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Aeson -> RE: collectors, useful? (6/15/2014 5:34:03 PM)
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quote:
- Are you sure that the state has to pay for the fuel if it comes from its own empire? What about the private sector? If yes, then where does that money go?
There's a line item for it in the empire budget. My current game's year to date state fuel costs are around 9000 credits in mid-July, and I seriously doubt that I've imported over 11,000 units of fuel for state ships and bases. The money goes to the same place that all the money used to buy resources goes, which is "who knows."
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- Considering that according to Sylian's chart a collector seems to provide from stars on average 5.2 times the energy (per second?) for each Potential Energy point, having 2.5 times Potential Energy Points the energy requirements seems a little bit overkill. Even in a main sequence star system, you would have to be farther than 90% of distance from the star for energy requirements for static energy usage to overtake collection rate.
Can't say I care. At 40 credits per collector, even if I am putting too much energy collection in place it's only a few percent on the annual maintenance costs when the ship total is ~2000 or more credits to maintain. A collector or two doesn't take up too much space, either, and it's a number I can look at in game rather than a number I have to go look up online every time I decide to optimize with it.
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- Are we certain that the energy requirements are per second?
The design screen lists weapon energy requirements in units of energy per second. This is presumably done to put weapon energy usage on the same units as reactor output, indicating that reactor output is listed as energy per second. Static energy costs are subtracted from total reactor output without modification, so presumably static energy use is also per second.
As for why I'm treating this as a real-world second rather than a game-world second: game world days pass in a matter of real world seconds, and there are 86,400 seconds per day (assuming that game world time units are the same as real world time units). If weapon energy per second were reported in game world seconds, combat would burn through your ship's fuel so rapidly that the only viable warship designs would dedicate incredibly large fractions of their internal space to fuel cells and carry barely any weapons whatsoever, as even a single Concussion missile requires about 7 energy per second, or 592,200 energy per day, which translates to 1184.4 units of fuel per day using the most efficient reactor available (Quameno NovaCore Reactors, 2 hydrogen per 1000 energy). This is clearly a ludicrous level of fuel consumption per game day for a single weapon (a highly energy-efficient weapon, at that; most weapons require more than twice the energy per second of a concussion missile).
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- I heard that Hydrogen could reach prices of 40 per unit (and more?) in times of shortage?
Maybe it can. I thought that the cap on resource costs was around 2 or 3 credits per unit, but I could be mistaken.
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- Also, there are considerations of logistics, space and resources spent in building energy collectors compared to (gas mines + freighters + fuel storage) or resupply ships.
Adding energy collectors reduces the need for such things. Reducing the need for these things reduces the overall infrastructure costs. Whether or not it does so to the point of making up for the cost of energy collectors, I could not say. I have never tried a game where I went without energy collectors on my ships for any extended period of time after I obtained them, because reducing the need to refuel strikes me as more valuable than reducing maintenance, particularly since it's unlikely that removing energy collectors from my designs will reduce maintenance so much as shift the maintenance costs from one component to another, especially on ships that I'm trying to pack to a size limit. Regardless, an energy collector or two makes a rather negligible contribution to the total maintenance costs of even fairly small ships; even if the maintenance cost of the ship is only 1000 credits (which is very low, in my opinion), an energy collector's ~40 upkeep is a mere 4% of that total. It's not something worth troubling yourself about once you have a reasonable economic base.
I am also somewhat disappointed to have to admit that I made a math error in my post on the costs of fuel. I seem to have multiplied the fuel costs by 100 for no reason apparent to me. A design with a static energy requirement of 10 using the first upgrade of the fission reactor will require 1000 energy or 3.89 fuel every 100 seconds, which translates to 3.1 credits per 100 seconds, not 310 credits per 100 seconds. I am somewhat disappointed that no one has pointed out this error yet, as the error resulted in two conflicting statements in my previous post, namely "it costs you about 3.1 credits per thousand energy" and "If your ship design has a static energy requirement of 10, you use 1000 energy every 100 seconds and so 100 seconds of real time at normal speed costs you 310 credits for fuel." Thus, the annual fuel cost to cover a static energy requirement of 10 would be about 19 credits per year, not 1860, when fuel costs the minimum 0.8 credits per unit. Energy collectors are thus somewhat more expensive than fuel when fuel is plentiful. Should a shortage occur which brings the cost of fuel up to 1.6 credits or more per unit, energy collectors become cheaper than fuel. It should nevertheless be noted that a ship that uses energy collectors to cover its static needs will not need to refuel nearly as often as a ship which does not cover its static needs with energy collectors, and that moving the ship to a fueling point can easily cost a hundred or more energy even if all it has to do is cruise over to a nearby station. I would tend to say that between not having the headache of constantly refueling ships and the fuel costs of moving the ship to go refuel (which is slight if there's a refueling point sufficiently close to the ship, costing perhaps one or two fuel), energy collectors are worthwhile.
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