I have added a automatic vehicle repair system to a branch of my fork. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.
While you could travel at the speed of 64000 miles per hour in a normal weinermobile, this isn’t something you should want. It isn’t something that you should aspire to. It isn’t even something that you should think too much about.
It will kill you, it will eat all of your gas and send you soaring through ten miles of forest before disintegrating on the most resilient tree in the forest. You can’t control it. Nobody can.
Anyway, after that PSA, let me elaborate in a less ominous way.
I wondered what would happen if you didn’t cap vehicle’s repair, to that effect I added a part with its own special flag. Every turn it would increase the hp of each part of the vehicle by 10 points, without checking the normal maximum hp.
This has interesting effects on the game, effects that nobody probably thinks about. For one thing, engine power increases asymptotically as HP is increased over it’s maximum. This comes at a price, as fuel consumption also increases at roughly the same proportion.
Reactors are really strange. The fuel load of the reactors was reported as having doubled within an hour of adding the repair system and turning it on. It did not appear to add electricity to the battery.
The battery also acted oddly, but not as strangely as a reactor. I am not certain of how many charges of battery is equivalent to a single full storage battery, but it took 1000 portions of batteries to recharge. This seems like a lot because it is.
With that charge, it was sufficient to put my atomic sports car at the speed of 6000 miles per hour. I don’t know for certain, but I think that the game isn’t meant to allow any of this nonsense.
Theoretically, it should be possible to survive a crash at the maximum speed of the normal atomic sports car. In this case, that is very much not true.
The efficacy of all the parts other than the engine, does not scale to the exponential scaling of the engines. This results in terrifying results. For clarification, 64000 miles per hour is equivalent to 28 610.56 m/s.
In real life, this might result in a crater roughly within 1 part in 8 of the Chicxulub crater.
I will acheive relativistic velocity.
I will exceed the speed of light. I will tell you what lies on the other side of the speed of light. Or I will die trying.
— later on
As it turns out, trying this sort of thing is incredibly liable to get your survivor killed very, very quickly.
In any case, it seems that travelling at the speed of light is one of those things that you should only attempt on a nice sunny New England day if you are a photon.
Travelling through a forest at wood’s Cherenkov speed is a difficult thing to acheive at the the best of times. Though it does often result in scenic craters throughout the landscape as markers to mankind’s follies, almost as much as the Cataclysm itself.
Self improving vehicles are something that, in this game, at this point, should not be pursued further. And for the love of god, don’t try to go back in time by going faster than the speed of light. You’ll hit a tree. This will result in little survivor giblets ending up strewn over a line hundreds, if not thousands of miles long.
You might end up preventing the cataclysm by causing one much more immediate problem than even zombies. The car-induced winter will cause crops to fail across the entire world.
The other immediate effect to this action is to destroy the majority of the New England metropolitan areas. Painting shadows across the walls that the shockwave does not topple, marking forever more the locations of those poor human beings reduced to nothing but a silhouette on a single concrete wall.
Invariably, one of these shadows will be making the thumbs up sign, marking for eternity the indefensible optimism of humanity.
As another result, you may very well start a nuclear war. Probably less detrimental to human life than the cataclysm.
When the governmental investigation starts, they will find, at the very bottom of the crater, a single license plate for a car that still exists in one piece. They will question the owner of the car, and find absolutely nothing to convict them, and still proceed with convicting them anyway.
So take it from me, please, you don’t want the automotive singularity, you also don’t want it to happen with you driving the car.
Thank you for reading
- that username.
