Wiki / Ship sections / Thruster

Thruster

Screenshot needed assets/wiki-section-thruster.png A thruster burning, exhaust plume lit, ideally on a multi-thruster build.

The thruster produces forward thrust and drives the exhaust plume. Throttle is analog, so a build's thrust authority comes from each thruster's magnitude and how many you fit - more thrusters, more push. What that push is worth is the other half of it: a section weighs the box it is hit on, so a roomy hull is a slow one and no part of it says so anywhere.

Every shipped drive pushes with the same 1.0 and all three shipped hulls carry two of them. The civilian yacht weighs 8.28 and pulls 15.5 u/s2; the torpedo hauler weighs 18.95 and pulls 6.8. Nothing authors that gap - a section's mass is exactly the volume of the box it is hit on, so it is the shape of the craft and nothing else. Bolting basic drives on closes it, with a tapering return: each one is a unit of mass as well as a unit of push, and no stack of them passes 64 u/s2 - what a single drive would do carrying only itself.

A thruster bolts on by its forward end and by that end only. The rest of it is barrel, nozzle bell and exhaust, so the builder always seats it nose-in with the plume clear of the ship - you choose the face it grows from, not which way round it sits.

The flight computer balances thrust through the ship's live center of mass, recruiting off-axis thrusters for counter-torque, so an asymmetric or battle-damaged thruster layout still flies straight instead of pinwheeling.

A hurt drive looks hurt. Past about a third of its health gone it cracks and throws sparks, and its exhaust runs short and guttering instead of steady. It never guts all the way out, because a dead plume means a shut-down drive and this one is not shut down: a damaged thruster delivers exactly the push a fresh one does. The plume tells you what a chaser has already taken off it, not what it can still do.

Loop capture needed assets/loops/loop-section-thruster.webm A short loop: throttle rolling up, plumes brightening, the ship pulling away.

Variants

Every shipped drive pushes with the same 1.0 magnitude - a build's thrust authority comes from how many you fit, not which. All bolt on by their forward face only, plume clear of the ship.

assets/icon-thruster.pngThruster - shipped prototypes

	Variant	Thrust	Health
captureassets/catalog-basic-thruster-section.png	Basic Thruster Sectionbasic_thruster_section	1.0	70
captureassets/catalog-racer-engine.png	Racer // Engineracer_engine_port + racer_engine_starboard	1.0	70
captureassets/catalog-cargoa-engine.png	CargoA // Enginecargoa_engine_port + cargoa_engine_starboard	1.0	70
captureassets/catalog-cargob-engine.png	CargoB // Enginecargob_engine_port + cargob_engine_starboard	1.0	70