Which early driver gives the best bang for your buck?

[sling77]

So I've been playing quite a bit and I've firmly solidified my hold on the majority of earth's boost as well as taken the majority of useful sites on mars for to stockpile resources. I'm now trying to decide on the worlds tech direction and I'm stuck deciding which propulsion methods to go after. There are obviously multiple but many of them don't link on the tech tree meaning I'm going to be stuck in for a while once i choose one. While I'd like to rush the late drivers as i assume they're just all around better I need a stopgap "Ok" driver for now to get things up and going for at least local defense of mars and earth.

My question is this, (disregarding the 2nd half or right side of the overall tech tree ) what tech in the earlier tech levels will get me a driver that will allow some flexibility in terms of combat and long distance travel?

[ulzgoroth]

How early? Very early, I don't think there's anything that will do that without enormous fuel budgets.

NERVA/ponderomotive will get you around relatively cheaply, but it's barely mobile in combat.

[sling77]

Well i can't really give you an era as the game doesn't really have that but World Tech is currently about 1/3 completed of the tech below "Mission to the asteroids" and pushing on from there, there are a couple past it but thats where we are generally on the tech tree.

[Zuul]

The first drive you can get that's really worth "anything" at all more than just the bare necessity to drag your backside around, is the advanced pulsar drive. That's a solid fission drive so "kind of" early, but the RNG gods have to go ahead and unlock pulsar and then advanced after you've researched it.

It's still utter garbage compared to the aliens, but it's something.

Edit: Just to be sure, don't just look at the top level tech tree and assume that's telling you everything that's important. Take a gander at Solid Core Fission Systems. It doesn't say a blessed thing about drives in the unlocks, other than an expensive later technology for fission pulse drives. Which is because the drive unlocks come off of the project Solid Core Fission Reactor I and the latter evolutions of said reactor.

In the full tech tree you'd quickly see this, but in the top level one unless you know...you're going in blind.

[sling77]

Many thanks, I'll look into the one you mentioned. Been having a rough go of it. I made the aliens a bit too angry and they bombarded a couple of my mines. They've since been rebuilt but it set me back on resource production a good bit and i honestly don't know what i can do to defend against that besides having overwhelming superiority in space and that doesn't seem possible for the forseeable future. RN the only things i have that can kind of stand up to their fleets is my stations, my ships get shredded.

[Rashka]

Here's a chart with all drives (minor spoilers I guess) https://i.gyazo.com/bda9b546d601225548e3f9370e5af012.png

I found the Grid Drive, NERVA and VASIMR drives and their relatives most useful early game (Electrostatic, Solid Fission, Electromagnetic respectively), although all I did was fly around LEO and capture stations with marines.

I guess I'm mid-game now and the Helion Reflex ( Fusion Mirror Magnetic) is very useful for prospecting and creating outposts.

[andrei haiducul]

Pulsar and it doesn't actually get outclassed for a long long time.
For long-range ships (ex: colony ships, troop transports), Ion->Grid and they are the best for even longer than the Pulsar.

Most of the drives you get before fusion are garbage or memes (Orion).

[Rashka]

Originally posted by andrei haiducul:

Most of the drives you get before fission are garbage or memes (Orion).

[sling77]

So I'm currently going the route of advanced pulsar, I gotta say i really hope the tech screens gets a bit more user friendly before too terribly long.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by andrei haiducul:

Pulsar and it doesn't actually get outclassed for a long long time.
For long-range ships (ex: colony ships, troop transports), Ion->Grid and they are the best for even longer than the Pulsar.

Pulsar has terrible exhaust velocity for interplanetary purposes.

Less terrible than all the other alternatives that aren't electric drives, but terrible. You'll need to use an enormous fuel fraction for ships that are meant to go places.

[andrei haiducul]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Pulsar has terrible exhaust velocity for interplanetary purposes.

The next best is Pegasus and good luck getting that in the early game. You can get Orion but it's far too expensive (in units of Noble Metals) to actually use.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by andrei haiducul:

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Pulsar has terrible exhaust velocity for interplanetary purposes.

The next best is Pegasus and good luck getting that in the early game. You can get Orion but it's far too expensive (in units of Noble Metals) to actually use.

My position is that there's no early game drive I'm aware of, emphatically including Pulsar, that has both significant thrust and utility for long distance travel.

Develop an electric drive for long distance travel, and if you want high-thrust combat ships maybe also develop another drive (ideally pulsar) for that.

(I haven't found Orion so I can't rightly comment there.)

[SaltyStoryteller]

Honestly, early game drives can EITHER get you places, OR let you maneuver in a fight. Frankly, I aim to give each of my colonies a small flotilla of gunboats for defense and wait until I have more advanced drives before I start building real warships.

My only hope is that mission control points are balanced around having more mid-weight ships than just it being most efficient to stack up the biggest ship around and have it handle tons of lower weight vessels. A good fleet should be a mix of torpedo boats, destroyers to screen, cruisers for line engagement and maybe a battleship or two to delete specific targets or brawl with one another.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by SaltyStoryteller:

My only hope is that mission control points are balanced around having more mid-weight ships than just it being most efficient to stack up the biggest ship around and have it handle tons of lower weight vessels. A good fleet should be a mix of torpedo boats, destroyers to screen, cruisers for line engagement and maybe a battleship or two to delete specific targets or brawl with one another.

In terms of mission control and maintenance and weaponry, a monitor is pretty much two Escorts glued together. Not sure where the escorts have an advantage other than being more individually expendable. And turning faster I guess.

They do have one more utility module between them, and a battery slot each. Usually the utility slot will be lost because there's some utility you're duplicating between them, but if there isn't (say you're building a swarm of marine assault craft) it might favor the escorts.

[sling77]

Well as of now I'm not trying to make anything that can go across the system just mars-earth and hopefully not have so little thrust that it basically doesn't move in combat. Ik the whole mars-earth thing may not be reasonable or at least be a more longterm goal but worst case scenario (i hope) is i use one of the ones you guys mention and the ships can secure mars and its two moons so that when the aliens come to bombard me again i can have something to respond with.

[Derek]

Until the late game you will never match the ai in terms of speed, distance, everything else. So a good engine isn't needed, what you want is the range and speed to hold a defensive zone. Basically far enough to get from the moon and back. And quick enough to reach targets before the aliens do.