of energy. This compartment would have to be exponentially larger in order to be able to hold a linearly increasing amount of antimatter. That way, larger ships can have more FTL capability but would have to sacrifice an incredible amount of space.

In effect, small interceptors would also have the need to be transported by a carrier ship due to their limited supply of fuel, and may perhaps not even have any antimatter compartment (larger fighters and bombers might, though) while corvettes and other craft can be more independent. In I:B, interceptors only need to fly around one system, so this would only matter more as a scientific explanation in lore, and in a future game.

Infinity community, please share your thoughts. Thank you.

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I understand where you’re coming from with this, but allowing players to strand themselves isn’t generally considered fun gameplay. It sounds great in theory, but being allowed to drift endlessly into the void would suck.

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I’d still support stranding people indefinitely for TQFE. Not at all for battlescape, but definitely in TQFE.

Actions should have consequences!

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I like the idea, but that is something that would have to be tested how it works out.
But it might bring interesting problems to solve and new elements to gameplay.
Non combat folks would have their job.

I always remember what a fun it was in Battlefield Vietnam to just carry people and equipment around in non combat chopper.
sigh great times

perhaps only limiting the speed with empty fuel tank … ?
or
What about disabling afterburner without fuel ?

I don’t mean that it should be easy to “strand” people. Fuel should be easily transferable between ships. A few hours of flying is already a lot, and it’s hard to get stranded in a solar system where you have stations almost everywhere.

Besides, the devs already said something about repairs being done by corvettes.

After a large battle, I’d imagine there would be some stranded interceptors that are too damaged to move. Somebody has to pick them up, come by and repair them.

Similarly, it’s not really that big of a deal if someone gets stranded and has to crash land due to lack of fuel in a small interceptor. Larger craft can simply carry a scoop that should let them get fuel from gas giants and stars.

I think that a ship that is low on fuel should warn the user, and enter “Emergency mode”, or simply let the user power down systems in order to be able to slow boat it back to the station. Only through negligence or damage sustained through battle can a ship really get “stuck” somewhere on a planet without any fuel.

As for FTL travel in the future, antimatter should be something that a person must actively seek out after jumping for hundreds of light years, and either refuel at a station or scoop it from things like black holes or some other stellar phenomena. Perhaps large exploration vessels can simply generate it internally, allowing for almost limitless jumping capability for an entire fleet of ships.

As for I:B, a possible explanation as to why we can’t travel to other stars may be that this current system is a stranded colony, far far away from SFC space, without any jump gate or simply no natural antimatter in the area. Also, the colony might be too poor to build a large facility to synthesize it in great quantities, or it is simply far too cut off from supply routes; too far flung, neglected, and forgotten by the rest of humanity.

Would also explain why the 3 corporations are so interested in fighting over 1 system, as resources are limited, and “winning” the game could also be because the winning corporation has united the system and can finally build a facility powerful enough to synthesize antimatter to be able to get out of their hell hole.

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It’s a full scale solar system. There won’t be stations “almost everywhere”. There will be a stupifying amount of empty space. All it takes is someone traveling at warp speeds in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the solar system for them to just be screwed. Remember, ships won’t come to a stop when the engines are shut off. They’ll just keep on going at whatever speed they were traveling at at the time of fuel exhaustion.

It creates an edge case that just sucks. Where’s the up side to this?

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I agree with you, @Kichae. There’s no point on creating stranded people. Unless you create a full stop for the ship when nearing fuel depletion and create an automatic rescue mission with a reward for it… but that would be for another time ^^.

Limited munitions would be kind of OK, though.

Well, either way, I:B matches don’t last forever so everything is reset anyways is it not?
We can’t have infinite fuel as that would require zero point energy and kind of makes it too casual imo.

The only time that basic capabilities such as movement, sight, hearing and such are on the table is when the game is about survival. Staying alive is the gameplay. It’s harsh, and it’s tough, and just getting from point A to point B is a major victory for the player. But Infinity:Battlescape is not a survival game. It assumes that players are able to casually motor around the system, exploring, shooting, building, escorting, and so forth.

Note that basic consumables have been tried in countless games, and players universally revile them. It’s an annoyance. Even telling players that they need to return to town or they’ll be penalized on experience gain is enough to start riots. Players want access to gameplay, not barriers to it. That’s why only survival games can do what you’re after - the barriers are the gameplay.

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in my opinion capital ships should be the only ones being able to travel long distances (at leats for a few planets), while smaller ships would require to refuel at high costs in order to warp again, or have some kind of in-game mechanism to make them way slower.

My idea is to have an option to salvage small ships through NPC transport ships, if someone has suddenly the smart idea of going far away from a station or any other installation/planet. This transport should take some time to reach the ship, and have a considerable cost. Once the ship reaches the player, the player can refuel or just be carried back to a station, without any death penalties. If the NPC ship is destroyed, even if it’s just on it’s way to salvage the player, then the player will just spawn in a station, death penalties applied.

Another method is to make the warping system overheat, which leads to a travel time between planets maybe 10x times longer that traveling on capital ships.

In the case of capital ships, warping would just consume a small amount of fuel, but warping too often should overheat the warping system. Capital ships should be the main way to travel between planets.

Having 5 planets, i think 2 or 3 should be unreachable by smaller ships due to distances, but those planets should have a good amount of resources.

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Maybe the antimatter container could be synonymous to an ammo rack on more conventional vehicles?

I think having a fuel system should only be necessary if playtesting determines that not having one is detrimental to gameplay.

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It would be one thing if this was an MMO, but in a round based game i see very limited applications for fuel mechanics. The only things i can consider are some kind of jump fuel recharge mechanics on cap ships to gate the flow of the battles somewhat.

I would not mind some sort of a “cooldown” timer on warp drive, to prohibit people from popping in and out of warp once combat becomes a thing. As it is, just getting from the Sun to Earth takes eight minutes at the speed of light, and five and a half hours to get to Pluto. AFAIK, c is going to be a hard speed limit in game, so trips around the system will already take a healthy enough amount of time with needing to fly there, worrying about possible interceptions (being knocked out of warp drive by an enemy, maybe?), potential cool downs between jumps, potential limits on distance traveled in warp, etc. without adding the consideration of fuel.

The prototype is not a full implementation of the interception mechanic, so don’t worry too much about what you see there.

I’m assuming that they will go with the warp frequency idea from the old forums, which wouldn’t involve a cooldown timer. Instead, if you come near a ship on a different warp frequency, both of your warp drives lose effectiveness. The closer you get, the greater the loss. By the time you’re ready to shoot at each other, your warp drives are inert and you’re maneuvering entirely on thrusters wherever you happen to be. Other ships can then arrive to help out and the furball commences.

I’d also assume that each team would have its own warp frequency, ensuring that if teammates are flying together, they can warp together, but that if different teams meet, they drop out of warp to discuss things.

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Hm…I’m not sure how well that would work without some modification, though. As it currently stands, dropping out of warp causes you to retain your momentum (I think?), so even if you were to force someone else out of warp, if you’re not already travelling at roughly the same vector, conventional thrusters will not allow you to engage in combat.

That would, of course, be remedied by any number of ways: dropping from warp forces you to slow. The “interference” from warp frequencies causes you to slow. My personal favorite, having done very little in the way of fleshing it out (or thinking about it, to be honest) is where the two vectors merge together, forcing both parties along a new, identical route. This would have an added benefit of making it simpler to intercept someone who would use their ship as a kinetic weapon against, say, an orbiting station as the inbound party is redirected away.

That’s what happens right now. Warp is not an afterburner, but another mode of travel. Turn on warp, your speed multiplies. Turn off warp, the multiplier goes away.

Take a look at the warp prototype from 2009. It does something like what you’re talking about, using a mass-averaged vector.

Currently, in the prototype, it is. That’s why people, like Keith, get stuck at 2Mkm/s because they disengaged “warp” and wonder why their engines can’t do a thing to alter their vector.

As Lomsor said, my interpretation of the current prototype has it as an afterburner. You see it when streamers were disabling warp, rather than letting it slow them down as they entered the atmosphere, and they would careen into the planet at tens of thousands of kph.