I wonder this since, well, we all know that almost all engines are procedural in their functions, chemical fuels have their variants in terms of performance and operations, such as staged combustion, solids, pressure fed, etc.
What intrigues me a bit are the variants of the dragon engine, I know that at the moment what is most known is thermal nuclear propulsion, since for obvious reasons its operation, performance and general characteristics are pretty known.
I know it would be too much for developers to try to get or do nuclear engine variants, but honestly, the idea of ??a complete procedural nuclear engine strikes me, related to different core functions, fuel injection or nuclear fuel variants, such as uranium salt-water, related to in game technology.
I am not really sure that the turbo pump performance loss is a thing at all, and with (turbo pump) being the only difference in engine cycles it would have to be something else brought in to the engine profiles, I am not ‘rocket xcientist’ or even a buff in this circle, but I would think that the nuclear engine is based on the theoretical advantages that are all but proven to physics(thermal dynamics, and the like) and until you go the route of the fusion ramjet or the push plate/critical mass(fission/fusion/positron) combo then if you get much more power out of it(maybe any) then you are getting less, ‘sci-fi’ and a lot more fantasy. I have a pretty good feeling that the radioactivity acts as turbopump and if you added a turbopump it would trade thrust for isp (only reason would be to escape orbitl) with the shielding and the reactor, ‘saltwater’, to give up its biggest advantages to use in planet. It took me quite awhile to learn that I need to be (practa)at escape velocity before I was counting on that nuclear payload to fire up. I didn’t even realize that anything short of mars had no upside. While I know ppl will be able to pick at my comment but if I am wrong, I will suffer the embarrassment for a chance to see the sr2 toutube video of the feat, orbital or otherwise. I also am stoked to see the lvl of realistic yet ‘out of this world’ engine specifics as the roll out and ramp up to full release, I can see it now, Pedro with an army of coding minions(or kerbal Slave,😬) updates will come out monthly and mods will go mobile. Bet this isn't an uncommon dream around here!