The Scoop on the Fuel Scoop…
Early on in the game, when I was flying around in low tonnage ships like the sidewinder and adder, topping up my fuel tank when landing at stations was pretty cheap, in the 20-50 CR range, usually, and low enough that buying a fuel scoop seemed totally superfluous. Plus, if I wanted to try one out, I’d have to replace something else, and something important, more than like. But that all changed when I finally bought my first cobra, filled it up with 20 tonnes of tea, and delivered it to Ising Station station in Neto five hops away: 600 CR!!! Maybe it’s just the skinflint in me, but that’s when I decided enough was enough! My cobra had an open slot, and I purchased the cheapest fuel scoop available to try it out.
In short, it’s been worth it. Oh, maybe not that first scoop. After some playing around with it, I got one a little better. The more expensive ones (understandably) scoop more fuel per second, so you spend less time working on your ship’s tan up close and personal before you top up your tank.
So what happens, for those who haven’t bothered trying one, is this. When you have a fuel scoop on your ship, and you fly close enough to a star, it automatically stats scooping in fuel to fill your fuel tank. You don’t need to active it, assign a new button to it, nada. All you need to do is skim the star’s surface while in Frame Shift/Supercruise and not fry. Because naturally your temperature will go up, and quickly. When you’re close enough, you’ll see a line around the star, perhaps indicating where the bulk of its atmosphere ends, and you want to just skim that line. When your temp gets too high, you’ll automatically brake and take some heat damage, so before that happens pull up, cool off, and then come around another run. But, if your shields are good enough (and maybe if you put 4 pips into SYS using your power distribution), your fuel scoop has a fast enough draw, and you get the throttle settings just right (for me it’s between 0.1c and 0.2c), you can essentially surf around the star at around 110% heat buildup until you’re done.
Now, what I’ve been doing is that if I’m delivering some goods to a station several hops away, when I come out of Frame Shift, I’ll take a single pass at the star I come out on top of as I align myself towards my next target system. It usually won’t refill my tank of the fuel spent from the last jump, but I also won’t spend more than a few seconds doing so, and often times lining up to the next system takes me to the other side of the star anyway. Once I reach my final destination system I’ll go to the effort of taking a minute or two to refill my fuel tank. So far that has worked out pretty well for me.
A quick note about your fuel tank. Your fuel tank is the one that loses chunks when you jump from system to system, and that’s what the fuel scoop fills. Just above it is your reservoir tank, and that’s used for in-system travel. When it empties, it automatically refills from fuel in your fuel tank, using up maybe 3% of the fuel from the fuel tank to do so. You can think of the reservoir tank as the volume of fuel that’s actually in your engine when you’re putt-putting around in-system, and your fuel tank as where it gets it from when it needs more. And the bigger, system-to-system engines just take it directly from the fuel tank.
In short, a fuel scoop is pretty much essential for exploring (as Rock8man recently discovered), but is still pretty useful for everyone else, especially once you start flying around in higher tonnage ships.