Reference Ships Drive Charts
Here is a thread where I will post my drive plots. These display combat acceleration versus delta-v for ships using non-pulsed fission, fusion, and antimatter drives. Unless otherwise noted, the ships have 6x engines, the best reactor for those engines, ten fuel tanks, a tin droplet radiator, and a certain tonnage of additional equipment including hull, weapon, battery (and its reactor and radiator needs), weapons, and utilities. The tin droplet radiator was selected because it strikes the best balance between cost and effectiveness for most situations. There are two sets of charts – one without Hydron Trap and Antimatter Spiker, and one that includes those in the payload if it is applicable to the given drive.
The figures in the charts are meant to provide a ranking for drives that is a little closer to the true story than the typical thrust versus exhaust velocity chart. They aren’t completely realistic – for instance, if the acceleration is significantly over 4G you will likely reduce the number of engines to reduce reactor and radiator weight and cost, and most designs will probably have more than 10 fuel tanks (or fewer, for example with the Pion Torch.) However, I believe that this representation does a good job of showing the relative rankings of drives for different weight classes.
Note that I only included drives that require specific reactor types. Ships using electric engines typically need small reactors and radiators to support them, and it is generally agreed that the Grid Drive has the best balance of all characteristics anyway. Chemical and pulsed fission drives don’t even need reactors and radiators to support the engines and have low combat multipliers so it’s fairly easy to rank them based on their raw stats.
2,500 Tons Payload
Click to enlarge…
5,000 Tons Payload
10,000 Tons Payload
20,000 Tons Payload
2,500 Tons Including Antimatter Spiker and Hydron Trap if Applicable
5,000 Tons Including Antimatter Spiker and Hydron Trap if Applicable
10,000 Tons Including Antimatter Spiker and Hydron Trap if Applicable
20,000 Tons Including Antimatter Spiker and Hydron Trap if Applicable
AAPC is always the best drive if you can both get the unlock and afford to set up antimatter production. Ever since interception became reliant on combat acceleration.
Daedalus looks better than it did tho.