Idea: add Solar panels service module for collecting solar energy and reduce fuel consumption by others service modules fitted in citadel.
More distance to Star - less fuel consumption.
As much as I think the lack of solar energy utilization in Eve is sort of odd, this isn’t a great idea.
Where’s the tradeoff? Given the way most structures are utilized, there would be very few that wouldn’t have room to include one of these, making it an obviously correct fitting choice most of the time.
I’d like to see solar power utilized for something, but probably not for mitigating fuel costs.
It’s because the reactors on board a ship or a station produce far more power than can be efficiently collected via solar power, since the area needed to gather any significant amount of solar energy is massive compared to the power requirements of a star ship.
For example in orbit solar energy produces about 1367 watts per square meter. One Gigajoule, the unit capacitor is measured in in Eve, is 277,777 watt hours of energy. That means that to produce 1GJ of Capacitor in 1 hour you would need a solar panel of around 200 square meters at 1AU from the sun. Of course the energy per meter goes up if you get closer, but most of a solar system is more than 1 AU away.
For a Battleship with a peak cap recharge of 35GJ to supply the energy for that Capacitor, not including engines, power grid, and other stuff they would need a solar panel array with an area of 25 square kilometers. That’s basically towing around the silhouette of an Avatar class Titan.
Ignoring the above science/lore lesson, I don’t think this is a particular good set of mechanics. There are way too many situations where something like this is just the obvious choice, whether it’s because you only need one other module or because you’re running high fuel consumption modules.
There’s no particularly interesting gameplay here. The “sit the Citadel closer to the sun” thing isn’t a particularly good incentive either. If someone wants their Citadel close to the sun it should be more of aesthetic reasons than anything since there’s no incentive to anchoring one elsewhere with this system unless you either aren’t fitting this module or you’re mining a moon. If someone doesn’t want to undock into a big ball of glare that’s their call, I don’t think it needs to be decided by mechanics.
Eve tech more than meets what would be required for Dyson structures - sphere, swarm, take your pick.
You could argue that since antimatter reactors are a “thing” in Eve that it might be unnecessary, but you do run into some problems once you start considering that where one race utilizes antimatter, another is using nuclear reactors, while still managing power yields within the same order of magnitude which, simply put, isn’t possible.
Oddly enough it actually is possible.
Antimatter is only 3 orders better than fission, 2 orders better than fusion.
Which means if your antimatter reactor runs on grams of it, and the rest of the weight is the shielding needed, while the fission reactor runs of Kg’s of it but doesn’t need as fancy shielding, then you actually have the same output using similar weight reactors.
EVE tech also doesn’t really meet the requirements for Dyson structures. We haven’t the ability to scale the tech up enough for that. It’s heading that way but we simply can’t produce things big enough to even start. Stations might be ‘huge’ but they are island/city sized. All the stations in New Eden wouldn’t even be 1% of 1% of 1% of a Dyson structure.
So yeah. Logic wise it makes sense why we don’t use solar, or rather logic would say that the solar already exists and is why Citadels don’t go totally offline when out of fuel, and game mechanics wise it would make there be only one sensible point to anchor your structures and you just use a few more to get the services/rigs you need for whatever you are doing if you have to.
That’s a whole lot of "if’ coming off of that. You may as well be making concessions for reactors powered by unicorn farts, it would be comparably inane.
You are right, there is a decent amount of ‘If’ there. The point was that it is conceivable the two techs can be side by side and producing similar amounts of energy. It’s not like someone is running a steam power generator and matching an antimatter reactor.
I don’t believe it’s stated anywhere that Minmatar ships use Nuclear reactors instead of Antimatter or Fusion. I’d have to check the notes in the Frigates of Eve book but I’m pretty sure everyone runs on more or less the same level of reactor tech, the Minmatar are just really bad about cooling/shielding theirs which is why they need the heat spreader sails where as no one else seems to.
I’d also question whether Eve has actually hit the point of it being really feasible to build a Dyson structure.
I mean, I think they’ve got the tech, but I don’t think anyone has the scale or spare resources to do something like that without painting a giant target on their back due to the resource drain from defense and civilian projects. Eve tech is pretty ridiculous in a lot of areas but it hasn’t really hit the scale of resource extraction and general production required for the total mass conversion of a solar system into a Dyson Sphere-like structure.
The only group that might have had the time and the tech to do something like that is the Jove, and if they have done it they’re not talking about it.
Erm. “Nuclear Reactor Units” are actual production components for T2 minnie ships (fusion in gallente, antimatter in Amarr, and Graviton (which I just interpret as “spacemagic”)) in Caldari.
There’s plenty of room for it in the lore, really. Iapetan titans + a construction paradigm focused on surface area instead of volume leaves plenty of room for a swarm, if not an outright sphere.
Screw structures add this to the Ragnarok or other minnmatar capital ships… Or we should just see more of these on Minnie stations
Fair enough, but you could also take it as those just being close equivalents, not that they actually run on the same principles as our reactors. After all if you can directly capture the energy from a nuclear reactor instead of having to feed it through steam pipes then the efficiency goes up exponentially compared to current technology.
After that things like shielding, size, density, ect all come into play.
Even a Lapetan Titan isn’t even on the scale of a small moon, and each of the empires only built one or so of the things, with the Jove having three, and even that’s questionable in-cannon at this point since the lore around those things has gotten rather muddled over the years.
Plus when you get into “space magic” energy sources the need for something like a Dyson Swarm becomes questionable, since you’d need infrastructure do actually make use of the power, and something like a Station in Eve already produces all the power it needs.
I do like the idea of Solar power, and I haven’t read all the posts cause TLDR.
Solar could have uses in the Capital//Super Capital Land.
For Capacitor Recharge, however the cost has to come at something, increased Jump Fatigue maybe.
My short 2 Cents.