Fast forward a few months ...

The way the game will work is each piece of technology will have a "wave function", which is shown here as the curved 3 line band.

There are four minerals required for the "L2 Scanner", Quartzious, Laminsite, Thertize and Browlemite.  Each of these minerals will have a grade, 0 to 100, and the grades available to the player are shown as green ticks.  The game picks a grade required for the perfect wave, and this is shown as a white tick.

When the player has all 4 ideal grades for the device, then the device uses 1 unit per second (u/s).  When the player does not have the right grades, they have to figure out a set of chambers to alter the flow of energy to match the ideal wave.  These chambers (shown as the circles 2,3,4) are fuel hogs.  So the player can get high efficiency at 13.87 u/s.  This might not be a big deal for one device, but L2 Scanners are used all over the place, and if you had 150, then the player needs to be able to mine:

• 150 Scanners
• 13.87 unit/second
• 3600 second/hour
  = 7,489,800 mined units/hour

This configuration only works if you have a supply source of 7.5 Muh (Millions of units/hour), but as soon as you add your 151st scanner, then the game won't work as well; how the game reacts to a fuel shortage, has not been written.  If you had ideal mineral grades, then you could support nearly 2100 scanners for the same fuel load.

Note: The 7.5 Muh value is required for all of the mineral sources.  

Fuel sources are limited, so a specific configuration at the game start might not be what you use at the game end because of how you consumed the sources.  An 18Bu deposit (Billion Units) ... means you can power your fleet for 2400 hours (3 months), but if you had ideal units (~46 months).

Meanwhile ...

The last time I posted anything about this game was more than two years ago.  The major issue has always been scope.  Early game work was always good, but then shipbuilding became to complicated.

In all versions of the game have been the idea of a reactor vessel, and in development, I kept postponing the development of the reactor vessel because I didn't exactly know how I was going to make it work. In the latest revision, I started with the reactor vessel first, and have created a super cool mechanism for controlling the vessel where the player has direct control.

Here is a prototype view of the Reactor Vessel:

With manifolds: