Can you give us any more detail about fuel usage? Things such as how will ships refuel, will there be external fuel tanks, and how much will the hydrogen scoops really be able to refuel in a diffuse nebula?asked by Savior
TL;DRFuel mainly powers maneuvering jets and afterburners, not the power plant; they are thinking about multiple fuel types, hydrogen as a default always collectible, and drop tanks, aiming for some resource-management gameplay.
Okay, so there is fuel. Fuel mostly drives the maneuvering jets and the afterburners. It doesn't drive your power plant, because your power plant is usually something like a fusion reactor or antimatter drive. And those ones don't require fuel, but you do need fuel to essentially propel mass out to help you to move around. And we're thinking about having more than one fuel type. Hydrogen's probably the simple, the default one. You'll probably be able to collect some level of it no matter what, just so you can't fully run out of fuel, but you'll be heavily disadvantaged if you don't have a nice, good compressed set of fuel. You'll be able to have drop tanks, and we're going to have different kinds; some liquids are just generally denser, so you could store them versus something like hydrogen or whatever. So those would potentially be better for more efficient maneuvering or afterburner, but they would also be rarer, right? So you wouldn't necessarily always find them, so maybe there's just some areas that you could find this, or you would potentially buy it from a vendor on a space station or planetside. So hopefully there'll be a bit of a little metagame on resource management on your fuel, which I think also will add an extra interesting wrinkle to space flight, space exploration, space combat.