Greetings Citizens!

Todays topic of discussion on the New Ship Matrix is all about thrusters and how we reflect their stats on the web page. Thrusters are obviously a key part of a spaceships and critical for getting you around and also a key area to manage in both fuel consumption and emissions. Thrusters come in a huge range of sizes and types from the smallest fixed maneuvering thruster on a Nox, the huge pivoting VTOL thrusters found on the Idris, and all the way to the humongous fixed main thrusters found on the Bengal.

The first and most dramatic thing to notice with thrusters on the new matrix is the removal of TR values or Thrust Rating from the stats page and we’ve done this for a few reasons:

With how ships are setup and tuned now we do not currently dictate independant thruster outputs, instead we allow thrust to be shunted around the thrusters as needed from a pool but within a total capped amount per thruster. With this its meant we have no “desired” or minimum thrust output values to generate TR values from or against. The value itself was always very confusing to explain and often did not match the art of the thrusters created by the talented art team which caused further confusion. How could a TR1 thruster on ship X be as powerful as a TR1 thruster on ship Y when its 1/10 the size? It was a un-intuitive and uninformative value to compare ships with given how complicated the flight model is, knowing that a ship had three TR2’s versus another with 2 TR3’s gave no useful information that couldn’t be better presented elsewhere, such as the values on the Technical Information panel we discussed yesterday.

The second change to notice is the removal of Size attributes for the thrusters, these have been removed for much the same reason as TR was removed. As thrusters are unique to the ship and swappable in complete sets the size loses all meaning. Instead of the old Thrust Rating and Size values we now display the amount and more information on the type of thruster equipped to your ship between the two categories of thruster: