[Balance] Afterburners as Engine Multipliers about endless-sky HOT 5 OPEN

I like this. I must admit, I don't see this as an alternative to #9968 in "solving" the problem, but rather as a complementary detail to expand and diversify afterburners and potentially create more space for propulsion related outfits. Likewise, as something that provides more interesting options.

I must admit, having recently been through the data files and seen every single ship that has more than one thruster installed in it by stock; there's an awful lot of ships that have a fairly big thruster, and then have a tiny thruster alongside it. I haven't looked at the performance of those ships to test it, but for instance the Auxillary has the 4700 and the 1700 ionic thrusters. A large and a small . That small provides a 16% thrust buff. Which isn't huge, but it's not nothing, either, at the cost of 16 space. I suspect that, given the opportunity (and especially motive) we could have quite a variety of interesting things that use that 16 space to provide valuable options. For some, having something that didn't touch thrust at all but significantly reduced energy cost or heat production could be just as valuable.

One thing that comes to mind here; if we are adding multipliers directly to thrust. I know we already have turn and acceleration modifiers, but I don't see a thrust multiplier. In furtherance of the increased diversity of thrust related outfits that I would like to see, it would be nice to see a multiplier capacity that applies directly to thrust, as well as one for maximum speed. Having something that provided a thrust multiplier just a fraction (say, 5-20%, for sake of argument) of what theoretical afterburners of this style produce, but as a constant effect, might be appealing to some players, particularly if much more energy efficient.

Regarding max speed, yes, we could always just lower drag, and that does have use cases, but that is dangerous and hard to balance, since something that lowers drag by .1 might be huge for a fighter, and do zero for a freighter; but something intended for a heavy ship by drop it by, say, 2. Which would just break the game for anything that has a drag already below 2, of which is there are some. So overall touching drag is a bad idea unless it can be very, very carefully controlled. (doable, but challenging) For most cases, probably better to have a "maximum speed multiplier" attribute. Likewise, while we can just buff thrust to change max speed, this doesn't work if we want to change the max speed without changing the acceleration.

from endless-sky.

I planned an afterburner in the form of an engine multiplier for the uhai, but it's part of the engine itself.
I dont like the idea of all ABs being that way though

from endless-sky.

Perhaps rather than requiring something relatively esoteric like afterburner fuel multiplier, the thrust multiplier should simply take the max value of all installed outfits rather than be additive.

from endless-sky.

That might be nice, but it wouldn't be consistent with the way all other multipliers work in the game. And I don't think we should block stacking entirely, it just shouldn't be efficient.

from endless-sky.

I think ABs should use outfit space and a small amount of engine space. Most ships have a slight surplus of engine space already. I'm assuming the multipliers would be related to the ABs size.
Would these multipliers also work on reverse thrusters? I could see some people place more value on stopping and/or reversing quickly. I don't see any need for them to work for steering.
I also think it should be 1 AB per thruster. No stacking. Following your current explanation (which is accurate BTW) of ABs you shouldn't be able to add another afterburner to a thruster that already has an AB. You just make a couple of different size for each AB. If people wanted more AB thrust they could just buy the larger version, if it fits. Same result as stacking.

from endless-sky.