We need your help: Looking for fuel names

Hi everyone,

I am currently preparing the third alpha test which will be about space flight and I am feeling uninspired and need your help!

Quick re-cap how the space flight in Prosperous Universe works. There are two methods of traveling: faster than light and slower than light.

Faster than light travel works by bending spacetime around a ship using a big reactor and field emitters. The reactor utilizes a small, contained black hole to generate the necessary energy (see black hole starship). Since black holes are also called singularities sometimes I decided to call the FTL fuel Singularium. I am pretty happy with the name, if you have other suggestions, let me know!

Now for the part where we need your ideas: We are not sure how the slower than light propulsion system works. The only limits we want to have are that it has to be much more down-to-earth than the FTL one. We would like that the ships have recognizable engines. so here is what I’ve come up with so far. In the game there is a mineral resource calls Galerite which is used together with Ammonia and Hydrogen to create the STL fuel in a refinery. The propulsion system works similar to what we know as Ion Thruster: The fuel is accelerated in a strong electrical field and provides propulsion. Since the fictitious Galerite is the main ingredient of the fuel I would call it Galium or something like that, but I am not sure. Maybe we can find another name, or even anther backstory for the STL propulsion system! I am all ears :wink:

You probably already thought of this, but how about drawing inspiration from the Epstein Drive?

I suppose your ships are going to travel under constant thrust unless they’re going to need months to get from one planet to another within a system. To get the energy required, I think, your civilization should have figured out how to harvest the power of nuclear fusion. For that, they need special fuels like Helium 3, which can be mined from atmosphere-free surfaces like our Moon.

As for names, if you work a mineral called Tyllanium into your game, that would be a fun cross-reference to the sci-fi game I’m developing myself. :wink:

There is a lot of new conceptions of breakthrough tech for propulsion…

In this link there is a list of them Propulsion

If ur idea is a basic propulsion method why not use a free fuel system like Mag Sail?

@Mjeno Of course we have thought about The Expanse, the danger here is not to think too much about it and accidentally copy things. I was going to use Helium 3 as well, but for the FTL fuel :slight_smile: What’s that game you are developing?

@MACROSSBR Thanks for that list! Interesting read! Mag sails are interesting, but not quite what we are headed for :slight_smile:

Our game is super-secret as of now, so I’ll send you a link via PM. :wink:

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Due to a short look inside the wiki articel to Ion Thrusters one of the important things i read was the mass to ionization energy ratio. If i understand this correct a higher mass means you can feed more energy into the atoms while excelerate them there for you’r own exceleration is higher, so maybe somthing like " heavy Galium" implements a beter fuel…
the second part was the ionization energy what roughtly says how good or bad you can ionize the atoms… also there more electrons they have in their " normal state" you can inonize it to a higher state andaccelerate them better i think, so maybe in the end a name like “Heavy IonGalium” are also possible and even gives a hint to the realworld functionality of an Ion Thruster…
also this holds the possibility to implement better fuel for exampl “super heavy Galium” or so

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How about something like the Gallerite ReAction Vector (G.R.A.V) engine? Sounds suitably scientific and provides a nice “catchphrase” :smiley:

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I feel I should point out that Galerite and Gallium are not fictitious at all! :stuck_out_tongue: I realise you spelt galium with one l, but I can’t help but read it as a typo of gallium…

As for ion thruster fuels, they typically don’t use chemical compounds as fuel (like your galerite), but rather ionised gaseous elements, not that this matters to most people :). Xenon appears to be the best real world option, but is very rare on earth, it definitely has a suitably sci-fi sound to it though! Other options seem to be krypton, argon, bismuth, and iodine.

If you are planning on having multiple types of fuel as a kind of upgrade then noble gases (argon, krypton, xenon) might be a nice system, as rarity increases up to krypton, but so does max thrust, and there’s no reason an ion thruster can’t use multiple kinds of fuel. Commercial production of noble gases is a by-product of separating air, so you could just produce very small amounts of it at a collector and require relatively large amounts of it for fuel.

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I think in every spacegame should be something with antimatter. A Suitable name would be Antimatter-Matter-Complementary-Fuel (AMCF). And perhaps a description text with something like this: First time the mankind saw antimatter in action was in a giant explosion, like the first time the humanity used nuklear power they weren`t able to control the force behind it. It took scientist countless Galactic Standart Years(GSY) to unleash this force in a controlled way which leaded to the modern space flight.

Sorry for my english I wrote my last english text 3years ago but I hope the main ideas of the text are understandable.

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