Fuel burn rate much higher after pull request 896 was merged.

[evertvorster]

Hi there!

Just testing current master, and I am noticing that fuel burn rate is quite high now in the beginning Llama. It takes almost half of the fuel in the ship just to reach Serenity from Atlantis. It's a bit too much.

Interestingly, when testing the pull request I did not notice this fuel burn issue.

This issue is further made worse by #741

In space fuel is converted into thrust. Once you are at your set speed, it does not take any more thrust to keep that speed.
When changing direction, thrust is again applied, and so that should use fuel.

SPEC, Shields, weapons, recharging capacitors and life support all depend on the reactor. Does that use the same fuel as the thrusters?

[royfalk]

Right now, engines burn fuel all the time. This is a limitation of the current implementation that we can revisit.
However, it is a lower priority, as we can play with efficiencies in the config file.

Unfortunately, I don't think I implemented it yet. This therefore requires a hard-coded change of the source code.
I'll change that and then you can figure out the right numbers. I just plugged something there for it to work.

[evertvorster]

OK, That will be a fun though experiment, figuring out how much fuel to use.
As you say, it is lower priority.
As it stands, it feels like it is burning fuel at about four times the rate that it used to. If we are going to figure this out later, then at the very least the hard coded value for fuel burn rate needs to be about a quarter of what it is now so that we can live with it while playing the game.

[royfalk]

I'll get to it this week. Just finishing something and that's next.