This is my first post and I hope you find this useful. There may be something about xml that I do not know, in which case please tell me. Also, some of you may very well know this, in which case please also let me know.

The fuel efficiency of a plane’s engine(s) (or the lack thereof) may be a defining trait for said airplane. Unfortunately, there is no way that I know of for tweaking fuel efficiency with XML in SP. Of course, to make engines less efficient, you can make engines that face opposing instructions etc. but I’m specifically wanting to increase fuel efficiency in engines. Of course, you can always use a less fuel-hungry engine and increase powerMultiplier but that doesn’t really solve the problem. I have thought of another solution with its own tradeoff and I want to share it here.

I realized that the only setting pertaining to engine performance is powerMultiplier. The exhaust settings only change aesthetics (probably). But there is also the InputController. We can scale the input here. And, to the best of my knowledge, powerMultiplier doesn’t change anything except thrust. We can therefore use this fact and increase powerMultiplier and proportionally decrease max in the InputController. This effectively lowers the thrust setting of a more powerful engine, decreasing fuel consumption.

There is, however, a tradeoff. Engine noise is dependent on the type of engine and the thrust setting. With a forced lower power setting, the sound is now the engine sound for a very low power setting even at full power, for example. This may just be a nuisance for some and a catastrophe for others.

A similar strategy can be used for fuel dumping with a group of VTOL engines not connected to any nozzles. I have first seen this in the Emirates A380 by @TheSavageManZ here You can set the max setting very high to dump fuel without using additional engines.

Thank you for reading. Please comment and upvote if you find it useful.