Nerf ion engine but make it possible to use it during time warp

[szputnyik]

If the ion engine would become less powerful AND consume less energy, similar to the ion thruster of the IRL Dawn mission to the asteroid belt, BUT time warp would be available during its acceleration, it would be a good choice for smaller probes.

The main problem with the ion engine is not its power, but the inability to accelerate time while using it. The real life Dawn probe uses its engine for months, but in a game, such long waiting times are unacceptable.

If the engine would have one quarter of its current thrust with a somewhat smaller energy consumption, but the possibility to time warp while using it would exist, I think it would be more popular.

[Nuke]

the problem with true ion engine is that it manuvers take days/weeks/months. which is totally unacceptable from a gameplay point of view. you can get a 4x physics warp, but this is still too slow to accurately depict ion engines in a tolerable way (hence the buff). id love an ion warp feature which would be a 10-20x warp with partial physics when using ion (and other low thrust) engines exclusively. the idea is that ion engines exert very small forces on a space craft which are incapable of breaking it. this allows you to get buy without doing any structural simulation. your ship would need to conform to some very strict rules about mass, power to weight ratio and a limit to the amount of force that may be exerted on any particular part while at full thrust.

[Brandano]

If the ion engine thrust and fuel consumption is assumed to be constant, it ought to be possible to calculate the "running on rail" path for it before entering time acceleration, though this increases the path prediction complexity a fair bit. It would also help a lot when planning an ion "burn", since you would be seeing the predicted path rather than the instantaneous projection.

[Captain Sierra]

In a word, no.

Real life does not make good game balance. While higher orbital physics warp is good for long burns, the LAST thing Squad needs to do is nerf an already underused engine.

[Brandano]

Currently warp is only good for long coasts, though. The biggest issue would be to get the users to understand how incredibly useful could be an engine that has negligible thrust but can be burning for days. But I did not consider electric power usage, and that adds a lot of complication to any path prediction.

[Anton P. Nym]

As I understand it 4x physics warp is about as much as SQUAD dares use... apparently physics calculations with bigger steps tend to shake craft apart even at low thrust levels. Unless there's a change there, we're "stuck" with the PB-ION's rather bizzare status as simultaniously grossly overpowered (wrt real life) and woefully underpowered (wrt undue demand on many players' time) which leaves it as a niche engine only.

-- Steve

[Brandano]

That's why I was suggesting to adapt the prediction mechanism to create new "rails" to run the throttled ship on. the problem is when the thrust suddenly stops, because there's no more fuel or power. In that case at the very least the simulation would have to fall back to realtime to recalculate the new situation. At least, the fuel consumption is a constant rate, but while power consumption is too constant, power replenishment is not. It does however seem that power generation from solar panels and the like is still calculated while the simulation is running in an accelerated state.

[Andrew Hansen]

As far as I understand the position you're in while on rails is calculated in "steps." There's a certain amount of steps per second calculated, and the higher the time warp, the less steps are taken. That's why it's possible to warp entirely through planets with high time warp values since the step sizes are so large.

How about if you're using an ion engine, you can start warp with the throttle on and the throttle will be locked until you return to 1x warp. For each step that is taken in time warp, a certain amount of velocity will be imparted into the orbital path. It shouldn't be that hard considering how solar panels and batteries currently function in timewarp. Or at least I don't think it would be too hard.