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Smaller hydrogen tank block

Πέτρος Ψωμάς (Aristodikos) shared this feedback 5 years ago
Completed

I would like to see a hydrogen tank for ships smaller


I was thinking for on block 1x1x3 which will be ofcorse less capacity but will make us do better ships. I have this idea from the time that hydrgen tank born but never seen it taking place.


Now with the last PCU limits, i think will be a good solution for our small vessels (and large propably)

Replies (24)

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Agreed, we need a smaller version of the Hydrogen tank - both for small grids and large ones.

This gets my vote!

For large grids I would propose a 1x1x2 tank instead of (or as well as) the 1x1x3 suggested by O/P - since we already have lots of 1x1x2 blocks (Oxygen tank, Assembler, Arc Furnace, etc), a Hydrogen Tank the same size would fit better into a conveyor system without creating any odd 1x1x1 gaps.


For small-grid ships I propose a 3x3x3 tank (as well as the existing 5x5x5 tank). It would match the diameter of the Large Hydrogen Thruster, Medium Cargo Container & Oxygen Tank / Generator and make the internal conveyor system of a ship much more uniform, allowing for more streamlined hull designs with fewer internal gaps. Like the 5x5x5 version, it'd need large ports on 2 sides and small ports on the other 4 sides.

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accepted all except the small grids, we have 1 5x5x5 already so they must put a 1x1x3 so we can combine more in order to make the shape we like. Thanks for your possitive vote :D

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There is also one more solution, to add an extra small hydrogen tank. As we all know, cockpits can carry already a small ammound of oxygen in it. Be attaching an embedded hydrogen tank, it is possible to have hydrogen indication on low right corner even without using a hydrogen tank.

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I think this a great idea. It helps that it wouldn't take lots of effort to do.

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1 Additional blocks inhibit the game

2 This new unit does not introduce new functionality into the game.

3 Give at least 3 benefits that you get with the use of this block.

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If you try to build a "large" ship that isn't enormous, the current hydrogen tank is too large to easily incorporate into the design - especially if you try to build an ice-miner so have drills and a processing plant in there too (it makes sense to have it hydrogen-powered, after all, since that's what you're mining).


Smaller ships means fewer blocks in the game server - you're not going to leave your fuel tank peeking out the top of the vehicle after all - especially on a pvp server.


Michael's solution below (retasking the tanks to be "generic" and then designating their type in their settings) would be the best all-round solution, I think (re-designating the current tanks as "small" and "large", most likely).

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On vanilla servers, this is useful if you're planning on only using Ion and Atmospheric thrusters, and only need Hydrogen for your suit. A large 3x3x3 (27 block) tank is roughly 26 blocks more than you really require for your suit over the course of a year.

On modded servers (hydrogen oriented servers where hydrogen usage has been reduced), this is useful if you want 3x3x3 tanks to be intended for storage on stationary grids, and 1x1x1 or 1x1x2 tanks to be intended for transport. I for one have made it so that you need a 1x1x2 tank to leave an Earth-like planet, instead of a 3x3x3 tank like it works on vanilla. This means that starter ships (hydrogen) can remain small, with a small tank, and players can build smaller grids in general unless they deliberately aim to make grids bigger than they need to be.

The oxygen tank is also ridiculously large for one person. A full 1x1x2 oxygen tank will last for more many many years.

That said, we should be allowed to fill gas tanks with whatever type of gas we want, so it doesn't need to say "Oxygen" or "Hydrogen" on the side of the tanks. The type of gas we want to fill the tank with can be selected in settings. If we fill the tank with the wrong type of gas we can either "stockpile" the gas to another tank, or "eject" it prior to filling it with our gas of choice. This way we can keep the 1x1x2 and 3x3x3, and use them for whatever purpose we want.

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That's actually a brilliant suggestion! having just the two tanks that you can add onto your ship based on their current sizes and then fill with whatever gas you would like sounds like a great use of the current in-game blocks and a great extended functionality of what we already have!

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I was about to suggest the same - a smaller Hydrogen Tank would allow you to build a smaller hydrogen-cell craft - you need a reserve to start the hydrogen cell - maybe building a small tank (enough for a minute's worth of fuel?) into the Hydrogen engine might be one solution? Another would be the generic tanks that Michael suggested above - have a drop-down menu in the settings and whatever is suggested is what is printed on the outside of each tank and dictates what will feed from it.


Such tanks could also be used for any other gases introduced later for other uses with (I suspect) minimal programming, should the need arise.

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The gas tank should have been universal in what they store from the start. First time I played with hydrogen and oxygen I already got annoyed by the fact I could not use small hydrogen tanks or big oxygen tanks. I abstained from using them for a long time. Until I downloaded mods to give me the sizes i wanted. Making the tanks universal would allow some mods to reduce in size as well. I wonder if the gas tanks could also show the pressure in atmospheres, bars, pascals, etc. in the inventory/options menu (not sure what the K menu is called again). knowing the pressure would allow for better reasoning on balancing the game or future development requests or it will just allow modders to use another variable.

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^^ yeah this is the best and easiest solution in my opinion, no new models/textures, just a little coding time

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Bump- now that we are getting Hydrogen engines that would be perfect for small rovers and ships, we could really do with smaller Hydrogen and oxygen tanks in order to take advantage of them- the current tanks are just far too large for compact designs. This fact is compounded by the fact we are also getting smaller small grid batteries.


Come on Keen, get this done.

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Energy densisity is unrelated to the issue- there are Liquid hydrogen tanks that fit into the trunk/boot of a saloon car and give hundreds of miles range; there is no valid reason for them being larger than the car itself ( in SE ). We could easily have small 3x3 tanks to mirror the large grid tanks, instead small grid hydrogen tanks are 5x5x5 which is crazy.


Likewise, we could have smaller 3x1 large grid tanks for more compact builds- this game lacks building options and forces you into building bulky designs, or over sized designs and seems to ignore obvious building mechanics that would allow for better engineered creations that utilise space more efficiently...

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While not really a solution to this, I do have a mod called OCD Compact Tanks

Both balanced and a slightly unbalanced version.

Since survival update is doubling vanilla tanks, i will be doubling the 'balanced' version to match this.

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The small ship tanks are fine but the big sized tank really could be smaller. I remember placing one the first time i thought i would have a big enough place but in the end i had to massivly expand the room. I mean its almost as big as a large cargo container..

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Well as of the latest version, H2/O2 generators has had their flow rate massively nerfed, meaning the one way of making compact hydrogen ships is now dead.


Small hydrogen tanks are now needed more than ever.

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Seriously? The only propulsion type that actually needs a two storages (ice and hydrongen) plus hydrongen generators, hydrogen tanks and a complete conveyor connection between all those gets nerved... while ion and jet drives still soak their "fuel" from reactors through the block grid themself.. while the reactors can also store the uranum ingots.

Great.. so i guess it was a good decision of mine to turn my back to this game .. weeks ago.


R.I.P Space engineers and go to hell KEEN.

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BUMP- Marek, if you want to improve the game, don't make it harder to play and break players creations with questionable changes. undo the changes to H2O2 generators, and give us the smaller Hydrogen tanks we've been asking for for years...


giphy

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o2/h2 generators werent changed that much, in-fact the small grid one is exactly the same as it was before, the only change on the large grid version is a small power increase from 330kW to 500kW

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They output less hydrogen now, meaning you can't just fly using H2O2 generators, you have to have a hydrogen tank or a butt-ton of generators.

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[EDIT] ah, i was only looking at the ice to gas ratio, they have reduced the consumption per second...

that is quite a bit lower than what it was before.

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Are you 100% certain on that- I've seen multiple people saying otherwise. I can't really test it myself since I never made a note of such things before the update.

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i edited before you replied :)

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Ah, no worries. But yeah, people were saying they reduced the consumption by two-thirds I think it was, so output of Hydrogen gas dropped by the same amount. Now you need 3 times as many generators to feed your thrusters, which is obviously a bit of a problem on small grid ships designed to be compact and not require the huge hydrogen tank.


Sometimes, I think Marek likes messing with us just to see how violent the reaction can get; 'Very' will be the answer...

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I don't actually mind the O2/H2 gen change. They were never meant to directly feed the thrusters.


However doing it while not giving us a smaller hydrogen tank has made using hydrogen on smaller combat ships completely unfeasible now. We should have been given a small hydrogen tank to make up for this change.

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This is depressing.

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Besides smaller tanks it would be nice if there were High pressure versions, ones that are the same size be hold several times the normal amount of gas, but with a downside that when the tank takes enough damage (and is not empty) it explodes (maybe have the explosion force proportional to the volume of gas currently in the tank), that way you have a trade off of safe but low capacity tanks on small and dangerous.

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I like this idea, I've always found the idea that functioning blocks could explode and deal damage around them to add an extra engineering factor into how you build your ships.

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Before anything hydrogen becomes explodeable.. i suggest that jet thrusters actually require some conveyor based fuel aswell and fuel tanks wich also can explode then.. I can understand that ion drives work with electricity alone coz afaik that drive theorictly works with electricity in real as well. But how one creates a jet stream strong enough to bring a vehicel in motion with nothing but electricity is beyond me.. Perhaps some high advanced hair dryer or something? They said the game is supposed to be realistic..


Dunno how to refine kerosene and from what.. but as long as hydrogene is the only true fueled propulsion system.. it should not exlode by any means.. its handycapped enough already.. jesus.


Edit: They could for example add frozen oil to planets.. wich then is refined into kerosene in the refinery and and then stored in a new tank.. a kerosene tank. Kerosene should ofc be consumed much slower than hydrogen.. so that a full kerosene tank in an aircraft or spaceship lasts much longer. The kerosene from the refinery conveyor system could get some special gas station like system to transfer it to vehicles.. The existing transfer systems might be a bit to difficult to use if you have to repeat it after every flight dunno.

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The Atmospheric Thrusters are electric powered- they are electric ducted fans.

Realistically they should have been 'petrol/gasoline' powered- that would have been the best thing to do when adding planets, just add a new resource ( oil ) that has to be refined in order to create the fuel required to run Atmo thrusters- and the new Hydrogen Engine which should also have been a petrol/gasoline engine. It really boggles the mind that they decided the engine should be hydrogen powered... and it's weak as piss at that and hardly worth using. Marek's 'vision' is a mess, he needs to hire some people who have a clue to tidy up this mess of a game. /rant

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I don't like the changes they made to O2 gens, now they don't output enough. Either change things back, or give us a smaller hydrogen tank.

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I would at least like to see other hydrogen tank shapes if nothing else.


A long-skinny one or a very short tub would be a lot easier to deal with than this huge barrel.

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When playing SE, smaller hydrogen tanks feels like they are missing from the game. They don't have to hold a lot of hydrogen. Just be easier to fit into smal ship builds.


Small tanks would also make a small ship more viable with one small tank and one small H2/O2 generator. You would not be able to fly for a long time, but you would be able to fly well during those short times between tank refills.

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I am using a mod that adds "tech blocks". Multilevel blocks like hand tools and weapons are. This extends the endgame.

And taking advantage of the oxygen tank model, they made the smaller hydrogen tanks.

It's not like other mods that specialize in solving this hydrogen tank issue. But it helps a lot.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1682499145

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We need liquid hydrogen tanks instead, commpressed version should fix problems with storage, so mods with smaller versions can be created!

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Still no small tanks. Sad.

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To me, the best and easiest solution to this problem is to change the oxygen tank and the hydrogen tank to "small gas tank" and "large gas tank", then have a toggle in their settings to determine whether they store oxygen or hydrogen.

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yes, the tank models are fine, just then needs some coding work for them.

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Keen, I'm pretty sure you should mark it as done.

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Please can this be marked as complete and archived

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mark this thread complete.

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This was implemented a major update or two ago, with the introduction of the small (1x2x2) hydrogen tank for small grids. As such this thread should probably be marked as completed.

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