Hydrogen Consumption

[master00340]

I have a small ship with 2 large, 8 small hydrogen thrusters and 4 hydrogen tanks.
Is it normal that the hydrogen tanks are depleted in less than 10 seconds?

[TTVDisaster_Artist007]

They drain rapidly if you don't have a constant supply of ice in the oxygen generators.

[maninredagain]

Back when I played around with thse thrusters a single small hydrogen thruster would empty a hydrogen tank in around 90 seconds, so it sounds fitting.

[TTVDisaster_Artist007]

Large Thrusters would easily down 2-5X the amount as small thrusters. I have the specs of them around here somewhere. I'd reccomend looking at the wiki. It should give you the formula to calculate how much you need to produce to stay up in the air.

[master00340]

I have an oxygen generator that produces hydrogen

[AlanEsh]

Originally posted by master00340:

I have an oxygen generator that produces hydrogen

It also produces Hydrogen if you have a Hydrogen tank attached the system.

[Thalyn]

The raw numbers of it all, for a small ship:

H2 Tank = 40,000 (Units? Litres? Not sure - it's not specified anywhere)
LHT = 514.1H2/s
SHT = 109.2H2/s

If we assume you're using all the listed thrusters at once (which is a big assumption, since it stands to reason they're in all directions - you can only use up to 3 directions at once or else the game starts reducing usage rather than doubling up) than you're looking at a capacity of 160,000 and a usage of 1,901.8/s. Maximum burn time would therefor be 84.1 seconds (1:24.1 minutes) - assuming all 4 tanks are full.

A single Generator produces only 166H2/s, meaning it would take 963.9 seconds (16:03.9 minutes) to fill all four tanks, using 17,777.8kg of ice in the process (1kg ice = 9H2). If you have less ice than that, or wait less time, than the tanks won't be full.

[Steel Panther]

So these thrusters are actually just to blast off from planets then regular usage? Guess that means my hybrid heavy fighter idea is a bust.

[heuldoch]

Originally posted by Steel Panther:

So these thrusters are actually just to blast off from planets then regular usage? Guess that means my hybrid heavy fighter idea is a bust.

go to mars moon, its nearly completly out of ice. i only use hydros there for all my ships

[master00340]

Sorted It out, thanks for your help.

[FцllSїzёd]

I tried making a small hydrogen powered ship once. It had a single large thruster which operated all the time to keep me hovering. And 5 smalls which were only used for directional control. I only had 1 tank but the idea was to have enough oxygen generators to keep it full. Even with 9 generators it couldn't supply enough to keep that one large engine just hovering. The tank would deplete in about 5 minutes. At this point I gave up on hydrogen for small ships as the size of the ship was becoming ridiculous to accommodate all the hardware. I'm pretty sure that 12 oxy generators would have done it but the ship was already bulbous and I hadn't added any of the other gear I actually wanted. So it is possible but its impractical IMO.

Large ships on the other hand you could have 1 large hydrogen thruster and 6 smalls, 9 oxygen generators, 1 hydrogen tank. With this setup and 400k ice you could launch a standard atmospheric lander off one planet and land it on another without running out of hydrogen ofc.

[Erebus Alpha]

I experimented with 'hydrogen afterburners' once, on pure deep-space non-hovering fighters, turning on the additional rear-facing hydrogen thrusters only when I required an extra burst of speed. It was moderately successful.

However, the entire system depended on a large hydrogen tank, which even on a very large fighter, takes up a lot of room. That is the defining characteristic of hydrogen-burning rockets in SE. They take up a lot of room. If you want a burn time measured in minutes instead of seconds, your ship will be HUGE.

If you are trying to do combat, a larger ship means that you will be easier to hit. Any deep-space starship that uses hydrogen as a primary mode of thrust will have to be the size of a battleship or larger. On everything except the absolute largest ships, ion thrusters + reactors generate much more thrust per minute per volume.

In non-combat applications, hydrogen thrusters have legitimate uses in reusable surface-to-orbit cargo rockets, sky cranes, and other instances where you need to lift heavy cargo into space, and aren't concerned with the possibility of the ship getting shot up.

Perhaps the one area where hydrogen thrusters excel in combat is in missile/torpedo design. Hydrogen thrusters are cheap to manufacture (with no platinum requirement), and have significantly more thrust than ion engines.

[Fot67]

I think it needs a bit of a rebalancing still.

[Jel]

Use Hydrogen Thrusters only to get you in Space, as temporary afterburners (turning them on until max.Speed then off again, also keep in mind, that even on earth your large Ion thrusters will help already after a few thousand meters).
Works quite well this way - regarding that for all other purposes we have different thrusters :)