Hydrogen consumption appears decoupled from actual thrust; reproducible max-input drain while idle

I am seeing reproducible hydrogen-consumption behavior where fuel use appears largely decoupled from the actual thrust being produced.

1. Consumption during normal flight / hover

With my ship in a normal operating state, total hydrogen consumption is approximately 15 H₂/s while hovering.

More importantly, the consumption remains approximately 15 H₂/s even during repeated hard acceleration/deceleration and simultaneous directional maneuvering. In other words, substantially increasing actual thrust demand does not appear to produce a corresponding increase in hydrogen consumption.

I tested this further by temporarily adding two additional 2 m rear propulsion thrusters. These thrusters are unnecessary for maintaining a stationary hover.

With the original configuration, hovering consumption was approximately:

15 H₂/s

After adding the two additional 2 m rear thrusters, hovering consumption became approximately:

23 H₂/s

This is exactly +8 H₂/s, corresponding to the two new thrusters' Max Input: 4 each.

The additional rear thrusters also show:

Max Input: 4 Current Max Input: 4 Current Input: 4

despite the ship simply hovering and requiring no rear propulsion. If those rear thrusters were physically producing their full thrust, the ship obviously could not remain stationary.

2. Reproducible high-consumption idle state

There is also a second, substantially higher-consumption state which I can reproduce fairly reliably.

Reproduction sequence:

1. Hover close to the ground with dampeners enabled and allow the hydrogen tanks to become completely empty, causing the ship to settle onto the ground.
2. Disable dampeners.
3. The parking lock may also be engaged. For this reproduction it does not appear to matter whether parking is on or off, nor whether parking or dampeners are changed first.
4. Leave ship power enabled.
5. Refill the hydrogen tanks, for example by adding ice to the H₂/O₂ generators.
6. Observe rapid hydrogen consumption while the ship remains stationary.

This occurs even with the ship fully parked and dampeners disabled, when no thrust should be required.

With a configuration containing three 2 m rear thrusters, I measured approximately:

34 H₂/s

With an earlier configuration containing only one rear 2 m thruster, the same state consumed approximately:

25–26 H₂/s

The difference is again close to the +8 H₂/s maximum consumption of the two additional 2 m thrusters.

During this high-consumption state, the 2 m hydrogen thrusters I inspected show:

Current Input: 4

which is their maximum input.

The 0.5 m hydrogen thrusters I inspected, however, show:

Current Input: 0

despite the total measured hydrogen consumption being much higher than can be explained by the displayed input of the large thrusters alone.

Turning the hydrogen thrusters off stops the loss. Importantly, switching the thrusters off and then back on also clears the excessive consumption: the thrusters can remain enabled afterwards without consuming hydrogen while the stationary ship requires no thrust.

Expected behavior

Hydrogen consumption should correspond to actual thrust demand/output.

In particular:

• horizontal propulsion thrusters should not continuously consume their maximum hydrogen input while the ship is hovering or stationary;
• a fully parked ship with dampeners disabled should not consume hydrogen through idle thrusters;
• substantially increasing actual thrust demand should produce a corresponding change in hydrogen consumption;
• the displayed Current Input values should correspond to actual resource consumption.

Environment

• Space Engineers 2 Early Access (VRAGE3 v2.3.0.2798 Release Alpha)
• Kubuntu 26.04
• Steam Proton 10

I am mentioning Proton explicitly rather than assuming this is platform-independent. However, the behavior is internally reproducible and the consumption change caused by adding two 2 m thrusters matches their combined maximum input exactly.

I have a relevant save from the earlier one-rear-thruster configuration and can provide a save file or additional reproduction information if useful.