It’s taken me a while to read through all of these posts. Damn, this topic exploded pretty fast!
My thoughts on beacons is a bit different than what I have read so far… rather than gathering fuel from resources to power a beacon, what if instead you gain power charge from work? This has a few of its own pros and cons, but I’ll go into a bit more detail for clarity first.
What I mean is that by doing actions in game, you slowly build a charge to power your beacon, much like charging your phone battery. No matter how long you charge your beacon, it has a max amount of discharge time before you need to begin charging again. (It’s a hotly debated topic, but my opinion is 100 days, 1 day = 1% charge) know those lovely glowy cubes on all of our tools and weapons? We simply know them as “oort cubes” but what if they function as some sort of kinetic energy transfer device that stores energy from work done with that item and transfers it directly to your beacon? Effectively, simply being active in game will charge your beacon.
Pros:
Powering a beacon is not a chore, just play the game.
You don’t need to return home to maintain the beacon.
Any profesion can charge their beacon without having to switch to finding fuel.
Cons:
Not tradeable
Not transferable
Possible fixes for these cons, perhaps if your beacon is at 100% capacity, you can then charge tradeable batteries that can be traded or socketed into your own beacon to add additional days to a beacons life? Perhaps batteries could also be used to power other devices besides just beacons such as airships, or consumed by a tool to allow that tool to output extra power (ie break speed for hammers, or damage for weapons)
TL:DR work is converted to energy that charges beacon’s capacitors, and excess work is stored in tradeable batteries.