This fukken engine

[Firepower]

For some reason no matter what I do I can't get the engine to run above 100kw and even then it's not stable. I often see the engine going unstarted a lot of rounds. At least when we had the singularity engine it was started almost every round. I contribute this to the fact that we don't have a tremendously detailed guide on how to start the engine in the Wiki, whereas the guide to start the singularity engine is very detailed and step-by-step.


Perhaps someone that knows what they're doing could write a guide?

[ClockworkCupcake]

There's an entire in-depth guide in-game as paper, with multiple copies scattered throughout engineering!

... which won't do you much good since the set-up it details is not so great. Read the guide to work out which valves need to be open, chuck a single can of plasma into each loop, run it off the furnaces, you can get it up within five minutes and go redecorate the bar or explore space or whatever you like.

If you want it step-by-step:

COLD LOOP:
1. Connect a plasma canister to one of the ports.
2. Open both valves in the cold loop room.
3. Open the cold loop inlet and outlet valves in the engine room.

HOT LOOP:
1. Connect a plasma canister to one of the ports. (The lower ones - the ports directly outside the combustion chamber feed into the combustion chamber.)
2. Open the valve for the feed from the canister, the one directly after that, and the bypass valve (it's the one that's just below the little corridor off the combustion chamber)
3 a: With furnaces: Fill all the furnaces with char from the cold loop room, turn them on.
3 b: With combustion: Fill the combustion chamber with whatever gas you want to try. Hit the ignition switch so they catch fire. (If they don't ignite, your gas mix probably has issues!) Close the bypass valve, open the two valves directly above it instead.
4. Open the hot loop inlet and outlet valves in the engine room.

You should have power now: check the generator. If it's still at 0 kw you missed a valve somewhere. There are additional, labeled valves for auxiliary gas ports and for venting the loops but you don't really need them with the furnace setup I've given here.

Set the SMESes in the room under the hot loop room. You should have at least 400kw output, so you can set their inputs to max and output to whatever - I usually do 100k.

You can bring your output up further while keeping things stable by adding a second canister of plasma to the cold loop, or possibly by using different fuel in the furnaces, but really, experiment with it. You'll want to use the combustion for ~pro burnz~, which are beyond the scope of a step-by-step guide like this anyway.

Unless you've screwed up badly somewhere, this guide will give you 400k-800kw output for most (all?) of an average round without the generator exploding or anything. Reload the furnaces if they burn out but eh, at that point the SMESes will have charged enough to last 'til the round ends.