And you’re getting that half-mile (a continuous half-mile, or remotely manageable sections? That makes a pretty big difference) of wire from where? You’re not pulling it out of walls, you’re not pulling it out of electronics, it’s not even reasonable to harvest from an existing motor assembly. Again, we’re back to a modern supply chain supplying just the right product to make the solution work as well as it does.
Then you have things like this: Charged EVs | Elon Musk: Cooling, not power-to-weight ratio, is the challenge with AC induction motors - Charged EVs
Amazingly it’s not as simple as wrapping sufficient wire around an axle, so I stand by my statement that:
Your limitation is going to be much more around:
- Supply stock. Even if you can find various stock lying around, you can pretty much never count on having just the right part or feedstock for your processes. There’s a lot you can do with standard stock and just over-engineering everything, but neither of those helps if you want to make a custom engine block. For that you either need an ungodly sized block of metal to mill out, or dive into large-scale casting on top of all the other processes you need to be an expert in. This contributes to the next problem…
- Time investment. While you can come up with a scrappy solution to every individual problem involved in the engine-making process, netting you an engine if not a great engine, the sum of these problems is pretty overwhelming. This requires innumerable diversions from the central task of making an engine to build tools, secure parts, make designs, test designs, discard designs, find workarounds, etc… Rendering the sum total of time required to create even a single usable truck engine to be truly astronomical.
- Scavenging vs Crafting. Why the hell would someone expend this ludicrous amount of effort to build an engine from scratch when there are literally millions of working engines scattered all over the countryside? It’s an utterly nonsensical thing to do, and that robs of it of any potential value it might have had.
- Game engine support. As outlined above, creating an engine “from scratch” requires a massive amount of operations, materials, knowledge, etc… and there is little to no payoff to adding all the content and code necessary to handle it.
- Game direction. Fundamentally this isn’t a game about crafting and rebuilding. It’s a game about scavenging and surviving. Most crafting-oriented games work by applying a ludicrous amount of simplification to the processes they are representing, consistently hand-waving away any and all obstacles to stitching together their crafting trees. I’m not interested in doing that, and a direct result is that when items requiring extensive tooling and intermediate parts come up, I’m not interested in treating them as anything other than a black box that can be shifted around.
That’s a truly massive oversimplification. Yes you can in principle sand-cast a blank to mill out into an engine block, but now you’re talking about getting into large-scale casting (and probably some amount of smelting, otherwise where are you getting your alloys with beneficial properties for engine-building?).