As i understand it, you need fuel for the reactor to function (the better the reactor the more fuel it's able to convert into power i think).
yes, but nothing mentions that, you have no description of this behavior in neither the reactor nor the capacitor (FTL and "normal") nor the Basic Repair/Fuel entry nor your ship's screen... and because the reactor is something that is really important and "main" in a ship, so i've never thougt about a depency of the reactor/wanted a official explanation ^_^
You can watch that behavior by shooting your weapons. That increased powerusage results in higher fuelusage.
really? The reactor gives you every second the power it can deliver (reactor 1 2000 MJ/s, reactor 2 4000 MJ/s etc), why should it give me more or less (and needs more or less fuel) if i shoot weapons that need more energy? Either because this number isn't that important to the real ouput, or because it just give you the amount of energy you need, and coding this behavoir would be really pointless, wouldn't it? it wouldn't make a difference to the player or the ship or whatever, except the fuel usage... and again, nothing of this is written down somewhere...
You see the same driving your car with activ air-conditioning -> more fuel usage.
The whole comparing isn't imho very accurate, because the reactor isn't a "motor" or something, the energy delivered by the reactor >is< (in that way) your fuel, which can be converted into weapon fire etc... the air-conditioning thingy is also just something, that get's its power from something (the fuel) and convertes it into something useable, so this would be in vegastrike a weapon, which converts power into weapon fire...
And the fuel in the game is just another reactor, just one that doesn't give you more of it inflight, but one which converts fuel into extra boost, overdrive boost...
Making the reactor depending on fuel would simply be a "shifting" of the "main device" of your ship, that device that is the reason why all works...
and the word "reactor" implies this "main device", doesn't it? And this is handled this way in (almost) all SciFi Games/series/etc, because it delivers the "reason why everthing works in a ship", energy...
Of course you also need energy for FTL, which means, no fuel - no energy for FTL and weapons
just that the main capacitor deplets within seconds, and FTL takes some time, enough to reach a planet.. and your main engines works all the time...
I can't imagine what would cause the FTL drain.
sorry, i was a bit unclearly... after your yellow/fuel bar is depleted, you lose all your capacitor power (the red bar) to the shields, and all that is left is the FTL capacitor energy... but when you spec, you need energy, usually about 2000-4000 MJ/s, normally, this isn't any problem for your reactor, but after it's gone because there isn't any fuel this energy is taken by your SPEC engines... also, you need about 150000 MJ to jump to another system, because the reactor isn't able to give you this output as fast as you need it, your FTL capacitor energy is used... (so you need at least a FTL Capacitor and a jump drive to jump, take a good look at your FTL capacitor... i'd lost once my one in a battle, and because you can only get one at a military ship/station, the waiting for a andolian tesla wasn't very funny with that nasty uln fleets on my back
)
you use your overdrive with the TAB Key, they are your afterburners, they give you an extra boost.. sure you never used that? maybe to get away from the planet? but, on a plowshare, it's about 96 tons or whatever... doesn't deplete too fast ^_^
EDIT: ah, and does a reactor output of x MJ/s mean x MJ/s for the main capacitor/weapons and x MJ/s for the FTL Capacitor/spec/jump or is the output parted?