Early game: Easy way to increase hyper speed by 50%- add an extra reactor! Adding an extra reactor to most ship designs in the very beginning of the game can give you a huge advantage; this will give your ships enough power to fully utilize the starting (and upgraded) hyperdrives. Your ships will be spending tons of time warping, might as well increase their effectiveness by (at least) 50%! Obviously, you may not want to add this to every ship; I definitely do this with private sector ships (goods/people moving faster at "no cost" to me? Yes please!)
I have found this to be extremely useful with colony ships; simply add an extra reactor to enable your colony ships to have DOUBLE the hyper speed compared to the basic model. (nearly double.
)Base CLN-1:
Cost: 6140
Maintenence: 2033
Size: 482
Hyperspeed: 6410
Cruise: 8
"Upgraded" CLN-1:
Cost: 6313 (+173)
Maintenance Cost: 2102 (+69)
Size: 504 (+22)
Hyperspeed: 12500
Cruise: 7 (-1)
This difference becomes even more significant once you do the very first upgrade to your hyperdrives. Other than the very minimal cost increase, the only downfall is the -1 cruise speed. True, this will slow your ship down out of hyper, but the difference is more than made up by the faster hyper speed.
Try it out and let me know what you think!
