[Flaser]

For generatign nuclear thrust you should either use a fission reactor or a hot fusion reactor (as Descenterace explained to me a couple of weeks ago).

However it's not the nuclear matter you should be expelling - that would be far too wasteful, instead some other propellant that was heated using the nuclear reaction.

The problem with prolusion is that to gain more thrust you have to accelerate the propellant more - and create better nozzles. The problem is that you have a limit as of how much heat a nozzle can handle, however the faster the propellant goes, the hotter it has to be.

Using electrically charged propellant seems a solution - you can steer that matter with magnetic fields alone, so you need no actual nozzle to come into contact with the gas.
Ion engines work like this - they use ions as their propellant.

I think for a fuison engine using plasma would be ideal - however it doesn't have to be the same as the one iside your hot fuision reactor that creates the heat. It would be also easier to use a low temperature plasma compared to the high temperature inside the reactor.

This is why you have a separate engine and reactor subsystem.

So it's not a tailpipe showing plasma out of a reactor, but a range of magnetic coils venting plasma from a secondary aparatus, that gains its heat from the fusion reactor.

For a very basic engine you could even use the reactor, but that would be quite dangerous - it your engine is hit, your spacship would blow up, as the high temperature plasma would rot you alive.

You could have a some ghostlight coming from this "plasma condenser" to indicate that the ship is on-line, however you only need a small glow.

The effect would be nice if it were inside the thruster models of capships.

[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by Flaser
You could have a some ghostlight coming from this "plasma condenser" to indicate that the ship is on-line, however you only need a small glow.

I don't like this. It gives various sensors, including human eyes, a pretty big target to lock on to. Even if it's dim, it can easily give away a ship that is otherwise not detectable (eg, a stealth ship). Any light is a sharp contrast to the vast blackness of space, and is therefore easy to spot.

This also gives one a tactical advantage in (currently nonexistent) multiplayer: if you are flying a stealth ship, but someone has spotted you, you can kill your engines and play dead, and they might lose track of you. A mission designer might also direct AI ships to ai-play-dead, to make them try and hide from the player, or wait in ambush by not using their engines until the player has flown into the trap.

[Hellbender]

Hmm, there's a difference between a shut off engine and an idling one...and focus here is on eye-candy, less on realism.  This is a game intended to be fun, and part of that is for it to look pretty.  

It's also a pain in the butt to have to cycle through a list of targets to see what's mobile and what is broken, especially when there are more than a few ships in mission.

Light may be a fairly sharp contrast in the blackness of space, however even interplanetary distances are huge - in order to spot even a vessel lit up like Christmas you'd have to have a good idea where to look, and be actively looking for it.  Even then there is a good chance you'd miss it in the background clutter of space - which though a cold, hard vacuum is far from devoid of sources of light.

[aldo_14]

The engine glow bitmap is mapped onto a poly, isn't it?  What about scaling & changine the opacity of it based on the %tage thrust or something.... so the engines are fairly dull and look kind of inactive when still, but then begin to glow brightly as the ship 'powers up'?

[_argv[-1]]

Originally posted by Hellbender
Hmm, there's a difference between a shut off engine and an idling one...and focus here is on eye-candy, less on realism.  This is a game intended to be fun, and part of that is for it to look pretty.

I'm thinking about both realism and tactics here.

It's also a pain in the butt to have to cycle through a list of targets to see what's mobile and what is broken, especially when there are more than a few ships in mission.

Why do you need to know if a ship is mobile or broken?

Light may be a fairly sharp contrast in the blackness of space, however even interplanetary distances are huge

But FreeSpace battles aren't at interplanetary distances, now are they?

Even then there is a good chance you'd miss it in the background clutter of space - which though a cold, hard vacuum is far from devoid of sources of light.

Again, I'm thinking of FreeSpace tactics here. The starfield backdrop is pretty much pitch black, so an engine glow against it is plainly obvious.

Originally posted by aldo_14
The engine glow bitmap is mapped onto a poly, isn't it?

If the ship has a thruster trail mesh, then a thruster trail animation is drawn on it. Whether the ship has a thruster trail mesh or not, each thruster has a thruster glow bitmap drawn on it.

What about scaling & changine the opacity of it based on the %tage thrust or something....

That's already how it's done, though the engine glows are only barely dimmer at idle than they are at full throttle.

As I've said on this thread already, the way I've modded FS2 for my own purposes, the engine glows go out completely when the engines are idling. IMO it looks better that way, and doesn't have any interesting effects on gameplay in my experience. Maybe if others actually played the game with this modification, they would see how it really affects the game, rather than making these "it's bad" remarks without actually knowing how it looks and affects gameplay.