There we go. New version should be up.

Let me know if I've missed anything or messed anything up. I got a little time to do some file editing today but not really enough to test everything thoroughly, so I'm hoping that there hasn't been any additional backend changes I need to accommodate for.

Hey no problem was just curious. Keep up the good work!

Yeah. I've been meaning to get around to it but things have been a little complicated of late so it just hasn't happened. From what I can tell it shouldn't be any problem to do the same to the DLC blocks as well.

I'll try to get onto it over the next 2-3 days. And my apologies for not getting it done sooner.

Will you be updating this to match the newest update? The materials don't match on the DLC thrusters and I haven't tested but I'll guess they also use the vanilla values

Just as a theoretical mumbling, simulating Magnetised Target Fusion (MTF) thrust, even at only 50% efficiency (the other 50% presumably being used to sustain the reaction or simply wasted in this case) would yield an Isp of around 35,690.07 seconds., some 76.79x higher. In tandem with using pure hydrogen instead of COH (a further 33% increase) this would result in about 100x longer burns (eg 78 seconds becomes 7,800 seconds, or over 2 hours).

That seems a bit much, but could be worth considering (perhaps at only 5% efficency?).

In all honesty, I don't like those numbers. That's way too little burn (even if you use 3 of the default thrusters on a single tank you get over 3x the burn time) for my tastes, but this mod has never been about "like" - it's been about accuracy.

I'm going to play around with the numbers a little to see what the final results are, but its seeming like I'm going to have to modify my "Arcade" gas balance mod (switch from 1/12 burn time to 12x, since 1,044 seconds is acceptible) or potentially look into simulating the hydrogen thrusters as nuclear rather than chemical.

Converting that Isp into TSFC so I can more easily simulate it yields 101,972 / 464.78 = 219.4g/kN·s, whichi s fractionally better than the 225g/kN·s of the SSME in a vacuum. Because it's feasible, I'm again going to use this for my simulations.

In terms of actual numbers, this would mean the Small Grid, Small Hydrogen Thruster would consume up to 44,976.68g of fuel per second to produce its 205kN. Rounding to a nice 45kg (may or may not be the final value) would mean it's using 114.57L/s (with my gas changes), so a full Small Grid tank (10kL with my mod) would burn for approximately 87 seconds. This compares to the default 82kN thruster yielding ~732 seconds from the default 80kU tank.

Following on from my ramblings on the gas rebalancing, I'm going to be touching on this mod a little. I'm intending on following through with my atmospheric change, which will result in the small grid variants having half the thrust (basically the small one will be the same as base), but mostly I'm going to be looking into efficiency - especially on the hydrogen side.

I've recently been looking into Isp and TSFC, which basically relate to fuel consumption for a given power output. At an exact 2:1 ratio (which I'm simulating with my gasses), the absolute maximum theoretical Isp should be roughly 464.78 seconds (working from 10.37MJ/kg, which is slightly lower than traditional 4:1 LOH). This is only slightly higher than the typical 450-ish of production engines, so I'll work with it unaltered.

I forgot to say earlier, however, that I have contemplated pulling the Atmo base back down to 80kN and restoring the Large Grid scaling to 25x. This would halve the output on the Small Grid while keeping the Large Grid identical, and may in turn assist with some NPC ship interaction.

Balancing the Atmos against any current turbine engine is difficult, since the atmos are purely electrical where current turbines operate off a combustion fuel source within the shroud itself. This changes the whole situation quite a big before even getting into the differences in mechanical setup - number of points of contact, blade count, blade size, blade pitch, etc.

As it stands, the Atmos are just set up such that you can make a ship - not a clump of thrusters with a cockpit. They're definitely stronger than they should be but the absence of aerodynamics (or an approximation there-of) basically makes that a necessity. Efficiency is simply based on an approximation and the fact that 1 Joule should be able to provide ~1.414 Newton-seconds.

I actually have been subbed to this for a while, but refrained from using it as NPC ships became far too maneuverable as a result of now having way more thrust than before.

I decided to take another look, and was curious where your thrust values came from, other than simple scaling from small grid small to large grid large. Why 160kN for small grid small atmo thruster? A GE GE90 on a 747 is about 7.3 meters in length, while a large grid small atmo thruster is 7.5 meters. The GE GE90 has a max thrust of 510 kN, so shouldn't the baseline be somewhere around there?

Honestly, SE thrust to weight ratio is like 58x more efficient, and I'm not sure it's even possible to balance as energy costs are far in excess of what SE reactors pump out. It looks like for 284 kN of force the engine requires 22.9MW of power, versus 2.36 in SE. So I guess accuracy is impossible without revamping everything?

Not a problem.

Oh ok, I was misinterpreting the description as the difference from vanilla, not a difference from a previous version. I'd suggest putting the information you just told me in the description :)

Even without doing that, it wouldn't have left anything weaker than it was before. Using Hydrogen as the example:

SG-ST: 82kN (base), 205kN (mod)
SG-LT: 400kN (base), 738kN (base SG-ST x 9), 1,845kN (mod)
LG-ST: 900kN (base), 2,050kN (base SG-ST x 25), 5,125kN (mod)
LG-LT: 6,000kN (base), 18,450kN (base SG-ST x 9 x 25), 46,125kN (mod)

Base is quite obviously the base game, and mod is this mod. Base with a multiplier is if I hadn't increased the output but simply used the multipliers - 9x for small to large, and 25x for small grid to large grid. Modifiers for Atmospheric are 9x and 12.5x respectively, while Ion is 12x and 25x.

Oh right, you increased the base thrust.

Oh yikes

Basically that scaling is how much more powerful the Large Grid thrusters are compared to their Small Grid counterparts. So it simply means that, for example, instead of a Large Grid, Large Hydrogen Thruster being 125x (12500%) the power of a Small Grid, Small Hydrogen Thruster, they're only 25x (2500%) the power.

So what is the effect of "large grid scaling reduced"?