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Power & Operation

A reactor is a heat engine you steer. Fuel fissions and pours heat into the core; your whole job is deciding where that heat goes. It has three fates, and only one of them pays:

Turbine → Drive Cells. Heat the exchangers pull off the fuel runs the coolant loop, spins a turbine, and mints Drive Cells — the warp fuel that moves capital fleets. This is the only fate with value.
Vent → wasted, but safe. Heat your Heat Vents reject to open space is gone: no Drive Cells, no danger. A well-vented core throws away heat it can't sell rather than let it pile up.
Pile-up → meltdown. Heat that outruns both capture and venting doesn't vanish. It backs up in the fuel, bleeds into a hull-heat pool, and when that pool hits the ceiling the core breaches. No reactor is meltdown-proof.

Run the core so the turbine takes the biggest share and the vents mop up the rest, and you out-produce every other generator. Push it so heat piles up faster than it clears, and you melt it. The throttle is how you pick.

Throttle & the bands

**The control rods are the throttle.** Every Fuel Assembly sits next to a Control Rod; throttling up slides the rods out of the fuel (more fission, more heat), throttling down slides them back in. There is no separate power dial — the rod position is the number on the console.

Throttle maps onto three bands, and the console tells you where each one starts for your build (they move with your cooling, fuel layout, and plating):

Band	What it means	Leave it running?
Cruise	Production balances cooling; the core self-holds	Yes — safe to leave
Push	Output exceeds local cooling; heat creeps up	No — attended only
Redline	Heat outruns everything; the hull pool fills	No — it melts

Cruise is the safe-to-leave band. Capture plus venting plus passive hull loss keep pace with production, so heat never piles up. A T1 starter kit at about 45% throttle holds a steady ~1,000 Drive Cells per hour and never comes near meltdown — the shipped-forgiving default.
Push trades safety for throughput: more Drive Cells per hour, but the fuel runs hotter and the uranium burns faster, so a rod that lasts hours at cruise is spent sooner. Production now outpaces cooling, so hull heat climbs; the core stays fine only for as long as the headroom lasts. Stay at the console.
Redline is past the point cooling can ever catch up. Heat piles into the hull pool, the pool fills, and the core breaches. Nothing self-corrects here.

The console's cruise and push ceilings aren't guesses — they're computed from your actual exchangers, vents, plating, and fuel, so "safe to leave" is honest for the reactor in front of you.

Attention, not babysitting

A cruising reactor asks for nothing. There is no attention meter draining in the background, no upkeep timer, no "tend it every N minutes." Attention is event-driven: the reactor speaks up when you change something (throttle up, reload, rebuild) or when a real condition crosses a line (hull heat climbing, a hot spot forming, fuel running low). Between events, silence means healthy.

This self-hold is the reactor's demand-follower: the control rods trim the power smoothly toward the throttle set-point you chose and hold it there, with Doppler feedback (fuel heats → reactivity dips) riding on top as a small, self-stabilising nudge. Power parks at your set-point; what cooling decides is whether that power is thermally sustainable — inside the cruise band it is, so hull heat stays flat and you can walk away. Past cruise, the set-point outruns cooling and heat piles up, which is why the push band needs you present.

Drive Cells & the economy

The turbine's output accrues as Drive Cells in the reactor's own output buffer. You collect them at the Core Console (or the Fuel Port) and they drop into your inventory — from there you spend or stock them like any Drive Cell, the universal energy token every other system burns: a capital-fleet warp jump, aquaponics Grow Lamps, jetpacks. A reactor doesn't mint a private currency — it feeds the one pool that already powers everything, and faster than any other generator when run well.

That's the point of the whole build: fissile fuel in, warp fuel out. A cruising T1 core quietly banks ~1,000 Drive Cells an hour in the buffer while you're off doing something else; collect them when you're ready to move a fleet.

SCRAM & safety

SCRAM slams every control rod fully home and kills the chain reaction. It's the panic button: one action drops the throttle to zero, fission stops, and the core coasts down as the vents and passive loss bleed off the heat that's already there. Use it the instant the console calls a breach — you'll see "hull heat critical — throttle down NOW or it melts down" at RED, and a softer "hull heat climbing — throttle down, add vents, or SCRAM" at AMBER before that.

SCRAM stops new heat; it doesn't teleport away the heat already in the core. A very hot core still needs its vents and hull loss to shed the backlog, so SCRAM early — while there's headroom — rather than at the cliff edge.

One caveat lives in the breeder: a core that has over-bred into Pu-240 carries a spontaneous-fission background that SCRAM can't fully quench, leaving a residual power floor. A clean burner has no such floor — SCRAM takes it straight to zero. If SCRAM won't fully settle a core, that's the Pu-240 telling you the burn ran too long — it consolidates to Nuclear Waste on withdrawal, so there's nothing to do but clear it out and reload clean.

The structural fixes, when the console keeps warning, are always the same: more Heat Vents (shed more), more exchangers and turbines (capture more), or simply throttle back into cruise and let it self-hold.

Power & Operation

Throttle & the bands

Attention, not babysitting

Drive Cells & the economy

SCRAM & safety

See also