Overview
Have you ever wondered how the various blocks and components in Space Engineers work? Do you wish that there was more lore to this story than your own adventure? Do you want *almost* true to life sci-fi data sheets? I’ve created this guide to not only rationalize various aspects of the game and its mechanics, but also to make an entertaining document for you to read while your world loads. For example: How does power and information manage to be transmitted through every block in the game? This question regards probably the most overlooked mechanic of Space Engineers, a game that is meant to be entirely realistic; and that’s why it’s my first section.
Power and Data Transfer through Blocks
Assuming you have read the description, which is very much an introduction, it is time to jump straight in with our first topic: How do blocks transfer power and data regardless of their type as long as they are connected physically on their faces?
The truth is Keen hid the answer in plain sight as their loading icon. Every block has a small panel on each connecting face that is discreetly hidden from view and when removed it reveals a coaxial connector for power and data transfer with the cross section of the loading icon.
Elements: The Few That We Have
Element 27 is not radioactive. It is specifically Cobalt 60, which is a component of nuclear fallout, that is radioactive. Otherwise it is a very ordinary metal that is used in making certain steel alloys. Cobalt is also used in trace amounts to color glass blue and is a part of Vitamin B12. Cobalt Steel is a very hard alloy that is often used for drill bits. In Space Engineers, Cobalt is a common ore that is refined and used to make various metal components.
Arguably one of the prettiest elements alongside Copper, Gold is a very useful metal with many general properties. It is a good conductor of electricity and it does not corrode, so it is used in many electrical applications where electrical contacts must be made and cannot deteriorate. In Space Engineers, Gold is farily common, but is mainly used for superconducting cables.
The first element and one that doesn’t really fall into a category with the rest. Hydrogen is the lightest element and is fairly cheap, that is why they used it on the Hindenberg. The Hindenberg is the reason we use hydrogen in rocket engines. It is found in organic molecules bound to various other elements. It is also the fuel of the sun. In Space Engineers it is created by electrolysis of water after you collect it as ice. Hydrogen’s only use in this game is for your Jetpack and for Hydrogen Thrusters.
Element 26 can easily be welded, machined, drawn, forged, cold-worked, and cast as various alloys of differing stengths, hardnesses, and flexibilities which are all called steel. Iron can do any job when necessary and is everywhere making it cheap and expendable. Its the metal ion used in hemoglobin to fix oxygen in most animals, which also leads to its only sturctural downside: it forms Fe2O3, Fe2O2OH, Fe2OOH2 and Fe2OH3 which are collectively called rust. Rust is flaky and crumbly causing it to fall off of Iron surfaces which allows the Iron to rust more and leads to disintegration of Iron structures. Luckily in space there is no air. That leaves only the good aspects, so Iron is used in Space Engineers for everything. Why it is rusted on asteroids remains a mystery.
Element 12 is machinable, strong and lightweight. Magnesium is a fantastic metal that can be used for many purposes and is the central metal ion in chlorophyll. It is also an Alkali Earth metal making it slightly reactive. Despite its great potential, it is ground into a powder allowing its slight reactivity to become explosive due to a high surface area to volume ratio. Its only use in Space Engineers is as an explosive/propellent.
Element 28 is used in electroplating for a corrosion-resistant, chrome-like finish when the extra layer of chromium is deemed unnecessarily expensive for the job. Chromium is only applied to make the surface a bit shinier and provides no chemical augmentation. Nickel is also the metal used in stainless steel. Nickel alloys are used in Jet Engines to make blades that maintain their strength at extremely high temperatures. In Space Engineers, Nickel is used for many components that also require Iron, such as motors, and is most likely used to create alloys.
Oxygen is the 8th element, 22% of Earth’s atmosphere, 86% of the oceans’ weight, and the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust (On the account that minerals are mostly metal oxides including the ubiquitous SiO2 and the oxygen ridiculous KCa4Si8O20!). Oxygen’s ability to react with pretty much everything else is what makes it the fuel of life and the fuel of everything else. The Saturn V first stage used 10 cubic yards of oxygen per second, and used kerosene (like the old-timey lamps) as fuel. It’s not about the fuel, it’s about the oxidizer. In Space Engineers, Oxygen’s only use is in pressurizing living spaces. Suprisingly Hydrogen thrusters do not use oxygen, which we will rationalize later on.
Platinum, element number 78, is a very important metal for many reasons: it can withstand high temperatures, it can survive strong acids, and it is a powerful catalyst for chemical reactions. It is not as rare as gold, but costs significantly more due to its demand. Platinum is used specifically to make thruster components in Space Engineers and cannot be found on planets.
Element 14, metalloid semi-conductor, chemically similar to carbon, and NOT Silicone! Silicon is second only to Oxygen by abundance in the Earth’s crust. It is the main component in Silicate minerals which make up all the grey rocks and all the white sand that we see every day, plus the skeletons of certain tiny sea creatures. In Space Engineers we are barred from refining it directly from stone (as we do here on Earth) and instead we must find the rarely occuring relatively pure lumps that are scattered throughout the asteroid fields. Space Engineers uses Silicon for the manufacturing of computer chips, Silicon is the working part of a field-effect transistor, and for the creation of windows made of glass: a liquid-like, non-crystalline, solid suspension of Silicon Dioxide. Note: Silicone is not Silicon, but it is actually a polymer with a Silicon backbone and Alkane side chains, the most common type is a chain of SiC2H6SiO units. So, the two are related.
47th on the Periodic Table, Silver is probably best known for its use in jewelry. It is often considered second to Gold and is priced as such. However, Gold is not the the best of any particular property among metals. Silver is both the best conductor of electricity and the most reflective metal. We use it in Space Engineers mainly for medical components and a few other parts. It is rare to find in my experience, but very important if you want to respawn.
A Radioactive element that is famous the world over. Uranium, element 92, is the last of the naturally occuring elements. The heat generated as it decays to smaller elements is used for power generation in Nuclear Reactors. It is also used, when refined into mostly U235, as a weapon of mass destruction. Space Engineers is a very optimistic game and so Uranium is only used as a source of unlimited (electrical) power.
Elements: The Ones We Should Have and How We Make Do
Copper is an extraordinary element in that it has no bad qualities. Element 29 is the second best electrical conductor, corrodes only until it forms a protective patina, is soft enough to be worked with small power tools or even by hand, is anti-microbial, is only toxic when under specific circumstances, and is one of the very few elements that is not grey. It is also an alternative to Iron in the oxygen fixing molecules of arthropods. Copper is used for heat dissipation in the form of radiant fins, for plumbing as an alternative to toxic lead and rusting iron pipes, and for electrical wiring. To not have copper in a game revolving around science, computers, technology and space travel is very odd. However, in the absence of Copper that exists in the world of Space Engineers, we simply make due by using any of the other metals that happen to be in the body of the component we are making. It seems that many components in space engineers simply use iron wiring, which would still work since all metals conduct electricity well. Just not as well as Copper.
Carbon, the sixth element, is in almost everything: wood (houses, tables, chairs, shelves, dressers), paper (documents, newspapers, posters, books, some hats), plastic (Fabric, car bodies, keyboards, glasses, contacts, headphones, pens, carpeting), fuel (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, coal, charcoal, wax), animals, plants, diamonds for cutting tools, and of course carbon fiber. When an element is behind the make-up of everything, it seems very odd to not include it in any form whether it be compounds or on its own. However, maybe Space Engineers predicts a future where more research is done in Silicon chemistry other than simply its use as a semi-conductor. Silicon is chemically similar to carbon, so long chain hydrosilicons could also be used as polymers and isulators. You could argue that it wouldn’t work as an insulator because it is a metalloid, but graphite conducts electricity too, so it must be the structure of the chains, not the element that insulates. This logic solves a major gap in Space Engineers’ idea of necessary materials.
UPDATE: After some research I discovered there are long chain HydroSilicons, but they are called Silanes. They are inuslators and are immiscible in polar solvents just like Alkanes, the difference is that Silicon holds the Hydrogens less tightly than Carbon and hence Silanes react explosively with Oxygen. In every other respect they are almost identical to Hydrocarbons and can even be augmented with the same functional groups and Hydrocarbon side chains. They supposedly smell terrible, but that claim seems a bit odd considering the fact that they explode in air, so how did someone smell it? I’ve been told that it’s the resulting explosion that smells terrible, which is more reasonable if the one smelling it was far enough away when it happened.
Thrusters: Ion Engines
An Ion Engine is any type of propulsion system that accelerates ions (electrically charged atoms or compounds) using electric or magnetic fields. The amount of thrust produced by a thruster is based on the momentum it imparts on the exhaust, whereas the amount of energy consumption is based on the energy given to each particle. Momentum is a vector quantity that is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity. Energy is a scalar quantity that is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by the square of its speed. Obviously this leads to two issues, you must eject mass to get thrust which leads to consumption of some type of fuel or another, and your energy consumption goes up by the square of ejection velocity, while your momentum exchange only increases linearly.
Ion engines of our time all use some form of ionized gas, or liquid metal for their fuel and are very FUEL efficient because of the high ejection velocities they can achieve compared to chemical rockets, but those high ejection velocities make them huge energy consumers. Chemical rockets have low ejection velocities of large amounts of mass, making them ENERGY efficient, but chemicals can only store a limited amount of energy and you have to drag their mass around with you. That is why Ion engines beat them is because in the end Ion engines carry much less fuel mass allowing them to make a gain in energy efficiency as well. The best ion engines I can find today are Magnetoplasmadynamic Thrusters. These thrusters use an electric field to ionize their fuel and then force the ions out the exhaust using magnetic fields. The largest use about 500kW and can generate thrusts of up to 25N, a 2000th of the thrusts delivered by the smallest ion engines in the game. As you can see their drawback is very small thrust that is limited by power production.
Here’s a quick background on electromagnetism in picture form:
Every particle is created with an anti-particle. When an anti-particle and a particle collide they decay into smaller particles that conserve their charges, energy, and momentum. As you also may know, if you’ve heard of E=mc^2, mass is simply the amount of energy condensed into the single point where a particle exists. It’s like a creation energy if you will. Now let’s see an example of a particle and anti-particle annihilation. Say we have an electron and a positron (anti-electron) heading straight for each other and they collide. Whatever they decay into must have the same charge (-eV + eV = 0), same momentum (0 if they were going in exactly opposite directions), and same energy (Both of their kinetic energies added to both their creation energies which = mc^2). Most often they will annihilate into photons because these are they simplest form of particle, hence why people say anti-matter plus matter equals energy. That energy is light. Photons carry momentum and energy defined by their direction and wavelength and they are neutrally charged, so they can conserve all these properties. Of course if a particle decays on it’s own and it has a non-neutral charge, then it must decay into something else, showing that any anihilation can create something else. . .
The cool thing is that ‘something else’ can be anything that conserves those three properties (Four if you count quantum chromodynamics and its color-charge, but we’re leaving that out).
Finally, you might wonder if light could be used as an exhaust to propel a ship because light has momentum. The issue there is that light has an extremely high energy/momentum ratio even at low frequencies (Consider that light travels by definition at the speed of light in vacuum and has ‘0’ mass) making photon exhaust even more energy inefficient than the small ions used by today’s engines. You would most likely gain only a faint thrust force, as your kilometer wide, microwave beaming, energy sucking, engines incinerated anything behind you. Also, they wouldn’t be called Ion Engines anymore, so it doesn’t rationalize anything.
Thrusters: Atmospheric Engines
Turbojet engines were first designed in the late 1930’s by Frank Whittle in Britain and Hans von Ohain in Germany. Frank Whittle’s design became the engine used in WWII in the Gloster Meteor. Hans von Ohain’s engine was used in the Heinkel 178 and lead to the Me-262. Before this time jet developement had been stalled for hundreds of years owing to the fact that rocket engines were inefficient at slow to modest speeds and aerodynamic turbines had not yet been invented. Even after they had been, the compressor stages had to be powered externally by a piston engine, take the Caproni Campini N.1 for example, because blades that could withstand jet exhaust temperatures had not been developed and so the energy needed to drive the compressor could not be extracted from the exhaust.
There are five sections in a Turbojet engine. The first set of blades is the fan, it pulls air into and around the engine depending on the amount of bypass (Bypass makes it a turbofan). Then several more sets of blades and stator fins follow, with an increasingly smaller cross sectional area perpendicular to the shaft axis.
As a Side Note: Notice how at low speeds, the fuel/energy is focused on turning a fan that accelerates a large mass of air from rest or low speed, to an only slightly higher speed, which makes the compression, combustion and nozzle stages less important. At high speeds, the intake air is already moving making a fan more and more unnecessary. A small amount of fast moving intake air most be slowed down and compressed, that way it can be heated which builds pressure even higher. Due to the small fan size, very little energy must be extracted from the exhaust to keep it turning. The pressure is then converted to an extreme exit velocity.
As we all know, the atmospheric engines in Space Engineers require only electrical power to function and can only function in the atmosphere of a planet. They also don’t require ambient oxygen. Of course, if you look at the description of a jet engine above, the only purpose of the fuel consumption is for the heating of the gas after the compression stage which ultimately leads to a higher exhaust momentum than what the air had to begin with, which results in an opposite increase for the engine and the rest of the craft. A good example of an alternative energy source is the nuclear turbojet that was designed as part of the X39 project. A Nuclear fission reaction was meant to be the heat source instead of chemical burning, which was reserved in this project for the afterburner.
Taking this idea to Space Engineers, we do not put the Uranium directly into the engines, but we do have nuclear reactors (or some other high power source depending). So the Atmospheric Thrusters work simply on this principle, at low power the many, small, internal motors work together with a gear system to drive the turbine at a high enought torque and speed for appreciable thrust. As the power output is increased, the electrical energy is diverted from the motors (Which cannot mechanically provide a high enough exhaust velocity) to large heater coils which take the place of the standard burner cans. The smallest atmospheric thruster uses 700kW of power and makes 80kN of thrust. One engine from an F-15 produces 79kN of thrust and uses 77MW of power by comparison.(77.5kg/kN/h*79kN*45.5MJ/kg/h*1h/3600s = 77MJ/s = 77MW)
Keen’s figures might be off in comparison to reality, but the math between their figures still works. The small thrusters seem to be turbojet engines which have no bypass and a high outlet exhaust velocity, which explains both their higher thrust per mass and thrust per volume ratio than the large thrusters. The large thrusters do appear to have bypass which means they are heavy, space consuming turbofans, but they are more efficient in the speed range of the aircraft of Space Engineers since the max speed is subsonic at 100m/s. Now you might wonder why the thrusters aren’t turboprops, or even mag-lev, fan-like, monstrosities such as those found on the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. The most likely answer is because Keen didn’t like that idea. My answer is that turboprops and fans don’t work at 360km/h becasue their exhaust velocity is simply to low.
Thrusters: Hydrogen Engines
I figured I should start this guide by describing the common engine type that Hydrogen engines in Space Engineers resemble. The kind you probably mistook them for. Liquid fueled rocket engines use the reactive force of combusting a fuel with an oxidizer, most commonly the fuel is hydrogen and the oxidizer is oxygen. Hypergolic fuels can also be used. Hypergolic meaning that the two compounds used explosively react on contact without an ignition source. Of course the Hydrogen engines of Space Engineers only use on type of fuel, namely Hydrogen and this poses a problem to our usual way of viewing engines. If there is only one fuel then it must be accelerated electrically like and ion engine, heated like an atmospheric engine, or it most decompose rapidly like a monopropellant. The Hydrogen engine in the game, does not use electricity for anything but turning on and hydrogen is as basic as the elements get. There’s nothing to decompose. It’s time for a radical rationalization!
Space Engineers’ Hydrogen thrusters are actually Nuclear Fusion powered. The initial need for an electric power source is to keep the engine’s capacitors charged so that it can fire its ignition lasers. After the reaction is started, it is fed a small supply of hydrogen to sustain the fusion reaction and the energy generated is entirely consumed as the thruster acts like a fusion reactor. This power in turn keeps the magnetic fields intact that contain the fusion reaction. It’s analogous to how a jet engine takes a small amount of energy from it’s exhaust to sustain the compressor and power other systems. The helium that is produced is allowed to escape the magnetic field after it loses its energy and returns to it’s un-ionized state. When thrust is needed, the supply of hydrogen increases and the magnetic field opens over the exit of the nozzle allowing the excess generated energy to escape as a dense, high-velocity jet composed mostly of super-heated, unfused hydrogen and the helium left over from the fusion that generated the heat. The complete lack of exotic materials needed to construct this reactor/thruster contraption is due to the fact that by the time of Space Engineers, nuclear fusion is becoming a common technology. Not quite as common as nuclear fission power, which is as common place as today’s petroleum, but common enough that it can be assembled from relatively cheap materials. These materials make for low efficiency, but fusion makes so much energy that the useful amount generated after losses is still modest. The newest tech is the creation of mass from energy, it might be a less powerful form of thrust for the moment, but who can argue with fuel-less propulsion? (See Ion Engines).
Notice:Endryon Alpha pointed out that Keen probably made the hydrogen-only mechanic to prevent people from burning through their oxygen supply and suffocating. If you want to make space engineers more realistic and you would also enjoy watching people suffocate from flying around too much, then write to Keen and tell them to fix it! I support this idea.
Mass and Gravity Manipulators: Gravity Generators
The year is 2077 and humanity’s understanding of the fundamental particles of nature and the forces that define them has taken another huge leap, much like the augmentation of our understanding of electromagnetism that happened in the 19-20th centuries. After searching for years for magnetic monopoles and negative mass/energy, continously larger particle colliders and progressively more sensitive instruments were created. It was eventually realized that negative energy could not be created due to energy being capable of only one sign or the other based on convention; if it could pass zero then entropy would mean nothing. Magnetic monopoles were found that could be separated via fractionalizion, but they could not be created independently which reduced their useful applications. However the technology created in that pursuit allowed the direct observation of the graviton (a particle with very small energy hence hard to detect) which united quantum theory with the force of gravity (Physics always seems to tell you things that you aren’t directly asking for). This in turn led to the direct observation of dark matter and a better understanding of the Higgs field, since dark matter only interacts with those two forces. Using this newfound knowledge, large, power-intensive devices were constructed that could minimally influence the gravitational and Higgs fields. These devices were of course improved over time to the smaller and more efficient ones seen today.
The Spherical Gravity Generator was the first functional generator produced. It was comparatively simply to build compared to later devices because it worked spherically as most fundamental forces do in nature. The spherical generator worked by creating a uniformly outward expanding gravity field via a large induced artificial mass in it’s core which attracted objects in its vicinity. It did not suffer a larger inertia because rather than moving the artificial mass it created, it simply recreated it as it moved by absorbing the mass left behind as energy and using t to put more where it was going. The Spherical Gravity generator was not popular in later space-craft designs because the movement toward modular building techniques made spherical ship building difficult, and it was more energy intensive than centripetal artificial gravity. This led to it being discontinued for some time until being brought back by popular demand when it’s potential was as a defensive/offensive device was realized. During this later resurgence it was augmented by the ability to reverse its field that was developed during linear generator research. To reverse the direction of the gravity was a more intensive process. First the gnerator had to displace the artificial mass to a distance behind the objects it had recognized to accelerate and then using an previously experimental lensing technique that involed dark matter, it focused the gravitational field down a *nearly* linear path back to its center, which created a force that pulled the object away. The size limit is due to the quadraticly increasing energy required to get constant acceleration at longer distances.
The Linear Gravity Generator was the second device build based on the principes of mass and gravity that were discovered. This device works by measuring first its local acceleration and then calculates the necessary force required to offset that acceleration in relation to the objects it is pulling on. It then uses the lensing technique described above along with a varied artificial mass density field around its vicinity to selectively pull on recognized objects (including people). The generator focues some of the field in the reverse direction into the ship to make sure the ship experiences net zero acceleration. For the generator to switch its direction of acceleration, it simply changes the direction of gravity lensing.
What I mean by gravity lensing is not the same as Gravitational Lensing, a real phenomenon in which the curvature of space described by relatively causes light to change direction. I took this idea from the fact that certain materials (Holmium metal is an example) can be used to pull magnetic field lines together making them more intense in a specific direction, I extrapolated that to the idea that a currently undiscovered substance could pull gravitational field lines together.
Mass and Gravity Manipulators: Artificial Mass
After the potential of gravity generators was discovered and they became more widely used, the issue of needing to move or tie down larger objects arose. Small objects were easy to move because the gravitational fields could be concentrated in them without using large amounts of energy. However large ships and structures could not as efficiently be moved, so a workaround was developed. The artificial mass block does not manipulate gravity in the same way a gravity generator does. Instead it acts as an anchor point for a gravity generator to grab onto. The artificial mass block manipulates the higgs field by using a large amount of energy to focus its effects on the block, making it very massive.
Now that the block contains a large mass in a small space the gravity generator can focus its effects on it more efficiently. There is one side effect caused by this interaction, good or bad depends on what you do with it. The artificial mass generated by the block is directly coupled to it so that the force can transfer to it, but that all causes the block to have a large inertia and if located on an extremity of the ship, it will also increase the rotational inertia and shift the center of mass. This has been used favorably for stabilizing systems and for mass driver weapons. However, the added mass has become an issue in ships that are meant to be agile and yet be tethered by a gravitational field. The issue has even been exploited by attacking ships who can manipulate a victim gravitationally if their mass blocks remain activated.
Mass and Gravity Manipulators: The Jump Drive
It might seem ridiculous to try and make a real functioning jump drive, but science is driven by the pursuit of seeing whether or not our imagination can be realized. A good example is the development of cell-phones spurred on by Star Trek. Today there a wide range of ideas revolving around jump drive ideas that have not yet been proven impossible. (This will be expanded in a bit, currently it is decelerating from light speed and so length contraction is still in effect)
To be continued. . . (READ ME B4 U GO)
Just like how the edge of the visible universe is not the real edge, but rather a representation of how far light’s endless travels have revealed to us over 14 billion years, so too is this not the end of my story. Trust me, the rest of this guide is only about 13,799,000,000.01 +-21,000,000 light years away, so it’ll be visible sometime between 3.65 days and 21,000,000 years from now. There’s also pictures over there! I just want to see what you guys think and post this already because I’ve worked on it for like 10 15 hours straight. I hope you like it! I will also read your comments that are undoubtedly somewhere beyond the light cone at the time that I am writing this.
99.998%(Background for Real Situations that are Similar/Related,
Science behind Reality,
Sci-fi that rationalizes Space Engineers)
+-0.001%(Comedic Impurities)
Oh and PLEASE SHARE, this guide is like copper, nothing is bad about it ^-^
And if you find mistakes, or inaccuracies, I don’t mind you pointing them out for me to fix. I’ve done this all by memory from various things I’ve read throughout my life and there’s surely some mistakes. Also I like to make alot of the Sci-Fi parts as my own invention, but I do read suggestions.