Any point to Hydrogen rockets?

[Tiru]

I've completed two playthroughs on Spaced Out! since the radiation system was introduced and hydrogen rockets reintroduced and I haven't been able to find a single use case for hydrogen rockets so I'm looking to see what others are doing. What I like about ONI is there are lots of ways to accomplish a task and there are pros and cons to consider but I'm having difficulty even thinking of a single thing where a Hydrogen rocket is the best option.

I'm balancing the options between three long-haul options: petroleum rockets, radengine, and hydrogen. A petroleum rocket with two tanks will give 12 tiles of range while hydrogen gives  up to14 I believe. Radbolt engine has 24 tiles. The max height limit of petroleum/h2 over rad is erased by the fuel tanks. I've never had a planet more than 6 tiles away in either my spaced-out style start or big asteroid start, so in all cases the petroleum rocket could make a round trip. If there end up being plants beyond that which require routine travel it would be better to use the radbolt engine (with 24 tiles of range) or do petroleum resupply at the destination. In one playthrough I used exclusively radbolt engines while in another I would send a rocket with 1 large liquid cargo (27 tons) of petroleum to the destination to offload and enable resupply of future petroleum rockets. With the ability to carry oxylite in the spacefarer module you can reload on site easily enough and petroleum is much, much easier to work with than liquid hydrogen since you can use standard pipes.

All my outpost planets are fully automated and duplicant free. They just collect metal from the volcanos and can send it back to base using interplanetary launchers powered by solar radiation or leave a conveyor chute by the rocket pad to be picked up every 500 cycles or so where a single radbolt rocket refill can get to every planet and back on one tank of fuel collecting metals.

In my 'spaced out start' playthrough I didn't have quite enough water to do a lox/hydrogen setup without importing from the water planet but even then radbolt engines were better for me. The text says they are faster than hydrogen but the limitation is rocket height but since they don't need fuel and oxidizer tanks, it's about the same. I had two radbolt rockets each with 2 large liquid cargo tanks bringing 52 tons of water per trip - and the only thing I needed that much water for was producing the lox/hydrogen I didn't use.

In both of these playthroughs I created large lox/h2 setups like I would in the base game, thinking I might want them for something and it would take a few hundred cycles to build up. There is a decent performance penalty from all the extra electrolyzers, the many aquatuners to condense everything, extra power infrastructure to support it, a petroleum boiler to provide fuel for power, etc. I probably ended up doubling the plumbing and ventilation of my entire base compared to just using an oil refinery to get the small amount of petroleum for plastic and rockets for initial planet setup then sticking with radbolt engines for everything else.

In the base game the hydrogen rockets were required to get to the most distant planets and even just doing silly things like sending a rocket to each planet  constantly was something to do that required a continuous supply of fuel but in the DLC there is just nowhere to go. Once the outposts are setup you don't need to actually go there to have resources shipped back, or if you do want to go there a H2 rocket is the worst option. 

If the capacity of liquid fuel tanks went up 10x and they had 35 tiles of range with 1 tank that would be a different story. Since insulation is essentially impossible to get now and H2 pipes have to be limited to 1 kg/sec in that case I would probably prefer to have a few hydrogen rockets on the launch pad since (like my multiple rad rockets) I'm fine letting them slowly fill up over time and the performance hit from all the hydrogen production isn't as bad as radbolts flying through the air. Without actually having much mroe range though, as it stands now, petroleum or radbolt propulsion is just so much better in every way that I can tell. 

Are there use cases I'm missing? What have you found to be the use cases where H2 rockets were the best choice? 

 

 

[zach123b]

the largest use case for me is speed and moving power.  but man they take a while to setup

for me, i'd use it if i needed water from the water planet back at my home planet or where ever i need water.  but that was before the cargo tanks got upgraded size... for 27000kg tank sizes.  so a trip every 30 cycles with hydrogen or a trip every 10 cycles with a radbolt engine... i'd probably choose radbolt engine still just because they're easier to setup.  i would use the hydrogen rocket for a steam chimney if i needed water though

so yeah, i can't think of a good use case for the hydrogen rocket either really.  the radbolt engine is just easier,  maybe if the radbolt engine got a nerf to have lower range i'd use the hydrogen rocket instead

[MiniDeathStar]

I felt the same, so I modded my hydrogen rockets to consume 75kg fuel/tile, giving them a range of 12 with 1 fuel tank. I also made them sliiightly faster. Can upload to Steam if people want it.

[KonfigSys]

Currently there is no must for hydrogen or even petrol rockets.

I use a steam rocket to land trailblazer on all asteroids. It takes ages to reach destination but it is only one trip required just to colonize an asteroid (I use the interplanetary launchers to send refined metal prior to a colonization trip). When I build the rocket platforms, I use CO2 engines to shuffle between. It is fast enough as taxi and requires minimum setup and does not produce pollution or heat. I used in-habitat module storage bins to haul a lot of cargo. 

Now with 10 times storage update it may make sense to upgrade the rocket park with petrol or even hydrogen rocket. It can haul a lot at once and no cheats with in cabin storage bins. I did not like radbolt engine because of pollution it creates (r/a waste). I do not know if it is changed since I tried it.

I hope Klei in future adds more asteroids and then if they are far away, the hydrogen engine will be again the must. So you are right, radbolt engine will beat it again.

Another option will be to add vanilla style travel to the DLC. So you can send rockets to far away destinations that are not on a map but a separate (vanilla style) option. Like intergalactic travel (deep space exploration) which brings resources and artifacts. This can be done in parallel to DLC space travel. Also Klei may disallow usage of radbolt rockets for such deep space exploration. If they do so, the vanilla game will be completely phased out by the DLC. I will really like this way.

[BallisticBuddha]

On 5/9/2021 at 3:11 AM, MiniDeathStar said:

I felt the same, so I modded my hydrogen rockets to consume 75kg fuel/tile, giving them a range of 12 with 1 fuel tank. I also made them sliiightly faster. Can upload to Steam if people want it.

I would be interested if you wouldn't mind going through that trouble. I finally got super coolant in my current game, and was excited to finally condense o2 and h2, only to finally build this rocket to be severely underwhelmed by its speed, as promised by the in-game description.

 

Currently, the radbolt engine is just straight up the superior engine, not a tradeoff kind of deal as it feels it should be from the in-game descriptions and the fact that it's not the the final researched engine. 

 

I'm okay with it having the longest range and only a moderate height limit, but the fact that you don't need extra modules to fuel the thing means you don't have to really even sacrifice much in rocket height either. Same goes for speed, as two fuel tanks and an oxidizer tank add 15 burden. 

 

My mid-game radbolt rocket that got me to late game is still just running laps around my shiny new late game H2 rocket. Both currently have the exact same effective configuration.

The only  "optional" modules beyond the engines and fuel modules are:

• 1 battery
• 1 large liquid cargo tank
• 1 spacefarer
• 1 basic nosecone.

Yet the H2 rocket can only make it 18 tiles to the radbolt's 24. Additionally the H2 rocket crawls at a paltry 0.6 tiles per cycle, while the nuclear rocket zips around at 1.5 tiles per cycle. The only advantage here is that I could add another large cargo tank/bay and apparently keep the same 0.6 tiles / cycle speed. Maybe it is a bit slower but the game only shows it to one decimal point so I can't tell.

 

In this configuration the H2 seems to add zero speed benefit over the petroleum engine as I just tried swapping it over and it gets the exact same 0.6 per cycle as a petroleum rocket with the rest of the rocket unchanged. The only difference is when I add that second large cargo module it drops to only 0.5 per cycle. Not enough to care about or make any significant changes to rocket trips.

 

At least with your mod it can match the range of the nuclear rocket, but the speed here is what really makes it feel like a joke in comparison. If I don't care about speed but want to ship a lot of cargo I might as well go with a petroleum rocket and skip out on the miniscule speed bump at the cost of dealing with the finicky nature of liquid hydrogen and investing all that time researching it.

 

I do think that either the radbolt engine needs a nerf or the hydrogen engine needs hydrogen engine needs a buff, or probably even both. I feel like to make the radbolt engine feel like you're really trading off for something with the alternates it might need an extra necessary 5 height 5 burden reactor module or something like that.

 

[Electroely]

1 hour ago, BallisticBuddha said:

[reply]

I agree with you on the majority of your points here. The fuel tank & oxidizer requirement, combined with how little range each one provides, makes it hard for the hydrogen engine to be worth using.

I don't personally want the radbolt engine to be nerfed - its height limit as-is is just good enough to make a luxury travel rocket, but with no room for other modules like storage ones. The other main downside of the radbolt engine comes from the refuel method - It's often difficult to create a safe route for radbolts to reach the rocket without also increasing duplicant travel time and/or having a dedicated radbolt producer for the engine itself.

I think with the introduction of space fields and the drillcone, the potential height advantage of the Hydrogen/Petroleum engines is more likely to come into play as hefty rocket storage as well as a good pilot living space would be needed to make good use of them.

The main issue is, again, the fuel tanks - each one is 5 tiles high and only provides 6 or 9 tiles of range. The burden from them and the oxidizer tank also adds up a lot. The hydrogen rocket is only barely faster than the radbolt engine at higher module counts... It only begins to match the radbolt rocket's speed when both have an additional 12 burden on top of the engine and basic nosecone (assuming the hydrogen rocket is using 1 fuel tank).

My personal suggestion would be to reduce the height and burden of fuel tanks, as well as reduce the burden of the liquid oxidizer tank. I think a height of 3 for the fuel tanks and a burden of 3 for the fuel tanks and 2 for the liquid oxidizer module would work well - In that same scenario mentioned earlier, it would only take 3.67 additional burden for the hydrogen rocket to be faster than the radbolt rocket, and that number would only go up to 8.67 if the hydrogen rocket has 2 fuel tanks. These changes would also make the height advantage of the hydrogen rocket more prominent - Even with 2 fuel tanks a hydrogen rocket would have a maximum of 19 extra height to use on extra modules (16 if using big spacefarer module), compared to the 12 (or 9) the radbolt engine has. For comparison, right now if you use 2 fuel tanks and a liquid oxidizer tank, the hydrogen engine would only have 15 free height compared to the radbolt engine's 12.

[SkunkMaster]

Hydrogen rockets used to be the go-to solution for VERY high heat operations. Sure you could say smelt regolith with petrol rockets, but steam rockets where just much better at it. That and the fact you can recatch some of the "fuel" where the only real benefits in my point of view. 

Radbolts do sound superior, no fuel tanks, no oxydizers. That said, personally i just use petrol rockets. They are cheap to operate, have good range, good thrust and can do most thermal jobs also without much of a problem. Oh, and they are VERY CHEAP to operate, did i mention ?

[BallisticBuddha]

I think that's a fair way to balance this too, I actually happen to think that the radbolt rocket is comfortably at a good place right now, to be honest. Personally I think the only rockets that feel like they are in a good place now are the radbolt engine and the co2 engine especially when you compare them to their alternatives at their tech levels.

 

The Sugar Engine in particular gives me strong "but why?" vibes, because it not only has the same problems of the hydrogen engine of negating a lot of the extra height benefit by taking up a good chunk of that with extra required modules and is slower than its alternative, but it also runs off of a potential food source in the early game, whereas co2 is strictly a waste product you're trying to get rid of anyway until you get some slicksters and want to ranch them, but by then you're graduating to mid-game because you obviously have oil and are gearing up for a petroleum rocket. So it seems as if the game rewards you with a faster rocket that can go the same distance for opting for the engine that uses your waste rather than your food. I tried starting with a sugar engine only once and felt like it was just a waste of time.

 

And you're right about its drawbacks too, that I forgot to mention. The main drawback of the radbolt engine is the mere fact that radbolts are pesky temporal oddities. You can't store them (except in the destination buildings), they require consistently high amounts of power, they attenuate fast, and radiation itself is a balancing game of consistency/safety vs. power.

 

So I like where you're going for the ideas of adjusting tank size and burden, but because the hydrogen and petroleum rockets share the same tank and oxidizer modules, all of these benefits would also carry over to the petroleum engine too, no? I still feel like the hydrogen engine needs a special benefit for being so high tech, but I guess the power of the engine would just shine through more when that rescaling happens.

 

One final thought/idea I have is related to the small petrolium engine. I was dissappointed with this thing at first  because I was trying to use it as my primary rocket for space exploration/colonization, and the minor bump in range coupled with it's sorta short limit made it not so suitable for that. However, I've come around to like this thing now that I'm using it in the end-game when I already have my massive luxury liners for comfortable long haul trips and outpost asteroids already settled because of its sheer speed at doing simple missions.

 

One thing I find myself doing a lot is going back and fourth to feed the damn tree, and I mostly care about speed there because I'm overcooking tons and tons of food at home, then loading it on a rocket and just dumping at the tree. I don't have any dupes living there so I can't just send payloads, as nobody is there to unpack them, so I'm resulting to quick drop-off trips once I have a million kcal in excess or so. Just go in, drop off the food, wait for it to spit out all the resin, flow into the tungsten volcano steam room, cross my fingers I don't get any naphtha (I'm still tweaking this design), then collect the isoresin from the cooling room, alongside any tungsten. I normally would just fully automate these remote volcano planets so they just automatically shoot the metal out on payloads and send them home, but this is the only one that requires me to send something over there, because I can make way more food at home than I can on this lil outpost.

 

So this got me thinking, maybe we could have a mini hydrogen engine? It sounds weird at first, as its seemingly a downgrade, but bigger is not always better. By combining the engine and the fuel tank, it helps with the extra height and and burden problem. We might need a small liquid oxidizer tank, or, if like you suggested, we reduce the burden of the current lox tank to 2, this would match the height and burden of the small solid oxidizer, so then there'd be no need. It would just look weird with the big disc in the middle of a narrow rocket, but let's be honest almost all rockets we're making end up looking weird, but that's part of the charm .

 

My food delivery rocket is getting 2.3 tiles per cycle, so I'm getting close to being able to make it one way in a single cycle. Now, if there were a hydrogen variant, it might be able to get 2.5, 2.8, maybe even a full 3 tiles in just one cycle? That would be pretty neat, as it would make the higher stress from the lack of amenities less of a problem as the pilot would realistically not be in there long enough for stress to really become an issue. I also think a slight bump from the small petroleum engine to 8 tiles would be sufficient, as that would make round trips possible to pretty much any neighboring planet, and since this is a late game rocket, I think that's just fine.

 

Not every delivery ship needs to carry tons of dupes or megatons of cargo. Sometimes you just need something small, but you need it shipped Next Cycle Air.

[SkunkMaster]

I think i would rather use the interplanetary launcher for food deliveries and stuff, seems better for this kind of low-weight operations.

[NewWorldDan]

Once the hydrogen fueling setup is in place, it's far more convenient than managing radbolts.  Especially if you want to use the rockets for cargo hauling.  As the ultimate rocket technology, I think they should be a bit faster.  And have a better maximum height.  With a config of 2 H2 tanks and 1 LOX tank, I'd like to see it have a range of 24 - able to run to the outmost ring and back.  No idea what the current range on it is, though, haven't used it in a few updates.

There's a lot of options in game now for moving cargo between planets.  5 months ago, I was using CO2 rockets to fly missions using the smaller cargo bays, automatically loading and unloading with autosweepers and managing resources with a series of storage bins.  That was fairly satisfying.  I'm not overly excited about some of the current options.  It may be that I just haven't found good ways to automate them.  At least I found a good way to generate absurd quantities of radbolts - just condense the exhaust from the radbolt engine and dump it on the radbolt generator.  The radioactive contaminants have a short half life, but they're a goldmine for a few cycles.

[BallisticBuddha]

1 hour ago, SkunkMaster said:

I think i would rather use the interplanetary launcher for food deliveries and stuff, seems better for this kind of low-weight operations.

That only works if you station a livable colony on the destination asteroid and have at least one dupe stationed. For every other asteroid where you send food, absolutely, use the payload launcher, because that damn tree is the only thing besides dupes that even needs food. Granted, that asteroid is pretty habitable. It's got lots of polluted oxygen, and sending lots of food there is the entire point of that place, so you could easily just reserve some for the the little micro-colony there.

This is more just my preference of play style, especially since I first tried out the classic style big asteroid world on my current playthrough, which I'm currently liking more and more as this run progresses and I'm glad they give us the option to play like this now.

[sakura_sk]

6 hours ago, Electroely said:

The main issue is, again, the fuel tanks

I don't know if fuel tanks need tweaking but what I think would fix petroleum and hydrogen engine is a fuel tank in-built. If they had a fuel tank in the engine module to begin with (like any other rocket engine of DLC), they would be the most powerful/quick engines. 

[village_idiot]

The sugar engine is nice because it lets you turn a sulfur geyser into fuel and food via Divergents. It's also easier to load than the CO2 rocket, both on your starter base and while exploring.

[babba]

1 hour ago, sakura_sk said:

I don't know if fuel tanks need tweaking but what I think would fix petroleum and hydrogen engine is a fuel tank in-built. If they had a fuel tank in the engine module to begin with (like any other rocket engine of DLC), they would be the most powerful/quick engines. 

I like the "integrated fuel tank" idea a lot.  I would see this as an addition to possible external fuel tanks. I am a big aviation fan, having these tank variations would be amazing. The more rocket component variety, the better the climax gets !

Also, if we could add shredded metal powder in to fuel for extra thrust power ( creating more exhaust heat ), that would be sweet.

[Electroely]

5 hours ago, BallisticBuddha said:

The Sugar Engine in particular gives me strong "but why?" vibes, because it not only has the same problems of the hydrogen engine of negating a lot of the extra height benefit by taking up a good chunk of that with extra required modules and is slower than its alternative, but it also runs off of a potential food source in the early game, whereas co2 is strictly a waste product you're trying to get rid of anyway until you get some slicksters and want to ranch them, but by then you're graduating to mid-game because you obviously have oil and are gearing up for a petroleum rocket. So it seems as if the game rewards you with a faster rocket that can go the same distance for opting for the engine that uses your waste rather than your food. I tried starting with a sugar engine only once and felt like it was just a waste of time.

I like the sugar engine, personally. World generation spawns a LOT of sucrose, grubfruit preserve uses little of it, and having dupe-delivered fuel is a lot easier than piped gas to me. The built-in 60W helps a lot with research as well, and the higher module space lets me use it as both a research rocket and a trailblazer rocket until I upgrade to small petroleum and/or radbolt. By the time I begin running out sucrose I would already have a small Sweetle ranch up and running, even after doing multiple trips to and from the irridiated asteroid with my sugar engine.

5 hours ago, BallisticBuddha said:

So I like where you're going for the ideas of adjusting tank size and burden, but because the hydrogen and petroleum rockets share the same tank and oxidizer modules, all of these benefits would also carry over to the petroleum engine too, no? I still feel like the hydrogen engine needs a special benefit for being so high tech, but I guess the power of the engine would just shine through more when that rescaling happens.

I thought about that too, but I don't think it would be a bad thing for the petroleum engine to get the buffs as well. The hydrogen engine is faster and has 50% more range than the petroleum engine.

5 hours ago, BallisticBuddha said:

So this got me thinking, maybe we could have a mini hydrogen engine? It sounds weird at first, as its seemingly a downgrade, but bigger is not always better. By combining the engine and the fuel tank, it helps with the extra height and and burden problem.

I think such a rocket would be great. A smaller engine with the power of hydrogen combustion would be very useful for a speed-centered rocket.

25 minutes ago, sakura_sk said:

I don't know if fuel tanks need tweaking but what I think would fix petroleum and hydrogen engine is a fuel tank in-built. If they had a fuel tank in the engine module to begin with (like any other rocket engine of DLC), they would be the most powerful/quick engines. 

Giving the engines a built-in tank would be a good solution, but that would mean Klei would have to decide on a specific max range for these engines rather than allowing players to trade module space and speed for farther travels. I'm not sure if that'll end well - I like the concept of using less fuel tanks for closer travels/trips to planets with refuel stations to maximize speed and storage space.

[Sasza22]

Yeah it feels weird when the rocket that requires more research and harder setup is weaker than one requiring just radbolts. I wish they addjust that.

[MiniDeathStar]

@BallisticBuddha Here you go: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2504234924

When I have more time, I'll update this to be user-configured so that everyone can put in whichever numbers they want. For now you get my hardcoded numbers, sorry.