I personally have never used the stuff because of the miss match with component's. 24th century should be able to use Flexfuel in all components.
I get that it's far more efficient in terms of total promethium consumption. But unless i'm missing something, Promethium is not hard to find, rare or whatever. And if you mine it all out, the game gives you more, in a convenient form. Not sure what the incentive to use it is.
1: Ya get more efficient Fuel Bang for Buck from your Promethium & can use it for HVs, Fuel Efficient SVs, & small Bases, & 2: You'll seriously NEVER need the sheer raw amount of O2 Tanks a full O2 Generator woulda made anyway. The amount ya get from a H2/O2 Generator is plenty enough with some Fuel Bang for Buck a nice bonus.
Uh, still misses the point. What is the point 'saving' on promethium, when there is no shortage of it? And when the replacement is worse? Even as a side product of O2 generation, it's not any use.
As it stands, your point is valid; personally, I like to conserve resources as much as possible, and so using Hydrogen Fuel Packs works for me from an RP perspective. Certainly, if the goal was to encourage use of hydrogen, large amounts of Promethium should be difficult to access . . . Either this (perhaps letting it be produced initially via a solar-powered extractor from the escape pod), or make hydrogen a proper T2 energy source, with higher energy content per pack (and ideally, per mass, once mass of items in inventory finally matters); fusion has a somewhat higher energy density than fission and is more complicated to get working, so as a bonus, this would be consistent with currently known physics .
CVs guzzle Large Promethium Fuel Packs like hell. If ya can run your SVs on Hydrogen Fuel, ya can save that Promethium Fuel for your CVs. Trust me, you'll need it, unless ya wanna Mine Promethium for 24 Hours for every 1 Hour of CV Run Time ya desire cause ya are trying to run everything else on Promethium too. (Maybe a tad exaggerated for the purpose of making my point.) Also, if ya make a Base but it's not REAL big, running it on Promethium too can be outright overkill & exacerbate how much Promethium Mining ya need to do as well.
Im not sure if it has changed recently but last I checked H2 was spent way to fast to be a viable fuel source.
It is. The fuel system in-game is a train-wreck. What should happen is that promethium should be removed from starter planets completely. All of the tool charges should be condensed into one tool charge type and require hydrogen instead of promethium. Hydrogen cells should have their runtime increased to match current regular promethium packs. Regular promethium packs should have their total fuel time doubled-ish and larges could use a little buff too. This would ensure that hydrogen is not only the early game fuel source for vehicles but also a long-term needed commodity for tool charges. I'm sure another use or two for hydrogen could be found. Tada, now **** makes sense and hydrogen has short and late game reasons to exist.
Maybe i'm missing something, but i can go out with a stack of mining charges, and come back with a couple of thousand promethium in 30mins of determined mining. That refines down to many more thousand pellets which make (from memory) something like 500 large packs. Fill a couple of large tanks with those, and your base will never need refuelling. My modified Hakon Cv uses next to no fuel. Even with extra engines and all combat steel, it mainly processes ore and components. it only really moves when i jump to another star system. Now, my base has 10 medium (Large T1) tanks full of hydrogen. Every now and then i have to go get more green bottles from my 10 H2O2 gens, make more packs, and refill. Because each entire full tank, is worth about 1 large Promethium Pack. Too fiddly. Next time it runs out, i'm just gonna fill it with large P packs, and never bother again.
Only for gas guzzling SVs, & CVs, & only if ya opt for Designs with very low numbers of Fuel Tanks. I personally don't find it hard to put a generous number of Fuel Tanks in my Creations, & Bases can outright hold all the Fuel Tanks they want considering they don't Thrust around & thus couldn't care less how heavy they are. I find it more of a problem trying to find a use for all that Crafted O2 that comes with the Hydrogen, even for CV Oxygen Supply usage. Anyone ever find yourself wishing ya could throw a O2 Tank at a Monster then shoot that Tank to explode it & the Monster with it, Action Movie style? (Bonus Points if ya blow the Monster off a high Cliff.) Hydrogen powered T2 Chainsaw could be fun! Ahh, I forgot to think about many still playing SP. I play MP, where I have CV uses I build for, like SV & HV Transport, & some amount of Combat. Also I love HVs & do use'em & always Hydrogen Fuel'em cause they're so fuel efficient ya can't even tell you're powering them with Hydrogen instead of Promethium when runnin them, plus it's a use for the Hydrogen I get as I make Oxygen & I still think I get more use from the Hydrogen then from the Oxygen... I keep having to give Oxygen away to others I get so much more then I need, no way in hell i'd ever wanna use a Oxygen Generator. With that said, to each their own. That's part of the beauty of these kinds of games, many ways to play.
Getting resources: I like the progress in getting new/rarer resources. First Akua, then Asteroids and the Moon and at the end other planets. But mining them with my handdrill drives me crazy. Storing resources: There are tons of fuel/oxygen in my base and only a small amount fits in the Fuel/Oxygen-Tank. The rest is in my CargoBox. So sometimes the fuel tank runs out and the base goes down, but there is enough fuel in the CargoBox, thats annoying. A ConveyorSystem would be really nice.
As far as I see it Hydrogen is really only useful if you can't be bothered to go and mine Promethium. You chuck your fuel into the H2O2 generators, go away and build a ship/have a cup of tea/watch space youtube, then come back and you've usually got a decent supply of Hydrogen. Admittedly it's usually fairly easy to mine a whole bunch of Promethium, process it and know that you're not filling up fuel tanks every five seconds. I do use Hydrogen in some of my SV's and my HV as they're not too fuel hungry, but my CV eats an entire T3 fuel tanks worth in seconds! I would agree to bumping Hydrogen packs up to a normal Prommy packs worth of fuel and making Promethium a bit harder to find to justify the extra fuel power.
Maybe larger H2 packs like we have with prommy, that would save people having to fill up the fuel tanks so much. I do like the idea of a renewable energy source and the fact it's got less "oomph" behind it as it balances it out, but at the moment the fuel value seems a little low for it to be decent fuel source. As I say, I run a few of my ships on H2 and it is fine, but I do find myself in the P menu a lot filling up the fuel tanks after I've flown somewhere.
& if ya wanna actually really play this game & enjoy a huge mammoth CV over 200 Blocks long, Arceus help you & your efforts at trying to keep THAT fueled... though the new Fuel Tanks DID help the Issue some. I STILL wonder if it'd be more viable to return Warp Drives to Power Usage & make Pentaxid a Super Fuel exclusive to CVs where each Pentaxid would = 5,000 Fuel, then combo that with how many Pentaxids a Warp Fuel Tank (Could be renamed "Pentaxid Fuel Tank" easily.) can hold, & a CV could hold some normal Fuel Tanks for extra power on top of that or perhaps as 'Emergency Gas', THEN maybe CVs could have a not idiotic amount of Fuel Capacity. In the current state of things a CV can run out of Fuel mid-battle then become a helpless sitting duck.
My CV isn't small, it's quite a bulky thing overloaded with turrets and I may have made the mistake of loading it with extra thrusters for use on planets. It's got 8 T2 large fuel tanks and it will demolish those in about 30 minutes planetside! It's better in space, naturally, but still quite hungry. I reckon a CV exclusive fuel would be quite cool, the Pentaxid could certainly work as it's able to power our warp drives, but it is far easier to go to a moon/ocean and grab a load of crystals so it would make gathering fuel maybe a bit too easy. Hopefully the devs will be able to work something out.
Number of deposits on planets are good. The shape of them are bad. Would be way cooler if they were more realistic with ore vein shapes. This could create cool cave patterns as people dig out ore. Way to easy to find ore right now in my opinion. Maybe make an admin setting that adjusts how far you have to be to identify the ore? Would prefer an admin setting to randomly generate new deposits on planets (slowly of course) More resource options in space. So far all I've seen is Sathium. Why not iron and Cobalt, ect.... Make asteroids more customizable. Give us the ability to make resource rich planetoids perhaps? These would be very large rocks with ore in them.
I met problems with ore harvesting in hard environments with exhausted ore deposits: 1)when you find a meteorite and fly away from it, map don't remember it, I think map should meteorite on first time seen, and remove it when meteorite is mined personally, or when you fly nearby again and find nothing there (somebody else mined it); 2)overall meteorite mining procedure is quite boring, you just stand in one place, watch one point on that boulder, and spend 10-15 minutes like that... (mining entirely for CV building purposes). Automated ore harvesters are a good thing, but they're useles in a planet with no natural ore deposits. Maybe they should be able to collect ore from meteorites, or add a high-level HV drill for personal use (or automining, maybe some kind of mining turret). This will add more use to hovers by advanced players/factions.
My experience with mining can be described in three words: Mining. Is. Tedium. It's exhausting mining enough ore to build a respectable capital ship - assuming it will measure no more than roughly 30x10x13 in size, and uses only regular steel. The main issue is that before, we already had to do a lot of mining to build capital ships. And then the steel blocks become five times more expensive. Not only that, but it feels like with some key materials (mostly iron) we do not get as much ore per volume mined as we used to. This goes double or triple for the asteroids. As a result, it feels like we're spending more time mining than building, and we've always spent much more time building than fighting or exploring... My recommendation to alleviate this boring, tedious situation is to develop alternative late/end game means to mine faster. And I don't mean auto-miners which cost power coils that take hours to generate a mere stack of ores. I mean something like a vehicle-mounted mining laser that works two to three times faster than the T2 drill and also picks up ores automatically; or being able to send four or five mining drones to go pick a mining spot clean. At a cost, of course, but at least make it possible when it comes time to build your magnificent CV.
