RE: Fuel Use at half throttle.

[xenoscepter (OP)]

If I have a ship with a max speed of say, oh, 1,000 km/s and I manually set the ship's sped to 500 km/s in the ships tab; does that increase my fuel economy?

[Cavgunner]

No.  Think of it this way:  every liter of fuel that is expended can propel a ship a certain distance.  Reducing that intake will make your movement slower, and while you will *technically* use less fuel in that time tick since you aren't moving as far as you could, it doesn't actually improve efficiency per unit of distance travelled.  When you reach your destination, you will have used the same amount of fuel; it just will take you that much longer to arrive.

If you wish to have efficient engines, then you must design them that way from the outset.

[xenoscepter (OP)]

That's... somewhat counter-intuitive. Thanks for the prompt reply though. 

[Michael Sandy]

There is a glitch, where if a ship's fuel use goes below 1 liter per sub phase tick, it may not consume ANY fuel at all.  At least, that is what I THINK is the reason my fuel efficient fighter scout ships stayed at 100% fuel after travelling billions of km.

[Cavgunner]

That's... somewhat counter-intuitive. Thanks for the prompt reply though. 

Yes well, if we were talking about cars or airbreathing jets that would be true.  But that's Trans-Newtonian theory for you. 

[Hazard]

It works perfectly fine if you discard the notions of inertia and friction and accept that energy is expended to travel a certain distance due to whatever reason. Higher efficiency engines simply use less energy to travel that same distance.

It's transnewtonian physics that doesn't play well with newtonian physics.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Although it would be logical for military ships to have two engines. One for cruising speeds and one for fast combat manoeuvres that you add when you need. The combat engine would likely be a fuel guzzling thing that burn fuel like crazy but might double the max speed of the ship.

I would like for something like that to be possible in the game... but I don't think we will see something like that anytime soon though.