Do Space Ports need fuel cells?
Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2014 6:42 am
Or can they supply ships with fuel from their cargo bays / planetary storage?
What's your Strategy?
https://forums.matrixgames.com:443/
Enough energy collectors to cover static requirements, enough fuel cells for however much combat time you think you'll need. If you have, for example, a reactor that uses 3 fuel per thousand energy and your weapons drain 200 energy per second, you'll drain 3 fuel every 5 seconds to power the weapons while in combat and so a standard fuel cell with 300 fuel capacity is worth about 500 seconds of combat time at normal game speed. How many fuel cells is enough? Well, that depends on a lot of things - how often is your station in combat? How long do the engagements last? How much power do its weapons draw? How efficient is the reactor? How often does its fuel supply get renewed by freighters? The greater the reactor efficiency, the less often the station is in combat, the shorter the engagements are, the lower its weapon power requirements, the more often its fuel supply is renewed, the lower the adequate number of fuel cells becomes.So whats a good general rule for number of fuel cells and energy collectors recommended on bases?
ORIGINAL: Aeson
Enough energy collectors to cover static requirements, enough fuel cells for however much combat time you think you'll need. If you have, for example, a reactor that uses 3 fuel per thousand energy and your weapons drain 200 energy per second, you'll drain 3 fuel every 5 seconds to power the weapons while in combat and so a standard fuel cell with 300 fuel capacity is worth about 500 seconds of combat time at normal game speed. How many fuel cells is enough? Well, that depends on a lot of things - how often is your station in combat? How long do the engagements last? How much power do its weapons draw? How efficient is the reactor? How often does its fuel supply get renewed by freighters? The greater the reactor efficiency, the less often the station is in combat, the shorter the engagements are, the lower its weapon power requirements, the more often its fuel supply is renewed, the lower the adequate number of fuel cells becomes.So whats a good general rule for number of fuel cells and energy collectors recommended on bases?
Regarding the number of energy collectors required to cover static requirements:
Based on the chart in the A Guide to Energy thread, having energy collection equal to static requirements will fully cover a station's static energy requirements if it's built anywhere not more than about 90% of the system radius away from the system center in most systems. Doubling the amount of energy collection will extend this to about 95% of the system radius, tripling it will boost that to about 97%. If you want to, you can create designs specifically for the point in the system that you're going to build the station at, but I would personally not bother; it's much easier to manage a single design than the dozens that you might require if you try to optimize for where you build the station. Regardless, it's a decent rule of thumb that energy collection greater than or equal to the static energy requirement is good enough. You can buy yourself a little leeway on where within the system the station gets built by building in a bit of extra energy collection, or you can optimize designs for how far from the system center they get built to save a bit on resources, but in general a design with the static energy requirements equal to the energy collection is adequate.
I've given you a rule of thumb for energy collectors - energy collection >= static energy requirements, which covers stations built within about 90% of the system radius or within about the inner 81% of the system area. I've given you two other possible rules of thumb for that which guarantee your static requirements are met on somewhat larger fractions of the system - energy collection >= 2*(static energy requirements), which covers stations built within about 95% of the system radius or about the inner 90% of the system area, and energy collection >= 3*(static energy requirements), which covers stations built within about 97% of the system radius or ~94% of the system area. You don't necessarily even need to do any math for this, you just need to add energy collectors until the energy collection term in the energy statistics section of the design screen is greater than the static energy requirement term in the same section (using the second or third rule of thumb does require some math, but multiplication isn't that difficult, and you'll probably be just fine with ballpark figures anyways). This might translate to 5 energy collectors for a small station, or it might translate to well over 100 energy collectors for a huge station. Without knowing how you build your stations, I will not give you anything more specific than a rule of thumb, and the rules of thumb are more useful anyways, because if you change your station designs or your technology improves, the number that I would give changes, while the rules of thumb apply just as well to that size 10,000 colossus over your homeworld as to that size 100 mining station you use on the frontier.Ok to simplify what would be your standard recommended number of each?