Thrusters really require 120 fuel and oxydizer per second?

[Micah]

I'm working on building my first travelling platform and the thrusters say they consume 120/s of fuel and oxydizer. One chemical plant produces 37.5 fuel/oxydizer per second without modules, so in order to fuel thrusters non-stop do I really need 8 chemical plants (4 of each type) plus two more for water production, plus a huge amount of asteroid collection and processing to fuel it all. And this is all for a single thruster.

I am assuming I can use liquid storage tanks to save up some fuel first, but I can't find any information on how many seconds of travel there is between the planets, so I'm not sure how to properly plan for any of this.

I glanced at some you tube videos (trying not to spoil too much) and they have very simple setups compared to what seems required. I'm guessing this is just an issue of the game not doing a good job of explaining what is actually necessary, or me not understanding something.

[Elafi]

the speed depends on how many thrusters you have and how heavy your platform is. Try to go to another planet for a few seconds and look at the speed o7

[Hurkyl]

Travel time depends on how fast you're going; it's mostly distance based system, although there is a small amount of drift towards either endpoint, so if you're not thrusting you're still going someplace.

That said, 120/s is just the thruster's peak performance, they consume less to produce less thrust when partially full.

[Micah]

Ah, so if I only supply 37.5 fuel/oxydizer per second and I have a single thruster, it will perform at 31.25% capacity?

[Rivet]

Look at it in the factoriopedia, it shows a graph with thruster performance curves.

[Sixfold]

Build tanks and pile up fuel while it sits above a station until you feel like building a ship big enough for multiple chem plants.