Thruster

A ship with a hybrid set of ion and hydrogen thrusters is power-efficient in space and can also handle planetary lift-off and landing

A Thruster is ^[1] a small rocket engine on a spacecraft used to make controlled alterations in its flight path or altitude.

For specific thruster blocks, see:

Usage

In Space Engineers, the thruster is the keystone block for all flying craft. Build at least one thruster block facing in each cardinal direction (plus a source of Power and a Gyroscope) to be able to stabilize and achieve controlled flight with a mobile grid.^[2] Asymmetrical thruster placement is allowed and will not cause tailspinning, as it would in real life or Kerbal Space Program.

The max speed is capped at 100 meters per second (360 km per hour) due to limitations of the physics engine that causes faster objects to phase through obstacles.^[3]

Thrusters use up 15 PCU.

Each thruster type has strengths and weaknesses in different environments. As of Space Engineers release 1.157013, there are three variations of thrusters in the game, each with two size classes:

Ion Thruster — optimised for the vacuum of space
Atmospheric Thruster — optimised for planetary atmospheres
Hydrogen Thruster — equally strong in vacuum and atmospheres, but requires voluminous Hydrogen tanks

For technical details, see Thruster mechanics.

Requirements

Important: If you have Progression enabled:

To unlock Atmospheric Thrusters and Ion Thrusters, you must build a Cockpit or Remote Control first.
To unlock Hydrogen Thrusters, you must build an O2/H2 Generator and a Hydrogen Tank first.

Atmospheric and Hydrogen thrusters can be built with mid-level materials: Hydrogen Thrusters especially need Cobalt for Metal Grids, whereas Atmospheric Thrusters need a lot of Motors. Ion thrusters even require Platinum and Gold for their Thruster Components.

Gallery

A ship with a hybrid set of ion and hydrogen thrusters
SOTF Patrol Bot with SciFi Ion Thrusters
SOTF Shuttle with SciFi Ion Thrusters
Big Blue Ship with Ion Thrusters
Moon Rover "Drop Pod" with Hydrogen Thrusters
B-60 Bulk Freighter with large Atmospheric Thrusters and small Hydrogen Thrusters
Constructor_mk.1 with Atmospheric Thrusters
A small planetary shuttle with atmospheric thrusters