Ship refuel

[jaheem666]

Still not possible to dump a bunch of fuel in a container and have the ship auto fuel itself just like weapons can do with ammo? Seems strange that it is not a thing.

[The Big Brzezinski]

Sure you can. The containers are called "Fuel Tanks". They come in two small block sizes and three large block sizes. When you place fuel inside your generators will automatically draw fuel from fuel tanks to power your ship or station as needed. Simply add more if you need more storage capacity. Hope this helps!.

[XLjedi]

I don't mind the existing fuel mechanic.

Thinking it through a bit. If we could assign a storage container to a fuel tank just like we assign them to constructors, and switch fuel tank to ON so it draws from the container, then there would be no reason to ever install more than 1 fuel tank per vessel.

...and then people would just say, why do we even need fuel tanks? Just have the engines draw from storage. In which case there is no easy way to monitor the fuel level in storage. If tanks could auto-fuel, your single fuel tank would always show FULL until storage was empty. If the engines could just draw from storage you'd never know how much fuel is left in storage.

So the fuel tanks, exactly as they are now, do serve a valid purpose. Same is true for the O2 tanks. It's nice to have a little more variety and a few different systems to manage rather than a singular multi-purpose all-storage container.

I think if they did allow any sort of automation, it might come in the form of an "Auto-Loader" block/console capability. Where you just specify an input and output and let the thing run.

[Mr_Ayetch]

I tend to agree with XLJedi's analysis.I do wish I could assign tasks to those crew puppets they sell. So when fuels in my gazillion tanks hit a lower limit, minion puts another shovel of coal in the firebox

[The Big Brzezinski]

Plus cargo storage has a lot more room than fuel or oxygen storage. So either fuel and O2 would need to be rebalanced so they take up as many cargo blocks as fuel tanks to store the same volume, or fuel and oxygen capacity in general would just cease to be a thing entirely as ships go for weeks without refueling. I can already imagine the threads of people screaming how the game is broken because they loaded a billion fusion cells into their SV's fuel storage, and now it can't fly.