Ship Selection: Water-Fuel Efficiency & Plan Availabiility

[tenbsmith]

Answers to these questions would help me buy my next ship:

1) Is the Water-Fuel efficiency of a given ship design based solely on ship stats? Ignoring the effect of captain/officer stats or upgrades, will two ships with the same states always have the same Water-Fuel burn rates?

2) Do New Ship Plans persist at Starports if you fly around and come back later?

[xdesperado]

W-F efficiency is figured with the ships base stats.
Upgrades, Officers and your Captains stats will all have an impact on it.

Depending on the game difficulty your playing on , you may need very high Pilot and Intimidate skills to keep the less efficient ships from being total W-F hogs.

How often a starport updates its available ships is variable. Sometimes you can leave and return weeks or even months later and the same ships will still be there. Other times you can exit and immediately land again and there will be a fresh list.

If there is a ship you really want but your worried your stats won't support it, you can buy it outright and leave it in the drydock until your ready.

If it's a question of money you'll just have to take your chances or hope it shows up again fairly soon.

[ncaoa]

High sails/hull can help with WF. I think high engines increases consumption.

[slayernz]

From some dusty ship user manual ...

Fuel Consumption
Water-Fuel is consumed until the supplies are exhausted. Then Luxury Rations are consumed until exhausted.

Having Luxury Rations on board increases Crew morale loss resistant ("at least we have some supplies in case things get tough.")

Once Water-Fuel is exhausted the Crew must collect ice and extract water-fuel from the reactor core cooling tanks. Both of these cause accidents, but as long as the Captain has Luxury Rations on hand, the Crew members won't get angry.

No Luxury Rations AND no Water-Fuel? The Crew is now on starvation rations and collecting ice from the ship's hull just to power the reactors and keep the interior air supply from freezing. The ship is in partial hibernation to save power and accidents are common, fatal and devastating to Crew morale.
Reducing water-fuel consumption

The water-fuel calculator is concerned about a number of things:

• Is the ship fully staffed (100% Crew)
• How many crew members?
• How large is the ship's hull?
• Does the Ship Have 20+ Solar Sail?
• Does the Ship Have 30+ Solar Sail?
• Is the Ship's Solar Sail Full Repaired?
• Does the Ship Have 20+ Reactor Engine?
• Does the Ship Have 30+ Reactor Engine?
• How high is the Captain's Pilot?
• How high is the Captain's Intimidation?
• What is the current difficulty?

The scaling equation that's used has rapid fall-off towards the edges, so there are a number of ways to push the results out to Infinity (the goal of most bounty hunters, certainly) for Green and even Red. A single solar sail damage can make a big difference. Three missing sails can be a serious problem unless the Captain's skills are up to it. Cory's tip guide for getting to best fuel range:

• Pilot & Intimidate = 1/2 of Hull
• Nano-Coat Solar Upgrade to 25 Solar Sail
• Always Repair Sails first
• Next Repair Engines
• Finally, Repair Hull
• Keep a Full Crew when possible (100%)
• Running out of water-fuel is only an issue without Luxury Rations
• Negotiation can help Luxury Rations last longer

Fuel consumption and current range can be viewed on the Cargo page of the status screen.

Note, every +1 Pilot skill you have reduces fuel consumption by 0.01. In Red Zones, Intimidate helps with fuel consumption, but I haven't done much testing in this area.

[tenbsmith]

Thanx!

[Cory Trese]

The calculated efficiency in the dock take your Captain into account -- it is the expected character specific fuel economy.

Ships for sale persist, yes.