Crafting engines from scratch (tl;dr, no)

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:

  1. 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…
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?).

More than some, sand casting and smelting are both done on the same site. Methods may have evolved over the years from the bloomery to the blast furnace to the arc furnace, but the process of melt and pour hasn’t changed in the last thousand years. (The finishing processes have gotten significantly more technical as the blacksmith evolved into the hand tool and die machinist into the cnc operator in the factory full of fancy robots with people standing around doing random part QA on the robots work and making sure the PLC programs are still working)

I can only assume that you’re implying that since the process has been exercised for a long time, it means it’s a reasonable thing for the survivor to do. It doesn’t make that case at all.

There’s a massive disconnect between the argument that, “Someone did each of the involved steps at some point in the past” and, “The process as a whole is a reasonable thing for an individual to undertake”.

The latter is the argument you need to make if you want engine crafting in the game, and nothing presented here is even approaching making that argument.

Passive observation on the topic, nothing more. You’ve already marked the topic as not going to happen, but the process of metal working is a subject that’s near and dear to me.

You can mix ammonia, bleach and zombie parts to make a serum which can transform you into a mutant, but machining parts and assembling your own engine is somehow too unrealistic for a survivor to accomplish.

Correct: FMS: Frequently Made Suggestions

It’s not just lack of consistency between super science items and every day items. Homemade engines aren’t unheard of. The excuse of realism isn’t applied evenly and certainly seems to be used as an excuse to shut down conversation around things you personally don’t feel like should be included in the game.

“We’re not talking about merely getting an aftermarket block and building it up with a unique rotating assembly, or even a custom head that bolts on an existing block. No, we are far beyond that. This is a ground-up, scratch-built, custom engine—as in, everything, including the block, the heads, and the valvetrain are all one-off parts, custom-built in a home workshop (well, a very well-victualed workshop).”

1 Like

It absolutely is unheard-of. If you read the article you linked, you’ll see the engine they’re referencing is a mixture of prefabricated parts, farmed-out work pieces, custom parts, and modified off-the-shelf parts, AND the in-house team is three people working on it, not one, AND they’re using a commercially-sourced workshop and commercially-sourced materials.

It’s laughably far from the scenario we’re discussing here.

All that aside, the tone of the article is, “this is unheard of, but these guys are doing it”.

Sure, it’s not something you’re going to do with an anvil and a hammer, but it is doable. That article is proof thereof; you just need the right machine tools, a fucktonne of time, and 2.5 fucktonnes of Mechanics. The time and mechanics involved can be reduced by using parts looted from extant engines and/or garages.

Lets look at this from an entirely different perspective: racing simulators. Most of them allow you to modify at minimum the major parts of an engine: block, manifold, flywheel, crankshaft, alternator, air intake, transmission, exhaust. Find a compatible block and manifold, assemble your scrounged or disassembled and lighter to carry parts and wham. Engine. Yes it’s a major over simplification, but it fits two things Theme, and ease of implmentation because you can dump the whole thing to a mod.

what about up-modding already existing engines? as in, turn a V12 into a Monster V12 or something? as in, take en existing engine block and after-marketing it into a more beastly machine. uses more gas but is more powerful and all that.

Like a port and polish or adding a superchager? I’d have to look at the alternator code.

was thinking like… how the engine in mad max gets crazier looking as you upgrade it. huge air intakes and shit.

Nobody’s going to home-make a Tesla motor, obviously - but anybody with a shovel or a ladder could find all the pristine tightly wound copper wire anybody could ever want without leaving their neighborhood: dig up or pull down power line transformers.

Reading, it’s FUNdamental.

Transformer wire is magnet wire.

Not the ones hanging off your light pole. And also not the right gauge. That power transmission line? Steel doped aluminium.

I think the biggest disconnect here is people thinking about winding a transformer and calling it a motor. No, then you have either a transformer, or a linear accelerator. A motor has at least 9 parts that you can’t get off the shelf at an electronics store unless that store happens to be Grainger or someplace similar that specializes in Industrial applications and actually DOES sell replacement off the shelf specialty parts for things like stators and commutators.

The realistic in-game approach to electric engines is the real-world approach to electric engines: allowing 1 motor per-wheel to be installed, but that would require a re-write on the electric motor to A: eliminate or massively reduce the mechanics required to install extra motors, and B: require the x requires y code like the seat belt to include “electric motor requires wheel”. Which is a change I’d be in favor of actually seeing in the electric motor department. It means your electric powered death mobile could go 984958394/mph if it wanted to, assuming you had enough minireactors to run it. It’d make electric vehicles a little more viable for extremely heavy load vehicles as well. One of the Japanese mods I use turns a cargo rack into an opaque non-moveable tile of triple the storage size and I tend to line my outer walls with 8 of them. My trucks get pretty heavy after a while because I’m a horrible hoarder.

actually, the way those (IRL) super massive trucks work is the big engine up front is actually a generator and it powers electric motors on the wheels. except the caterpillar 797F which has a massive 100L V20 and is drive train.

Do they use torque motors on the wheels to prevent motor damage?