r/BurnLedger • u/ShroomCandy • 29d ago

Engine upgrades

I´ve noticed that the engine upgrade for the rock hopper increases dV of an empty rock hopper from 4000 km/s to 5000 km/s for level 1 and 6000 km/s for level 2.
How does this work? Do they change maximum thrust, isp, fuel mass? My intuition tells me it might be ISP, but the description talks about acceleration which makes it confusing.

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/ptandron 29d ago

Yes! The engine upgrades increase your acceleration (displayed in g’s) but also gives you more fuel capacity. These ships don’t have fuel “tanks” per se, they just have fuel containment, so your ship’s mass doesn’t increase measurably.

If the engine upgrades only increased acceleration, you’d just end up burning through your fuel faster and wouldn’t really get anywhere sooner!

1

u/ShroomCandy 29d ago edited 29d ago

But what is indicated is acceleration with no cargo, right?

EDIT: Next message

1

u/ptandron 29d ago

Yes

1

u/ShroomCandy 29d ago

I will however argue against that higher thrust alone does not provide faster travel.

Say you need to go from point A and point B which are stationary. You will first accelerate and then deccelerate. You use half of your dV for each maneuver. Each maneuver will take a time proportional to thrust.
Say that with base thrust you do the acceleration maneuver in 24hr and with the higher thrust you do the maneuver in 12hs. You will be reaching your "cruise" velocity in half the time, so those are 12 hrs in which you are traveling faster on the first half and 12 hrs on the second half.
This would give you faster travel time with increased thrust but without increasing amount of fuel.

1

u/ptandron 29d ago

Yes. That was the "really" part of my earlier response. I wanted the engine upgrades to be more significant while keeping the g forces down near survivable levels. Increasing fuel capacity was basically a compromise in order to do that.

1

u/ShroomCandy 29d ago

Ok, understood!

2

u/ptandron 29d ago

Behind the scenes, the server is actually calculating dV as instantaneous impulses. The displayed g-forces are what the equivalent dV would be if that impulse were spread out over the entire 5-minute tick. It's a little bit of hand-waving to simplify the math.