I doubt I am the first to suggest this, but having vehicle brakes as a separate item, rather than part of the vehicle controls, seems like a good idea. My basic thoughts are as follows.
[ol][li]If you do not have brakes, you can stop either by rolling friction (same as if you dived from the vehicle) or, crudely, by engine braking (leg power, in the case of foot-crank vehicles). If you don’t have brakes, you don’t have a handbrake.[/li]
[li]Brakes attach to wheels. There would be three kinds of brakes that could be attached to any given wheel: drum brakes, disc brakes, and regenerative brakes.
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[li]Drum brakes and disc brakes would additionally need to be fitted with brake pads. These would range from crude (i.e. scraps of leather) to whatever modern, manufactured varieties you might prefer (and any homebrewed approximations thereof).[/li]
[li]Regenerative brakes would charge the batteries during braking, but would require special high-performance small electric engines to use as generators.[/li]
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[li]Total braking strength determines how quickly the vehicle can stop (up to a friction limit determined by the wheels). If the brakes are attached in a lopsided manner, the vehicle would be much more prone to loss of control on braking. Leather brake pads, racing brake pads, and brake pads that are too weak for the vehicle weight would wear out relatively quickly, but most of the time there will be little need to source replacements.[/li][/ol]
The two big improvements I see from adding these are, first, the additional verisimilitude and customization associated with finding, scavenging, and installing brakes, and second, the additional range on electric vehicles gained by regenerative braking.
I like the idea for having a vehicle part for collecting energy used when braking. I even like the idea of being able to improve your breaking ability by adding on parts. I don’t think we should remove the safety break from the vehicle controls, because the initial learning curve for vehicles is already fairly steep (at least it was for me). How about being able to add break pads or other devices onto vehicle controls?
I quite like this idea, I just thought of a scenario where one of your brakes has been fucked up and you suddenly went into a wild skid after hitting the brakes and thought yeah that’d be sweet. Hitting a mysterious handbrake to stop dead even at pretty high speeds (at high skill) is a bit weird. Vehicle maintenance is already a thing thanks to concrete slabs shrubs so one extra part to repair wouldn’t be too bad, and if you lose the ability to break then you could just drive slower for a while until you replace them so I don’t see any major drawbacks.
I like the idea.
Would add a new non-essential part to vehicles, thus making drivable-but-not-perfect vehicles more common.
Regenerative brakes would be a fair bit of an overkill at the moment, though. Getting electricity is currently far too easy to bother with something like this.
[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:4, topic:9108”]I like the idea.
Would add a new non-essential part to vehicles, thus making drivable-but-not-perfect vehicles more common.[/quote]
Thanks! It would also make more differences between the different cars you find wrecked on the streets - the sports cars would have fancy disc brakes, for example.
Regenerative brakes would be a fair bit of an overkill at the moment, though. Getting electricity is currently far too easy to bother with something like this.
I was mostly thinking of having it because pretty much every electric car in existence would. That said, I thought solar panels charged batteries pretty slowly, last time I tried.
Yeah, it is realistic, but implementing it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.
You’d need to balance it against many factors to make it realistic instead of a free energy generator.
Solar panels work slowly, but you can slap a million of them on top of your car and drive on gas/diesel until batteries charge. Or just drop electric entirely - gas engines are efficient enough not to ever need to go electric.
Vehicles are simply too fuel-efficient at the moment to care about regenerative brakes.
It’d be cool to spice up braking speed. It seems like all the cars do brake at the same speed. Probably the more mass they have the more difficult it should be able for them to decelerate. ( except if you install anti-matter brakes that will just annihilate the vehicle, making it stop in record time! )
Braking speed is usually determined by engine. Since engines give a lot of acceleration at the moment, braking speed is quite huge.
When it’s not determined by the engine (your engine sucks/lacks fuel/is broken), it is equal to 30 * mass coefficient (roughly mass to wheel area ratio).