petroleum THIS IS BULL!

[geniusthemaster]

keeps saying i have no thrust distance. 3 fuel tanks and a petroleum engine should be more than enough.

[SharraShimada]

If you had taken a look at your second screenshot, you would have noticed the last column, "total oxidizer 0t". You need some kind of oxidizer to run either a petroleum- or a hydrogen engine. You may choose solid oxylite, or liquid oxygen as oxidizer. Steam engine is the only one, that dont need it, but its power is rather useless.

https://oni-assistant.com/tools/rocketcalculator may help you. It calculates the fuel/oxidizer needed for your current build. 

Your current setup will achieve 50k km with liquid oxygen (LOX) and only 20k km with oxylite. Thats because the cargo bays are so heavy. 

[geniusthemaster]

in that case its still bull, the thrusters dont need to be run the whole time, and petroleum is self ignitable with a single 1 KJ start of electricity. havnt these guys play tested space engineers? also when leaving atmosphere you can pulse the engines and reduce the thrust required by HALF.

[SharraShimada]

Okay, you´re one of those you didn´t recognized this is NOT a space simulation, but a simple game. It ist, as it is. You have 3 choices: Deal with it, move along, or use a mod. If something like this bothers you that much, i would recommend to move along. You will encounter much more, you wont like, because its not "real".

[geniusthemaster]

got any good methods on how to create liquid oxygen?

[natanstarke]

Liquid oxy can be made using a thermo regulator with hydrogen in a loop trying to reach very low temperatures then radiate this pipe into a fully isolated room them let in oxygen in that room and have a water pump in the bottom. This process can be really hard so expect some sensors to control the situation.

 

[Sasza22]

If you aleady did some space exploration and brought some fullerene back you can make super coolant which allows you to make liquid oxygen pretty easily. Super coolant doesn`t freeze an you can just loop it through an aquatuner until it reaches oxygen condensation temperature.

[Nightinggale]

20 hours ago, geniusthemaster said:

in that case its still bull, the thrusters dont need to be run the whole time, and petroleum is self ignitable with a single 1 KJ start of electricity. havnt these guys play tested space engineers? also when leaving atmosphere you can pulse the engines and reduce the thrust required by HALF.

I will repeat the thread topic "THIS IS BULL!".

I admit I haven't actually played space engineers. I'm limited to knowledge of real life rockets and what you are saying makes absolutely no sense.

The rocket engine is in theory simple. Fuel is mixed with oxygen, it burns, heats up and expands. This expansion delivers thrust and the rocket is moved forwards. It's very difficult to do controlled, but the principle is simple. Fuel generally isn't a problem. Just open a tank with fuel under pressure and you can get as much as you want.

Oxygen is a big problem with rockets. If you limit the thrust to match the available oxygen in the air, then you will get nowhere. Instead rockets are treated like they are always in a vacuum and they bring their own oxygen. This way they can spray 100% oxygen directly into the flame and burn way more fuel than possible in normal air.

Another issue with rockets is that the flame is hot. Very hot. In fact it's so hot that it will melt the metals in the rocket engine itself. Because of that active cooling is needed. This is solved with LOX. The path from the LOX tank to the burner is fairly long because it goes all the way around the flame in the rocket engine. This means LOX is used both as oxygen for the flame and as coolant for the engine.

 

Arguing that you can use a rocket without LOX is like arguing that you can drive a car without wheels. It might work in a cartoon or game, but it makes absolutely no sense if you try to take it to real life physics.

 

Oh and the thing about pulse engines is an issue as well. Engines are the most fuel efficient when they deliver a constant thrust. At least you got this one partially right because pulse engines in space is a concept. However you need engines designed to be optimized for pulses and the engines in ONI are all designed for lots of thrust for takeoff, hence not pulse engines. Besides does it really matter for the game? I mean we are talking about fuel efficiency when the rocket is off the map. Even if we say the rockets do something to cut fuel consumption in half, how do we know they aren't actually doing that? I mean they are off the map and we can't see what they are doing in deep space. You can think of them as pulsing if you like because we can't actually tell for certain if they are pulsing or not. They can even turn off the engine and drift for multiple cycles for all we know.

[Vuelhering]

On 5/26/2019 at 7:10 PM, Nightinggale said:

I admit I haven't actually played space engineers.

I'm pretty sure he's joking about that. In SE, they run on hydrogen and don't require an oxidizer.

As a long-time player of space engineers, he's going to meet with a lot more disappointments since this isn't supposed to model things well.