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Components, Power, Signatures

Your Ship Owner Guide

Ever wondered how your decisions impact your ship’s performance, what makes one component better than another, and how different manufacturers set themselves apart?

Welcome to your Ship Owner’s Guide, your go-to resource for understanding the mechanics of power, heat, and signature. With this knowledge, you'll gain full control over your ship’s efficiency and performance, making every flight smoother and every battle more strategic.

Since the introduction and continuous development of the Resource Network, Star Citizen allows engineers to control power distribution to individual ship components from their vehicle's energy pools. This feature will be refined and fine-tuned in future updates and will play an increasingly significant role.

Let’s take a detailed look at the properties of components as well as the mechanics of power, heat, and signature.

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Component Properties

Component properties are determined by a variety of ratings tied to key
parameters: type, class, grade, and size. These parameters not only
define a component’s role within a vehicle but also influence critical factors,
such as its health, durability, weight, and power consumption.

The manufacturer also has a small influence on the performance of a
component through its unique style. The style subtly affects the final
properties of the component, making your choice of manufacturer relevant
not only for cosmetic and lore reasons but also for stats.

Each parameter plays a vital role in shaping the performance and efficiency
of your ship. Let’s break them down in detail to better understand their impact
on your gameplay.

Battery

Planned for a future release.

Cooler

A cooler is a critical ship component that manages heat generated by other systems. It produces coolant, which is distributed to powered components to prevent overheating and ensure smooth operation. Each unit of power assigned to a component directly translates to a unit of coolant required to cool it down. Each cooler has a specific maximum coolant output, determining its ability to support different loadouts. Proper cooler selection ensures efficient heat management based on your ship’s power consumption.

Hydrogen Fuel Tank

A hydrogen fuel tank holds your ship's hydrogen fuel, which is the default fuel type for most spacecraft. Hydrogen fuel, a colorless and odorless substance, powers conventional engines during non-quantum flight. It is essential for standard propulsion and maneuvering, making the fuel tank a fundamental component of any spacecraft's operation. Proper fuel management ensures your ship remains operational during atmospheric or non-quantum travel, emphasizing its critical role in both short and long-distance missions.

Gravity Generator

Planned for a future release.

Gravity generators produce gravity, a resource consumed by rooms to create and maintain a gravity field within their boundaries. This ensures that areas of the ship have functional gravity for crew movement and operations. Proper maintenance and management of gravity generators is essential for maintaining consistent gravity fields across the ship’s interior, supporting both comfort and safety for your crew members during missions.

Jump Drive

A quantum drive can be upgraded with a jump module, transforming it into a jump drive that enables interstellar travel through interspace. This feature allows ships to traverse jump tunnels, naturally occurring wormholes in spacetime that facilitate superluminal travel across vast distances. Jump drives are essential for accessing these tunnels, opening opportunities for exploration, trade, and missions in distant systems.

Life Support Generator

Planned for a future release.

A life-support generator is a critical ship component that produces life support, a resource consumed by rooms to maintain a habitable environment. It replenishes the atmosphere, regulates pressure, and normalizes temperature within the ship’s interior. The capacity of a life-support generator scales multiplicatively with the internal volume of vehicles of similar size, ensuring consistent functionality across different ship designs. Proper life-support management is essential for sustaining crew health and comfort, especially on long missions or in extreme conditions.

Power Plant

A powerplant is essential for a vehicle’s operation, generating power to run all systems. Protecting your powerplant is crucial, as its destruction could cause catastrophic damage to your ship.

Vehicles operate at a power deficit, requiring careful allocation of power to prioritized systems. Strategic power distribution creates meaningful tradeoffs, ensuring shields, weapons, or engines are optimized based on the situation, enhancing adaptability and performance.

Quantum Drive

A quantum drive is a specialized engine that generates a Chan-Eisen field, enabling spacecraft to travel at extremely high speeds across vast distances. Quantum drives can also be upgraded with a jump module to become a jump drive, allowing travel through interspace. When active, a quantum drive is either fully on or off and its operation affects the ship’s electromagnetic (EM) signature, adding another layer of strategic consideration.

Quantum Fuel Tank

A quantum fuel tank stores your ship's quantum fuel, enabling travel across vast distances in space. Generally, quantum-fuel capacity is consistent among ships of the same size category, ensuring balance and predictability. However, certain ships, such as exploration or special-purpose ships, feature larger quantum tanks to support their unique roles, offering extended range or specialized functionality. This makes the quantum tank a key consideration when evaluating a ship's capabilities and its suitability for long-range or mission-specific operations.

Radar

Radars play a crucial role in detecting and tracking objects by analyzing various signatures, such as infrared or electromagnetic outputs. Different radar variants come with unique sensitivities to these signatures, allowing for specialized functionality depending on the context.

Additionally, using a radar’s ping function amplifies its effective sensitivity, increasing detection range and capability but potentially revealing your position to others. Strategic radar use is vital for maintaining awareness and avoiding detection.

Shield Emitter

Planned for a future release.

Shield Generator

A shield generator provides vital protection by creating shields around your ship. Shield Health represents the total defensive capacity, distributed across all faces. Generators larger than Size 2 (S2) generate shields with four sides.

The Shield Regeneration rate determines how quickly shields recover per second. While regeneration also scales with generator size, it increases more slowly than health, meaning larger shields take longer to fully recharge.

Choosing the right shield generator is crucial for balancing defense and recovery, ensuring your ship remains protected in various scenarios.

Thrusters / Engines

Thrusters and engines are key systems for ship propulsion and maneuverability in space and atmosphere. They enable acceleration, deceleration, rotation, and precise directional control.

Engines provide sustained thrust for forward movement, while thrusters handle fine adjustments and stability. Both systems consume hydrogen fuel, with efficiency depending on their type and size. Larger ships often rely on more powerful engines and multiple thrusters to remain responsive.

Efficient use of thrusters and engines is essential for effective navigation, combat readiness, and fuel conservation, particularly during prolonged missions or high-demand scenarios.

Size

The size of a component determines its input and output capacity, defining its role within a ship or vehicle. Item-port sizes range from S0 to S4, with additional steps for larger capital ships to maintain balance. For example, while both a Reclaimer and a Bengal use S4 components, their unique requirements call for further distinctions.

Most properties, such as health, signatures, and output, scale with size, though some, like power and coolant, cap at S4. The size system ensures components are properly scaled, balancing functionality, efficiency, and versatility across all ship classes.

This categorization helps align components with the unique demands of different ship types, ensuring a balanced and engaging gameplay experience.

Below is an overview of ship sizes and their typical component sizes (exceptions may apply for special-purpose ships):

Size 0

Most ground vehicles, such as the Mirai Pulse.

Size 1

Single-seaters / light fighters, such as the Aegis Gladius.

Size 2

Small multi-crew ships / heavy fighters, such as the RSI Zeus Mk II.

Size 3

Large multi-crew ships, such as the Crusader Hercules C2.

Size 4

Even bigger capital ships, such as the RSI Polaris, Aegis Idris, Aegis Javelin, and RSI Bengal. (Some capital-sized vehicles use bespoke, non-swappable components.)

Civilian

Average overall performance, with the benefit of low heat generation and low maintenance overheads.

Competition

High performance and low weight, but a trade-off of low durability, 'louder' signatures, and fewer options for power management.

Industrial

Although heavy and power-hungry, this class excels in durability and heat management and also has lower maintenance costs.

Military

Extremely durable, performant, and high configurability, though has equally high signature output and power consumption.

Stealth

Stealth components are the most fragile and their output is in the middle of the pack. However, they consume very little power, have lower minimum power consumption, and produce extremely low signature emissions. This reduced minimum consumption makes them more flexible for power management, allowing you to easily adjust their settings without overburdening your power pool.

Grade D

Common (budget-friendly option)

Grade C

Uncommon (standard loadout on most ships)

Grade B

Rare (typically found on highly specialized ships)

Grade A

Ultra-rare (the highest possible performance. Not expected to be obtained through regular means)

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Power, Heat, and Signature

Component Consumption and Emissions

Choosing the right components is one thing, but an experienced ship owner
alsoknows how to get the most out of their vessel and what dangers to watch out
for. Understanding the intricate systems of your ship is what separates a
good pilot from a great one.

Let’s take a closer look at power, heat, and signature, three key factors that
not only define your ship’s performance but also determine your ability to
adapt and thrive in the vast and unpredictable expanse of the 'verse.

Power

Power is the lifeblood of your vehicle, supplied by powerplants that produce a maximum output scaled to their size, up to S4 for standard components. Powerplants provide energy to all onboard systems, forming a shared network with limited capacity. Future updates will introduce fuel consumption for powerplants, adding a layer of complexity to resource management.

Power Throttles

Each power-consuming component has properties for minimum and maximum power units, along with low, mid, and high ranges that determine its performance. Some components have a minimum power consumption that displays as combined power segments. These components are harder to reassign power to or from because they require a significant amount of power just to activate. This is referred to as controllability, where a smaller or larger minimum power requirement affects how easily a component can be adjusted in real time.

Components reaching mid/high ranges at lower power settings provide stronger functionality sooner but wear down faster, generate more signature, and are more prone to malfunctions.

In contrast, components with extended low ranges offer better stealth and durability, letting you operate them efficiently without sacrificing reliability. This flexibility allows you to fine-tune power settings to optimize performance based on your current objectives and situation.

Power Distribution

You can manage your vehicle's power distribution through the engineering screen (available on select ships) or via multi-function displays (MFDs). Power is allocated in segments to components, which consume these universal units based on their demands. Components are divided into:

Main Systems: Weapons, thrusters/engines, shield generators, quantum drives, and coolers. These are critical systems that require the most power and careful prioritization.

Sub Systems: Radars, life support, and gravity generators. These secondary systems consume less power, ensuring you have flexibility in managing resources.

While most components are managed through dedicated power throttles, weapons share a single power pool across the entire ship. Each weapon draws a proportion of this pool, with energy weapons consuming significantly more than ballistics. If you run out of available power, you can trade off by equipping more ballistic weapons to reduce the overall demand on your ship’s systems.

Larger ships often operate at a power deficit, making strategic allocation essential. Batteries help fill gaps by providing temporary power, which depletes over time and requires active management.

Coolant & Heat

Each unit of power assigned to a component requires a matching unit of coolant to manage the heat it generates. Coolant demand is directly tied to the power consumed, meaning coolers play a critical role in ensuring a loadout operates efficiently. Choosing the right cooler involves comparing its coolant production to the power requirements of your loadout rather than tracking coolant as a separate resource.

Default loadouts and power settings are designed to avoid overheating under normal conditions. However, certain scenarios can still push systems beyond their limits. Overheating may occur when too many components are running at high power levels, coolers are underpowered, or components become degraded or malfunction. Components operating in high ranges are especially demanding on coolant, and powerplants, as the largest power generators, require the most attention.

For vehicles equipped with multiple powerplants, it’s important to note that additional powerplants do not double your power output but instead add only a small boost while generating significantly more heat. This means it’s worth considering whether activating an additional powerplant is worth the extra coolant usage.

Heat management is also influenced by how long components take to reach their maximum heat threshold. This provides flexibility to temporarily reassign power from coolers to other systems in critical situations like combat or emergencies. Additionally, overheating components can be cycled on and off to balance their performance without compromising the overall system.

By understanding the relationship between power and coolant, you can optimize your loadout for efficiency and reliability. Strategic decisions about when to push your systems and how to manage heat effectively can give you the edge in challenging situations. Whether you’re balancing powerplants, selecting the right cooler, or managing component wear and tear, staying mindful of these mechanics ensures your ship operates at its best, even under demanding conditions.

Signatures

Since the implementation of the Resource Network, we transitioned to a system where electromagnetic (EM) and infrared (IR) signatures are generated by individual components rather than the entire vehicle. This change makes stealth and scanning more dynamic, requiring careful selection and operation of components. Each signature is influenced by component properties, making your choices critical for staying undetected or detecting others. Radar sensitivity to signatures will also vary in the future, adding complexity.

Signatures are measured as effective detection ranges in meters. Ground vehicles benefit from a sensitivity modifier, reducing their detectability, especially against spaceships, making them more stealthy during ground-based operations.

Electromagnetic (EM)

EM signatures are generated by consumed power or produced by your ship’s components. For example, assigning power to items increases EM output, while activating a quantum drive generates a significant EM burst, making your ship easier to detect while fleeing.

EM signatures provide valuable information:

• Low EM indicates idling or minimal activity
• Moderate EM suggests active systems or combat
• High EM, especially with doubling, reveals quantum-drive activity.

Stealth-class components reduce EM output by consuming less power, helping you remain less detectable.

Infrared (IR)

IR signatures are produced by the heat expelled from your ship’s components. Overheating drastically increases IR output, while stealth loadouts with minimal coolant usage result in lower IR signatures.

Coolers play a key role in IR management by expelling heat but also increase IR signatures the more they are utilized. Running IR dark, which involves disabling coolers to reduce signature emissions, causes heat to gradually build up, making IR levels creep higher over time. When coolers are reactivated to prevent overheating, they create a significant IR spike as they work to stabilize temperatures. Balancing these effects is critical for effective heat and signature management.

Cross Section (CS)

CS signatures are determined by the physical size, shape, and overall dimensions of your ship, specifically its width (X axis), height (Y axis), and length (Z axis). Larger vehicles naturally have higher CS signatures, making them easier to detect on radar, regardless of their EM or IR output. Additionally, some chassis have modifiers to simulate radar absorbent coatings, particularly on stealth ships.

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