General opinion on the new fuel system

[StahlRitter]

In my opinion, the current fuel values are too low. I believe a tank should take you as much as 4-5 overmap tiles in a regular car. I can understand and agree that huge deathmobiles should suck more, but be proportionate to that. I also feel that the current offroad penalties are too punishing. Yes, no car should be able to vroom around off road the way we used to, but you should be able to go about 1/3 to half speed.
Hopefully this is the kind of feedback you wanted. Overall, I miss the awesome distance crushing offroad mobility, but I can see how knocking this down to a more realistic thing can add mid-game duration, much as the current skill gain on melee or ranged skills does now (which I like, btw). I think they’re too severe now, though.
I submit that at least some of this could be mitigated with offroad suspensions, better tires (although, really, a pair of tank treads should offer much more offroad mobility than they do now; I run a half track design and get … 18%?) skid plates, stuff like that. And I expect that once multiple engines are possible again, we’ll see performance go up. Currently I can put two engines in, but only run one at a time.
Just my 2cents.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

According to Wiki, the Merkava has an operational range of 310 kilometers.

EDIT: Whoops Meant 500 kilometers.

[Charlesilv4]

Jeez this topic is still going X^p

[DeclanFrost]

Jeez this topic is still going X^p

It’ll keep going til the issue’s fixed, I expect.
Btw, is it fixed? Haven’t played in a week and can’t download til next week, so I wanna know.

[XaoG]

[quote=“Charlesilv4, post:43, topic:13008”]Jeez this topic is still going X^p

It’ll keep going til the issue’s fixed, I expect.
Btw, is it fixed? Haven’t played in a week and can’t download til next week, so I wanna know.[/quote]
Given the trends, it will keep going until someone makes a mod to re-implement something close to the old values.

[DeclanFrost]

[quote=“DeclanFrost, post:44, topic:13008”][quote=“Charlesilv4, post:43, topic:13008”]Jeez this topic is still going X^p

It’ll keep going til the issue’s fixed, I expect.
Btw, is it fixed? Haven’t played in a week and can’t download til next week, so I wanna know.[/quote]
Given the trends, it will keep going until someone makes a mod to re-implement something close to the old values.[/quote]
Wish someone would do that already.

[PaultheNerd]

Downloaded the latest experimental, fired up a new character, started playing, slowly repaired a sports car in a village works, filled it up, first drive…

It drove for about 2 in game minutes at it’s top speed of 202 mph before running out of a FULL tank of petrol. As someone who plays with the city spacing set quite high (for the good old long drives from place to place) this pretty much ruins the fun for me, I guess I’ll have to tweak the JSON until I find a fun balance. I understand that cars perhaps lasted a little too long before, but this seems completely the other way.

I’ll have to mess about and see how it works for more sensible cars but I’d imagine a sports car could go for a hour or so at high speed before running out.

[Zanos]

[quote=“XaoG, post:45, topic:13008”][quote=“DeclanFrost, post:44, topic:13008”][quote=“Charlesilv4, post:43, topic:13008”]Jeez this topic is still going X^p

It’ll keep going til the issue’s fixed, I expect.
Btw, is it fixed? Haven’t played in a week and can’t download til next week, so I wanna know.[/quote]
Given the trends, it will keep going until someone makes a mod to re-implement something close to the old values.[/quote]
Wish someone would do that already.[/quote]
Isn’t the Huge Vehicles mod already in the latest experimentals? I’m using it right now, at least. It was specifically designed to get close to old values. Athough it seems like they’re still much higher than before.

[Vastin]

I like the general direction of the new fuel efficiency and engine power changes, but I do feel like they probably overshot the mark substantially. Vehicles went from being overpowered to being frustrating and annoying to manage, with ranges so short that you can easily drain a tank in a quick afternoon ride. Easy enough to mod over in the JSON’s for those of us who know where to make the changes, but probably not fun for most, and certainly not realistic.

Oh, one thing that is probably not on the radar that should be - vehicle momentum seems to be based mostly on velocity, not velocity*mass. Even if a 10mt vehicle is ‘only’ going 34kmh, it should still roll over a bush with only a minor slowdown or impact a zombie pretty brutally, but that does not seem to be the case right now. Pretty much any obstacle will bring that vehicle to a stuck halt.

[Vastin]

So, a quick test of just HOW bad electric energy efficiency is now, an 9.6mt APC with 16000 charge (4 storage batteries):
Moving 200m speed-32 discharges nearly a quarter of the vehicles power. Assuming that move cost increases linearly with vehicle weight (which may be a bad assumption), I can calculate that it costs ~19 energy to move one metric ton one tile.

Examining the recharge rate of the vehicle with 16 standard solar panels installed, I can further see that each panel generates ~100 energy per game hour, thus one solar panel can move 1 metric ton ~5 meters per hour.

In more expansive terms, it means that a 10mt APC with four storage batteries and 16 panels can travel only 800 meters before it is completely discharged, and will require ~100 hours of full sunlight - say about a game week - to fully recharge assuming no other drains (rechargers/fridge/lights) on the system.

In other words, the basic solar APC build can currently manage about 100 meters a day, has a max speed slightly above walking, and can’t maneuver through a bush.

[Vastin]

Assuming that mass is linear, this puts a standard 4 door solar car (900kg) at a range of ~4700 meters, or 148 map tiles, which isn’t too bad - but with 4 panels it’ll take that car 200 hours of direct sunlight, or something on the order of TWO WEEKS to recharge.

This gives them a overall move rate of about 23 meters per hour (in the day), or less than 1 map tile.

So overall, I’d say that electric engine efficiency is dramatically too low, but storage energy density is actually too high. Why do I say that? Because of tools.

Now, in relation to how other objects draw power, solar panels are much more realistic. You can charge a lot of items and keep things running pretty well with standard solar panels - minifridge is kind of a beast, but most of your tools would only represent a moderate drain against a good set of panels - my 16 panel APC can generally keep up with my welder’s draw during extended repair sessions. Increasing the panel rate substantially would render tool drain completely inconsequential, which we presumably don’t want.

So in order for tool drain to remain meaningful against your vehicle batteries, it might be that the correct balance approach is to substantially reduce the amount of energy that storage batteries hold, and very dramatically increase the efficiency of electric motors, to bring them down in line with what the panels are currently generating, rather than the other way around.

So you’d be looking at a world here a standard storage battery probably holds around 10k charge, rather than 40k, and where electric motors are something on the order of 8x as energy efficient, resulting in an approximate doubling of electric range, and a 8x increase in range/hour. Tools would draw down your batteries a good deal faster, but would be unchanged against panel output. Given that it would take damn near forever for a welder to draw down a full storage battery now, that seems fine.

How this would compare against gas systems currently, I’ve no idea. I have to go install a gas engine and do similar tests. Needless to say that gas engines should have better energy density per tank than batteries.

[kevin.granade]

Thanks for the feedback everyone, just to let you know what I’m thinking about these issues:
Petroleum fuel density/vehicle range:
This is definitely on the low side, we’re trying to sort out some MPG type tests to make sure we can set this correctly in the future, probably scaled to how far apart cities are in default mapgen.
Vehicle mass and collisions:
The things people complain about here (losing momentum or being stopped by isolated bushes, on the other hand small vehicles plowing through building walls) are undesirable bugs, and we’ll fix them as soon as we figure out how to make that happen.
Solar panel power output:
This seems low relative to appliances like refrigerators or water purifiers, probably need to rescale something.
Battery vs electric vehicle range:
This might be on the low side, it’s hard to tell because most of the examples are megavehicles instead of sensibly-sized electric cars.
Solar vehicle range:
I haven’t seen any reports of this not acting like I expect it to. A modern solar/electric car that can even approach continuous locomotion is massively under weight compared to a standard car, and even then tends to only be tested in highway conditions where stops and starts are nonexistent. Even if we crank up the efficiency of cells to their theoretical maximum (by roughly 5x, which would be a reasonable thing to do with “quantum cells” from labs), we’re possibly reaching enough power to operate a small car at a reasonable duty cycle, but its not remotely reasonable to run a heavy utility vehicle from solar, much less an armored vehicle.

[Vastin]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:52, topic:13008”]Solar vehicle range:
I haven’t seen any reports of this not acting like I expect it to. A modern solar/electric car that can even approach continuous locomotion is massively under weight compared to a standard car, and even then tends to only be tested in highway conditions where stops and starts are nonexistent. Even if we crank up the efficiency of cells to their theoretical maximum (by roughly 5x, which would be a reasonable thing to do with “quantum cells” from labs), we’re possibly reaching enough power to operate a small car at a reasonable duty cycle, but its not remotely reasonable to run a heavy utility vehicle from solar, much less an armored vehicle.[/quote]

Ok, so while I agree with you on the real world utility of solar vehicles, I think that if you stick to your guns on this one, it eliminates them from your world fiction altogether. Which is to say, we don’t have solar vehicles on the road today because they are completely infeasible. As you say, the only existent ones are silly little prototype vehicles with no real-world utility.

However, in the world of CDDA, the road is basically littered with solar vehicles. This could not be the case unless:

1. The government decided to force a substantial segment of the population to buy virtually non-functional vehicles.
   or
2. The physics/technology of the CDDA world are sufficiently divorced from our own that solar efficiency has rendered such vehicles road-worthy and mass marketable. The solar cars in the game at this moment do not fit that description. Their recharge rate is far too low for even occasional use - any sensible owner would rip the non-functional panels off to save weight and plug the thing in.

In other words, ELECTRIC vehicles work ok in CDDA - the battery energy density is monstrously high and the motor efficiency incredibly poor, but meh - however SOLAR vehicles shouldn’t exist at all. No one is going to wait two weeks for their car to charge so that they can go buy a loaf of bread.

Now, to be fair, there’s a ton of unused surface area on most of the solar cars in CDDA. They have a measly 4 panels when they should probably have 8-10 minimum for their size. Recharge rates would still be far too low to make them road worthy, but it means that the difference in engine efficiency and/or panel generation rates aren’t quite as bad as I make it sound above. Still really bad though. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would mount a much larger array of panels in their back-yard and swap battery packs when they got home or to a recharge station, rather than trying to put panels on their vehicle - or just plug into a utility grid.

[kevin.granade]

One option you’re neglecting is that they’re plug-in + solar.
Another is that we strip them down to being single-occupant commuter vehicles.
Either of these would be acceptable, puling them entirely would be problematic since it eliminates the main source of solar panels.

[Vastin]

Yards could certainly have solar panels, if that’s the main point to having them.

I think part of the problem is that anyone entering the game (without the benefit of these long design discussions), can take a look and see solar cars all over the road and think ‘ah, that’s great, just what I need in the apocalypse, a car that runs w/o fuel! Sure it’ll be slower and have limited range, but I need something dependable.’

Then of course they get in the thing, drive it a few blocks and its battery is dead, and they think ‘oh, I’ll just wait a few hours and keep going’. 3 days later they’re still standing next to the car, having looted everything a 3 block radius and the battery needle has just edged above ‘E’ - enough to get them another few blocks down if they’re lucky - and they’re thinking ‘WTF is this bullshit? I can walk 20 times faster than this car goes. Fuck this shit.’

And they’re not wrong. I mean, except for the part where they can probably walk around 50 times faster than the car goes.

It’s a matter of expectations conflicting with a game reality that seems deeply at odds with what it is depicting. In a world with lots of solar cars, you simply expect the things to actually work. Very few people outside of our little circle is ever going to sit down and do energy density calculations and say ‘oh, ok, that makes perfect sense…’

For my part the thing that bothers me is that for any application OTHER than motoring around, solar panels produce OODLES of energy. I don’t know the real numbers, but I’m going to bet that an electric arc welder blows through Kw/H like nobody’s business, but the solar panels - even in their very weak current form - can keep up with that kind of drain quite easily.

[StopSignal]

Are you suggesting to strip solar vehicles out of the game? Why? I mean I understand it from a realism point of view, I guess, but they are just fun to play with, and it’s nice to have the alternative and the choice. Solar vehicles come with their own challenges different from regular vehicles, and they work well enough in the game already. Also, CDDA is placed in a timeline were robots and power armors exist, I can’t see why we wouldn’t have some hypothetical good enough solar cars for common use.

Edit: Taking a look at your last post, I see your point. What about just buffing them and stripping the cars of some weight?

I do think they are actually just plug electric cars that have the solar panels for some extra kilometers in a road trip, I guess.

[Vastin]

So, just for reference, I’ve pulled together a number of real world kWh costs for activities that would be fairly common to the CDDA world so you can get a sense for how much power things might draw on average:

1 kWh will:

• Light a 60W bulb for 16.6 hours (damn, incandescent light bulbs SUCK)
• Drive a standard electric car (Tesla - 2 metric tons) ~6000 meters.
• Operate the average stove for about 40 minutes.
• Operate a small personal space heater for 40-80m.
• Operate a standard (full size) refrigerator for about 12-24 hours.
• Boil about 12.5 liters of water
• Run a 200Amp arc welder intermittently (25% on) for about an hour.
• Be generated by a 1m^2 solar panel in good conditions at 20% efficiency in about 5 hours.
• Can be stored in about 384 AA alkaline batteries, sorta. (this is a rough conversion, but powering your arc welder off of all those batteries you scavenged out of the electronics store is probably NOT feasible.)

If I take those values, it suggests that a 2 ton car with 4m^sq solar panels of good efficiency in direct sunlight could probably travel a cumulative 4.8km/hour of charging. Not really viable for the real world, but vastly greater than what the standard CDDA solar car could manage - though we have to allow for some matters of scale. CDDA’s world is only ‘meters’ on the small scale. The actual towns and objects in the world are packed very close together, so I think you have to multiply travel distances by at least 2x to approximate anything like real distances.

Now a 4 door CDDA solar car is very light and very large compared to a Tesla, at 6x4m and 900kg - a 4 door Tesla S60 is 5x2 meters and just shy of 2000kg. CDDA’s batteries are kind of light - 380kg for a pair of standards, vs the Tesla battery at around 544kg, but that’s well in the ballpark.

[Zanos]

If I recall, the Tesla’s entire bottom is occupied by a very large battery. It’s probably closer to 6 standards or so.

[Vastin]

Yeah battery size/weight is one of the biggest factors in a real electric car. 544kg in the Tesla, and I’m sure it takes up a lot of space.

Space is very oddly abstracted in CDDA vehicles, in that a number of components can share spaces - necessarily so in order to make the vehicle construction system work without making cars freaking enormous. So you can have batteries stuffed under storage spaces or beds or sharing space with an engine and so on. As a result, many components really only add weight and don’t functionally take up space at all.

A slightly more realistic system would be to allow a certain volume of objects to ‘share’ each space in a vehicle frame. So a bed or seat might only take up 1/2 a space (representing the upper frame of the vehicle), and allowing a mid-sized battery or 1/2 size storage compartment to be placed beneath it, while a full truck cargo box would probably take up the entire space, leaving little or nothing for other components. Or you could put 2 batteries in the same space - but not much else could go there.

However, I suspect that that would require a pretty major revamp to the vehicle system - a lot harder than tinkering with power ratings and engine efficiency values.

[Vastin]

Now, truth be told, assuming solar cars are viable at all in CDDA, it’s going to be pretty hard to keep them from overshadowing gas engines - mostly because a lot of what makes solar non-viable in today’s world are factors that aren’t very important in the apocalypse, namely:

1. Range doesn’t matter - much.

• In the real world, when you hop in a car you might be just headed around the block, or you might be headed down to NJ for the holidays - a trip of a few hundred miles that you need to be able to complete in <1 day in order for it to be worthwhile. Batteries suck for this, and solar is completely unacceptable. However, In CDDA, it’s pretty rare that you need to travel more than a few kilometers in a day. Truth is, there’s just not much of a hurry to get around. You don’t have any meetings to get to, no daily 1.5hr commute, and often no round trip that needs completing, because your vehicle usually IS your base, which effectively doubles its range in any case.

Lets face it, in the apocalypse, the daily rat race is over, and our survivor can afford to move at their own pace, as long as there isn’t a zombie horde hot on his or her heels, which brings us to our next point…

2. Speed doesn’t matter much either

• While it is fun to tear down the road at 200mph in a gas guzzling spike-ridden nightmare machine, this makes no sense at all. Even the fastest of zombies can’t chase you much faster than about 2 spaces per turn, so you don’t need to get much horsepower out of your vehicle to keep ahead of the hordes. That and they have really terrible vision, so you don’t have to get that far away from them before you’re out of effective pursuit range. Fuel efficiency is much more important than the ability to put out 5000rpms of tire burning badassedness, Mad Max aside.

3. Silence is Golden

• In the real world this is actually a problem, because pedestrians may not hear an electric car coming and get whacked by it. In CDDA, running over ‘pedestrians’ is a decided plus, and electric vehicles are like the ninjas of the automotive world. More importantly, the one sense that zombies have that actually functions worth a damn is - you guessed it - hearing. So again, any sensible waste-lander wants to go green, just for the sake of not running a noisy gas engine or generator all day to power your tools, and attracting the hordes from 6 map tiles away.

4. Running out of gas is Bad

• If you are being chased by a horde and you run out of juice - be it gas or batteries - you are pretty screwed. It’s time to take your nail bat and shotgun out of the trunk and get to work. However, assuming you manage to fend off the Zeds, you are then in an entirely different situation. The gas car driver needs to bandage up their wounds, grab a jerrycan and head for the nearest town, then hack their way through whatever hordes may be hanging out there in order to fill up the can and lug it back. Our solar car driver need simply chill out, roast some weenies over a campfire, and move on in a few hours to whatever their next destination is.