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"Ion Thruster" it's too weak!


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I think that the "Ion Thruster" is to weak, and that they should add stronger "Ion Thrusters", by making them stronger; by making bigger ones. Please comment/reply to say if this is a good or bad idea.

Edited by sumghai
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Yeah, the ion engine is vastly more powerful than real-world counterparts. With careful engineering, I've built a craft capable of reaching Vall orbit purely with 1 ion engine with a TWR of greater than 1. I'm not saying it needs to be reduced, but by no means should it be increased further! :P

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Yeah, the ion engine is vastly more powerful than real-world counterparts. With careful engineering, I've built a craft capable of reaching Vall orbit purely with 1 ion engine with a TWR of greater than 1. I'm not saying it needs to be reduced, but by no means should it be increased further! :P

You did what now? Screenshots?

Anyways, yeah, it already is an overpowered engine. Stronger ions fall into the realm of mods and custom configs.

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The ion engine is very specialized, something you should pick for small unmanned probes.

You could put 20 of them on a craft and move something big, but that's not what it was designed for.

It's very useful for career game contracts that ask you to do temperature scans from different orbits and altitudes.

The same ship can be reused for those over and over, as the contracts pop up.

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wasnt the old thrust .5? now its 4? its already been buffed to the limit of reasonable gameplay, in my opinion.

I've not used it in forever, so excuse me if I got this wrong

EDIT: oh it was 2, thanks basic.syntax

Edited by r4pt0r
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wasnt the old thrust .5? now its 4? its already been buffed to the limit of reasonable gameplay, in my opinion.

I've not used it in forever, so excuse me if I got this wrong

Was .5, increased to 2 in v23.5. And it's still at 2.

v1.0 brought us a new large xenon gas tank, so larger multi-engine craft are easier to work with.

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Yeah, the ion engine is vastly more powerful than real-world counterparts. With careful engineering, I've built a craft capable of reaching Vall orbit purely with 1 ion engine with a TWR of greater than 1. I'm not saying it needs to be reduced, but by no means should it be increased further! :P

That's not possible unless you modded the cfg file. The ion engine doesn't even have enough thrust to lift its own wait, let alone have a TWR of more than 1

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More thrust would make it crowd out the other vacuum engines, at the current thrust levels landers for lower gravity worlds can be built with them (which is grossly inaccurate but I understand the concession to better gameplay). Better to deal with the long burns as a price for all that efficiency.

Bigger ones wouldn't be a bad idea though, a 1.25m version that is equivalent to 3 or 4 0.625m ones in mass and thrust would help with part counts on bigger ion craft.

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That's not possible unless you modded the cfg file. The ion engine doesn't even have enough thrust to lift its own wait, let alone have a TWR of more than 1

Vall just has 0.2g ASL, an ion engine powered craft can take off from there on its own I think

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Bigger ones wouldn't be a bad idea though, a 1.25m version that is equivalent to 3 or 4 0.625m ones in mass and thrust would help with part counts on bigger ion craft.

Actually, larger versions of all systems would be incredibly helpful in reducing part count; the larger xenon tanks may appear more than sufficient for most craft, but they store only 0.52 tons of fuel, which leads to massive part counts on the high-tonnage vessels (such as those in the Battle Club) that utilize ion engines for range. In a similar vein, a larger engine would also be immensely useful in reducing the ~150-part support systems necessary to get even a practical TWR with such systems...

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This is a thread I created about fixing the problem by allowing a simplified form of thrust-under-timewarp in the specific case of balanced ion engines. Since they are neither powerful enough to produce significant strain on the structure of a spacecraft nor fuel-hungry enough for changes in mass during a burn to be substantial, you can cut quite a few corners on the simulation while still getting good results.
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That's not possible unless you modded the cfg file. The ion engine doesn't even have enough thrust to lift its own wait, let alone have a TWR of more than 1

Pretty sure they mean TWR greater than 1 with Vall's Gravity...

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Yeah, the ion engine is vastly more powerful than real-world counterparts. With careful engineering, I've built a craft capable of reaching Vall orbit purely with 1 ion engine with a TWR of greater than 1. I'm not saying it needs to be reduced, but by no means should it be increased further! :P

This is 100% impossible. An Ion engine on kerin in .90 BEFORE the thrust changes with ISP fix cannot lift off.

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This is 100% impossible. An Ion engine on kerin in .90 BEFORE the thrust changes with ISP fix cannot lift off.

Did you even read the other posts ?

He was very probably reffering to the TWR in Val's gravity, about 5 times less

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This is 100% impossible. An Ion engine on kerin in .90 BEFORE the thrust changes with ISP fix cannot lift off.
That's not possible unless you modded the cfg file. The ion engine doesn't even have enough thrust to lift its own wait, let alone have a TWR of more than 1

Haha, yeah, I meant a TWR greater than 1 on Vall! Sorry for the confusion! I don't have any screenshots of my lander but many other people have done it. Check out this album on imgur which was the inspiration for it: http://imgur.com/a/fPL77#106 (from image number 106 onwards)

Edited by hazard-ish
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