Tips

This page gather up some useful tips and tricks that can help you get the most out of your Near Future Electrical experience.

Maximizing Reactor Performance

As your ship design evolves, you will notice that reactors and radiators are quite heavy and bulky. You can use some advanced techniques to ensure that you

• Don't over-supply your ship with energy - no point in packing a 2 MW reactor when you only need 200 kW!
• Pack only the radiation capacity you need - use small radiators if possible.
• Use economies of scale - larger reactors tend to be more efficient and need less radiator capacity per unit of energy produced.
• Upgrade your radiator technology - the Heat Control mod contains radiators that are divided into tiers of higher tech parts. Higher tech parts are more expensive but remove more heat for the same mass.
• Backup solar panels for long coasts could reduce what your reactors need to supply and lower costs and masses.

Maximizing Reactor Life

Uranium is expensive and hard to come by, so should probably be conserved. Remember, reactors consume resources in the background and in proportion to their throttle setting - when not using the full output of a reactor, it could be handy to turn it down, such as during long transfers. In addition, consider secondary power sources for coasting and transfers, like solar panels, if you don't need the reliability of a reactor.

Capacitor Exploits

A capacitor has an energy storage factor of 8 - that is, it stores 8x the energy per unit mass than a battery does. This can be very powerful if used correctly - banks of capacitors can be charged by trickle sources like solar panels that don't weigh much at all. These banks can then be sequentially discharged in order to get really good energy rates for tiny masses.

(fun note: the mod used to contain a capacitor automation module that made this very easy and very, very overpowered)