TD Dual Fuel Power Core

TD Dual-Fuel Power Core

Threshold Dynamics, Applied Geometry

Stranded seventy years from home in a quadrant nobody has charted, with a ship to run and no starbase to resupply from? You will want a power plant that burns whatever you can scrape together, lights up a whole engineering deck, and keeps going when the crew does not. Built for intrepid captains.

A walk-in reactor core for Space Engineers, built from scratch: a glowing glass column rising out of a deck you stand on, consoles round the pedestal, and a stack you grow from 1 GW to 15 GW.

Two fuels, one core

The core burns deuterium capsules from Nukeguard's Fusion Power at full output, or uranium ingots at 60%. It always burns deuterium first whenever any is aboard, and falls back to uranium on its own. Uranium goes twice as far here as in a vanilla reactor.

The column tells you what it is burning at a glance: blue for deuterium, green for uranium, with a bright pulse running up the stack that speeds up with the megawatts actually leaving the core. Off or out of fuel, it goes dark.

Each core keeps its own fuel stock topped up over the conveyors. Two terminal sliders, Keep Deuterium and Keep Uranium, set how much it holds; set one to zero and it never pulls that fuel. You may notice a stack of Core Charge in its inventory: that is the working charge it makes from its fuel. Taking it out does no harm; the core simply makes more.

The stack

Power Core The base: 3x2x3 large grid, 1 GW. A deck with a walkway all round, a console pedestal with four terminal desks, the reaction chamber and the column, and four corner pylons whose lights stay on as work lighting. Conveyor ports under the deck and at the top of the column; the deck edges take vanilla catwalks.

Power Core Column Stack up to four on the core's column, +0.5 GW each. Conveyors pass straight up through them. A column no core is using glows plain white, so a broken stack is obvious.

Power Core Injector Extra fuel injectors. Mount up to eight in the cells under the deck, round the bottom port. Each adds 50% to the core's rated output, columns included.

Output is (1 GW + 0.5 GW per column) x (1 + 0.5 per injector), up to a 15 GW assembly limit (9 GW on uranium). Want more? Build a second core.

Power Core (small grid) One cell: 83 MW on deuterium, 50 MW on uranium. No columns or injectors. Easier to build and fuel, but teeny.

Live status on the screens

The four desk displays on the pedestal are real LCDs and default to the TD Power Core: Status app: what it is burning, output against rating, fuel aboard against your Keep amounts, time left at the current load, the charge buffer, and the stack. Put the same app on any LCD on the grid; with several cores it shows each one. The smaller console screens are decoration and never pretend to be readings.

What it costs to build

A full stack - one core, four columns, eight injectors - costs a little more than one of Nukeguard's 15 GW reactors, and it will send you out for everything: Magnetrons carry the power, every craftable vanilla component appears somewhere in the stack, and the injectors want about 1,200 kg of platinum between them. Plan a mining trip.

Requirements

Nukeguard's Fusion Power (listed as a required item): it provides the deuterium capsules and the Magnetrons. There is no Graphene edition, on purpose: a power core is something you should have to protect.

Tell me what is wrong with it

If a core will not start, a column or injector is not counted, or a number on the status screen looks wrong, say so in the comments. "I expected X and got Y" is the single most useful kind of report.

From the Applied Geometry incident file

TD-AG-0647 // INCIDENT SUMMARY - EXCERPT. Included in this listing in error.

Core Assembly 0647 was test-fired as a full stack. At 14.6 GW a transwarp conduit opened 212 m off the port pylon. The conduit was not requisitioned. It has been entered in the asset register as a traffic corridor.

A cube-form vessel, 3.04 km to a side, exited the corridor and held station for 41 minutes. Its occupants expressed a collective interest in the core. Survey and Assessment recorded the interest as a sales enquiry. Procurement holds no record of a quotation.

The occupants stated that resistance had been assessed. The resistance was not declared as a value in Ohms. Legal advises that an assessment not on file has not taken place.

Following the vessel's departure, Column 3 reported an additional 0.5 GW. No additional column is present. The output has been logged as adaptation and carried forward.

Traffic corridors are not to be opened in occupied sectors. Compliance has not been observed in any prior test.

- Applied Geometry, TD Orbital

☕ Support the Ongoing Experiments If you enjoyed this improbable engineering exercise, feel free to toss a few credits into the reactor core - funds coffee, replacement keyboards lost to arguments with the AI over "theoretically possible" versus "actually works," and the continued pursuit of overengineering perfectly good ideas. https://ko-fi.com/unsayablestorm Download it, build ridiculous things, have fun either way. Every contribution increases the probability of future projects by a scientifically significant margin.* *Science has not reviewed this claim.

Credits

Deuterium capsules and Magnetrons come from Nukeguard's Fusion Power, whose fuel burn rate this core matches.

Built with AI assistance - Claude, by Anthropic - as a working partner throughout. Every design decision, every balance number, and all of the in-game testing are mine.

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Threshold Dynamics accepts no responsibility for corridors opened in its name.