Why fusion power?

[Joman]

The first time, I'm so far in the game with the DLC. I'm on Aquilo and working on producing Quantum Chips there.

Now I asked myself, what I need fusion power for. Until now, I never had unsolvable electricity problems.

[god bless you]

The place where solar power is too weak.
& Heating tower is not available. (on spaceship)
& space really limited or don't like buffer massive steams (nuclear power)

[Nonotorious]

You don;t need steam tanks to regulate nuclear but you do need water to keep it going, which there is the possibility of it running out. Fusion doesn't leave any waste behind and the coolant is recycled fully.

[Fletch]

Also a fusion generator creates 10x the electricity in the same space as nuclear. OP power production.

[Fel]

There are two main reasons.

The first would be when scaling up, especially with productivity modules ad beacons with speed modules, this makes the energy costs go up sharply.
What we used to need either a very large solar array or a fairly long set of nuclear generators can be solved by just a much smaller amount of fusion generators.
I am talking about factories that require several (or several tens of) GW of power.

The second would be to feed some high-cost processes.
A good example would be railgun turrets on a platform, those things consume 10MW per turret (before researching shooting speed).
A platform set for going towards the shattered planet tends to require several hundreds of MW between the turrets and the production facilities.
Fusion is the only solution to generate a lot of power with a small amount of space required.

[16-0]

The rocket capacity and energy of the fuel is much higher than nuclear so resupplying platforms ties up silos less, and its natural site of production is Aquilo so it makes sense for the larger, non-solar powered ships you'd build in the end game that work further out from Nauvis. It also takes up less space for more power.

That said, if you're insistent, you could do without it pretty easily (like a lot of the high tech things in the game, honestly).

[Joman]

For now, I have nuclear powered space ships and they are able to generate much more energy than needed. Maybe I underestimated the engergy consumption of railsguns for the next ship design...
Do railguns need a constant supply, or do they only consume engergy, when they are shooting?

[Fel]

They only need power when shooting, 20MJ per shot specifically and it shoots at 0.5 shot per second initially (that can increase by 0.36 at most with the shooting speed technology for railguns).
When you travel to places that require railguns, they tend to be shooting non-stop unless you are going very slowly.

Of course a nuclear reactor can give you quite a bit of power, especially if you have one of a high quality, but it requires a constant influx of water and quite a bit of space when you start to need more than 1 reactor.

[Joman]

Nice.
I hoped, that fusion power is needed somewhere and not just some kind of endgame toy.
Then, my next space ship will have a fusion reactor.

[End of history]

Fusion power is incredible and compact. I was a bit worried after vanilla where large solar farms seemed to be the meta for UPS reasons. Now, granted, my base is not the size of worrying about UPS yet but I do see a need for all types of power and Ireally really appreciate that.

.... with all that said.... my mega base in vanilla did 2,7k SPM. My cobbled together base (well Nauvis is quite descent) does 2.2k but that's because I have been doing round trips to deep space and gotten my science productivity up quite a bit.