SpaceCat So i think this feels very balanced - you never get 24/7 boost but you can get near if your design rly focuses on it.
This is the use of boost thrusters that makes boosters just a more compressed normal thruster that requires some attention to operate. Having a more compressed thruster that doesn't require attention is also feasible, and boosters give us some hints on how to do it.
You can mimic a boost thruster by under-powering any other thruster, except you don't need to push buttons or burn energy you're not using. If you want cruising and boost modes, you can control-group thrusters and power them off and still waste less energy.
The remaining advantages unique to boosters:
- High maximum thrust per surface area
- One-button hotkey to change modes
A thruster with a higher thrust:surface area ratio creates a different class of thrusters and has to be balanced somehow. The existing thrusters have pretty small exclusion zones and can easily internalized or gridded. By making the new class of high-thrust thrusters longer and with longer exclusion zones (and more expensive), you can reward designers that expose their thrusters and make nice-looking ships.
The one-button hotkey is impossible to mimic currently, you'd have to let people control-group toggle buttons in a selection for instant response rather than 1, P, 2, P, etc. This would be a nice addition to the current control-group feature which is mostly useful for targeting weapons. Would probably be very useful on ships like Dalas's spinner to control movement.
What does this mean for boosters? I have no idea. They sit in a weird spot. It's like a higher thrust thruster with its space efficiency balanced by requiring micro-management when every other system of the ship runs itself. You could just as well have the "boost mode" make all the thrusters on the ship more powerful and more hungry.
