Thanks for all the good detail, this is exactly the kind of thing we could write tests around.
You missed one aspect where electric engines totally suck in the cataclysm, hauling lots of weight around. I’d be perfectly happy if solar occupied a niche of, “small getting around vehicles”, and the only thing you really needed gasoline for was very large vehicles.
AFAIK there is no limit to how large/powerful you can make an electric engine (think of the titanic generators in the Hoover dam - these are just electric motors running in reverse). The truth is, electric motors are extremely efficient and powerful. The problem is providing the electricity to run them, and that comes back to battery density - not motor efficiency - being the stumbling block.
This bad boy here could LIFT the average CDDA apc deathmobile - and probably throw it at the nearest zombie horde - using electric motors. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7Ip0L0aoqE
Submarines (massive vehicles by any standard) DO frequently employ electric engines and batteries in order to run quietly and without needing to breath air to feed the diesel engines that they normally run on - recharging their batteries with alternators when they are running on diesel near the surface. Of course, they can only keep that up for so long before they are forced to surface and recharge. WWII Diesel/Electric subs are thus technically among the earliest Hybrid vehicles.
The reason vehicles like main battle tanks don’t use electric motors isn’t a lack of power or efficiency - its simply that they can’t carry enough battery load to drive around for hours at a stretch, and recharging them would take several more hours rather than the few minutes it takes to refuel one with diesel. These are not acceptable limitations for the military, but for your Death-Mobile? Depends. Most trips in CDDA are no longer than a few miles a day, which batteries can easily handle even for a large vehicle.
CDDA seems to lean in the opposite direction, with batteries capable of holding massive charges (based on how long they can power anything BUT an engine) - but their electric motors are incredibly weak and inefficient. RL is the other way around.
It is worth noting however, that an electric motor is usually a fair bit heavier but smaller than a gas engine of similar HP rating. A gas engine apparently has a lot more empty space in it, whereas the electric motor is pretty much just a solid mass of steel and copper.
Probably around twice the weight - hard to gauge the size difference - though electric motor size increase at a less-than-linear rate for (20hp at 121kg = 6kg/hp) vs (200hp at 801kg = 4kg/hp). Efficiency doesn’t change much at all, it seems. Claimed around 95% for most models I checked.
BTW - I am by no means expecting any of this to be used in the game. At this point I’m basically just amusing myself by learning about engine efficiency and using this conversation as an excuse to educate myself in the matter. If it provides any fodder for future changes, then so much the better.
Now ignoring all this engine efficiency hoopla, the real design challenge seems to be one of scale.
That is to say, the spaces in CDDA are of distinctly differing scales. The vehicles and roads are rather ‘bigger’ than they probably should be at 1m per square, while buildings are probably a bit smaller and more closely packed, and the distances between town centers are far smaller than they should be - probably by a factor of 4 to 8 times at a guess. This is nice for non vehicular gameplay because it keeps the world from feeling incredilbly wide and empty, but feels wierder with cars.
Its this scale difference that poses the problem, because any vehicle range that seems nominal for cruising around town will seem enormous for inter-city travel, wheras a range normalized for the distance between towns will result in vehicles that cant drive more than a dozen city blocks before they run out of gas.
In terms of the recent change to vehicle fuel range we basically changed from one scale (intra-city) to the other scale (inter-city). As a result a full tank of gas is usually enough to get you to the next town over due to the corse scale - but is insufficient for actually drving around the cities themselves, where the scale is essentially much more granular.
All scales in the game are arbitrary, it’s just a limit developers have to work with because how the game is presented and coded. Otherwise I don’t think robot tanks would be just one meter square.
However, maybe doubling the default distance between cities would be nice? The overmap spawning should be changed accordingly in that case though, otherwise it would spawn lots of military bunkers and things like that, and it would still be a bit weird. I guess, I don’t really know exactly how the map generation works.
Doubling overworld distances between cities and increasing vehicle range proportionally would certainly reduce the scale disparity somewhat - but it would have a number of other effects. I’m kind of ambivilent about the idea of vehicles having long overworld ranges personally - but ill admit that their terrible city ranges do negatively impact my enjoyment at the moment. Ive been hacking around it though.
IRL i could load the back of my minivan with sandbags and still drive from one end of MA to the other on a single tank of gas - and the fuel expenditure to get to the next town over would be negligible even for a very large vehicle, so I dont quite understand the goal of the current ultra low fuel efficiency standards in CDDA.
[quote=“Vastin, post:55, topic:13008”]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.’[/quote]
Hi, newer player here.
That is a great description of my experience with a solar vehicle - I’m on my first character that’s survived to the mid-game (found a set of plate armor that fit and a zwiehander in a museum!).
About a week into the game I found a gasoline car that would actually start (so far most cars didn’t have sufficient charges to start the engine even if they were otherwise drivable, this hurt a previous character who though they had a drivable motorcycle, filled it up with gas, and then couldn’t start the thing - I did that with this character on a different car as well because I had no idea how many charges were represented by a battery percentage). So I hotwired that car, basically emptied a huge 16-pump (though some were diesel) gas station to fill it up, and when I was ready I set off on the road to the refugee center.
The gas car was unmodified (The game’s description was ‘car’, nothing special).
My journey started from the ranch (Green ‘v’ in the lower left corner). I had found the refugee center location through an evactuation shelter, but due to some bug I didn’t get a road map - if you see that line of forest heading south from the Refugee center, that’s the ‘road map’ that was unveiled when I used a console in the evacuation center. Separate bug there. So when I set off I didn’t have a direct route, and went to various places like the apple orchard and the bunkers looking for a way through.
By the time I got to that town on the right I was hurting on gas and had to stop and fill up (I think I was down to about 25% at that point). I felt I was using up a fairly excessive amount of gas to get just that far (I figured a full tank would be plenty to get me to the refugee center and back even with the roundabout route, turns out I had no chance of making it back without finding more fuel).
I started using the refugee center as a base and I made a short trip to the garage to the west. On the way back I stopped and turned the car on and off a few times to siphon gas out of vehicles along the way. Finally back at the refugee center I hit the wrong key and started up the car one time too many, then turned it off… and found I’d drained the battery. I could no longer start the car again as my repeated stops had effectively rendered it inoperable.
Side note - there was a minefield INSIDE the refugee center. The representative of the old guard met an unfortunate end.
Fortunately I’d passed other vehicles on the way, and over at that motel about 15 tiles to the east of the refugee center there was a working “solar SUV” with about 30% battery charge and 3 working solar panels. Given how bad my gas mileage was I was looking forward to being able to travel without needing to refuel.
I got it and completely drained the charge driving the 15 map tiles from the motel to the refugee center.
While waiting for it to refill I raided the town to the east, and had a disaster against a spitter zombie - I broke both my legs.
I spent weeks in the refugee center living off my food and reading books. During that time the solar SUV slowly built up a full charge. I learned enough to repair the electric motor - it had been badly damaged so I figured that it was super inefficient due to that damage and I hoped I’d have better performance with all the components in good working order.
After being fully healed I set off on my journey - I’d seen how slowly the solar SUV charged and I knew I’d need more solar panels to make the thing work well, and there were some back down near by original base. I knew the route so I hoped I’d make it back ‘home’ on a full battery.
No way. I made it into the town I lost my legs in and the battery was more than half gone. I turned around and parked at the cave where you see the car marker, and left it there at a measley 27% charge.
As a new player in CCDA, reaching the point where I can finally drive some cars has not been a fun experience.
The solar SUV has now been stuck there for a couple days and the charge is still in the 30’s. It will likely take me over a month to get this thing to my original base on 3/4ths of it’s original solar panels alone, even now that I know the route.
Even making the six trips it would require to move my current inventory, I think it’s faster for me to push a shopping cart back and forth between my base and my solar SUV’s location.
So yeah, electric vehicles really really need to be able to go a lot farther on a full charge, and I think that solar panels should charge them faster if they’re expected to be viable. I expect an unmodified solar vehicle that’s in good condition (25% more solar charging wouldn’t help me enough here) to be able to transport it’s trunk space faster over time than I can walk it.
I get the argument that solar alone just isn’t powerful enough do the trick and maybe these electric cars were designed to ‘plug in’ (in which case the game calling them solar cars / solar SUVs is somewhat misleading). However in that case, how about adding charging stations to gas stations or other locations where we could feasibly fill up the battery charge of the electric car? The cataclysm is set in the future, so presumably these would be more common given the number of cars on the road, but right now the only way to charge an electric car (that I know of) is with it’s solar panels. If that’s all we’ve got, then it’s gotta be somewhat viable to do - I’m cool with it if I have to stop and let the vehicle recharge for a day or two before I can travel a few towns further down the road, but if I have to wait a whole week to get a single town over, then I’ll stick to walking. I want to get on the road and start seriously exploring the world, but right now gas looks like my only option for that, and I’m going to have to stick to light vehicles to go any appreciable distance.
My initial reaction to this thread was that I needed to go figure out where in the JSON I had to edit things to make my electric vehicle functional, but I realized that the better option was to come here and give feedback so it gets fixed for everyone. I want electric vehicles up to and including the solar SUV to be viable (since they’re all over the road they presumably worked!), and I want gas vehicles to be somewhat better in terms of say range and power, but both ought to be viable choices that are superior to walking.
Yeah, driving is a lot more tedious than it used to be nowadays. But on the other hand, I’m not driving around around a rolling fortress like I used to in past games. Right now, its a two-and-a-half ton solar bike with 4 large storage batteries and one large electric motor. Provided that I drive at less than 32 km per hour, I can get a sustainable mileage provided that I give it regular downtime to recharge with the the fold-able solar panel arrays that I assembled from 12 upgraded solar panels.
Judging from my experience, my current set-up could probably eat up near 100 map tiles on a full charge (at the lowest speed) before running empty. Not that I would let it happen.
Same here. As a newer player, I was really excited when I found a like-new security van parked outside a jewelry store on the other side of my starting town, and then much less excited when I carefully siphoned all of the diesel fuel I could find and still burned half of it getting back to the evac shelter an hour’s walk outside of town. I switched it to electric since there were a few solar cars that I could disassemble, and found that that still didn’t help much since it charged so slowly.
It doesn’t seem like things should be balanced around “walk vs. drive”, because there is so much stuff that seems to require some sort of vehicle - I wouldn’t want to walk to a lab and try to cart all of the stuff that I wanted out of it by hand, or cover four towns of area looking for a small relic for an NPC, without the speed and convenience of a vehicle. Similarly, I would think that because a vehicle opens up the map and the available things so much fuel balancing wouldn’t be around trying to make gathering it a chore (especially with automated gas stations and the abundance of cash cards), but around suiting different fuels to different tasks, the same way I hope that nobody is worrying that at some point you aren’t in danger of running out of rags, leather, scrap metal, or thread for crafting. My ideas there:
Electric is free, but requires infrastructure. Batteries hold a lot of energy and a car with 3-4 of them should be able to drive for quite a while between charges. But recharging that should need a base with a field of solar panels set up (and jumper cables), not just covering the roof of your RV with basic panels. It seems like the solar cars (the ones with 360-degree windows and 10 upgraded panels) should be self-sustaining, but that that should be what a self-sustaining solar car looks like. If you want something heavy and armored, you need a base to recharge at or be driving between towns and then settling down for a week or two to loot.
Gasoline is common and fast. Most of the cars in cataclysm run on it, it’s easy to find in towns and at gas stations, and it’s a good ‘wanderer’ fuel - siphon a tank every now and then as you pass through. It’s also the fuel of the engines geared to go fast. If you want a sports car that can get you to 200mph, it’s going to be fueled with gasoline.
Diesel is rare but powerful. If you’re running diesel you’re more concerned with scavenging it when you find it, or committing to craft it, but it’s what all of the large, powerful engines run on (related: add large, powerful diesel engines for APCs and Semis and buses and such). It’s the fuel for 20 ton mobile fortresses that can’t be moved by the other, lesser engines.
There are a couple problems with home-base recharge stations - the most significant is that nothing happens in the world physically unless you are fairly close by. There’s a ‘reality bubble’ around your character in which the game processes events, and most things such as recharging, food decay, and so forth, simply do not occur outside that small radius. Thus, if you aren’t at home, no recharging happens.
That could be fixed by check-pointing vehicles with time stamps that indicate when they were last in the reality bubble and then fast-forwarding them to the current time when they re-enter, but that does not occur currently, and it’s not trivial to code (shouldn’t be that bad, but it’s a significant new concept).
As for gasoline, it should have a FAR greater range than it does, even for armored vehicles. If we wanted to make it more logistically difficult to deal with, the more straightforward approach would be to make the fuel itself rarer rather than making cars burn through it like it has the energy density of cotton candy.
[quote=“Vastin, post:69, topic:13008”]There are a couple problems with home-base recharge stations - the most significant is that nothing happens in the world physically unless you are fairly close by. There’s a ‘reality bubble’ around your character in which the game processes events, and most things such as recharging, food decay, and so forth, simply do not occur outside that small radius. Thus, if you aren’t at home, no recharging happens.[/quote]Er, solar panels recharging outside the reality bubble has been a thing for a few months now. I just tested it to make sure, and after having stepped several overmap tiles away, a solar car’s worth of solar panels was able to charge a storage battery to full, despite having only been in the bubble long enough to install it and four other batteries.
Thanks for setting this fool straight, i was too annoyed to call him out.
Please, I don’t like misinformation either, but don’t attack people for it. This is really my fault, it took way longer than I predicted before we got a working implementation, so people got the impression that it didn’t work, then that kind of knowledge sticks around for a while.
Ah, my apologies, I did miss the update where this was changed. Glad to hear that it was updated - makes static bases a lot more usable. I’d stuck strictly to mobile bases for a long time in large part due to this.
Part of my issue is the “fun” side of things. Working vehicles are rare enough as it is that many of my characters don’t even have a set of wheels until they’ve built it themselves from parts… which makes vehicles and the map opening a mid-late game thing (Mechanics 5+ and access to a fully stocked toolset), well past the stage of “I should be scavenging every last little item I find”.
So… I don’t really understand the intent behind these changes to begin with, from that perspective.
Nerfs to mobile bases (that don’t have overpowered ultralarge engines) makes sense, but the nerfs to normal vehicles need a lot of buffing. I’m particularly fond of the “fuel is rarer, but more energy dense” approach as it would make finding fuel more rewarding and less of a chore.
Even before the nerfs, I would rain 2 entire GAS STATIONS to fill about 5 tanks (if I was lucky). That would be enough fuel to go on a deathrace through the city, and maybe get to the next city before getting low. Forget cruising around for fun or looting, or making return trips to visited locations. On 2 GAS STATIONS before the nerfs.
To quote HowStuffWorks: “The gasoline sold at service stations is stored underground in buried tanks. Each holds several thousand gallons of gas. There are at least two of these tanks per station and each tank usually holds a different grade of gas.” Note that in RL, gas stations require electricity (or specialized backup generators) to pump any gas AT ALL. That said, a little persistence with a jackhammer/halligan bar/welder could crack the underground storage tank (just don’t light any matches).
Electric: Weakest, heaviest, least efficient, to balance the convenience of solar. Current balance isn’t bad, but adding a new class of ultra heavy electric engine scavenged from an industrial location would be fun 
Storage batteries could use some rebalance as well, we could definitely use some higher tiers of battery with more storage. We at least need a dedicated “External Battery” along the same lines as the “External Fuel Tank”. ((Hmm, that’s easy enough to mod in myself… I’ll check existing mods first though))
Gasoline: Most common, but in limited supply. Balance by vastly increasing the quantity of gas in gas stations, effectively tying down a gas user to main roads and cities while freeing them to do what they want in those areas. The fuel of the nomad who never returns to the same city more than 2-3 times.
Diesel: Most powerful engines but expensive, balanced around late game deathmobiles and mobile fortresses. Time consuming to farm, high energy density, rare at gas stations. The sort of stuff that takes a year or two of farming to fuel a fortress, but once fueled, can comfortably move the fortress from one city to the next.
I’m afraid I don’t have any facts, statistics, or anything useful really, to contribute to this discussion, but I wanted to say that this:
[quote=“Vastin, post:51, topic:13008”]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.[/quote]
sounds brilliant.
Also, where are we at now, concerning this? I haven’t had a character live long enough to construct/repair a vehicle lately, so I haven’t seen how fuel is consumed in the latest experimentals.
Normally when I start on a vehicle, I would try to find an RV, or Mobile Meth Lab, and turn it into a Solar powered Cargo-Mobile, with a bed instead of a seat, where the controls are (I know there’s no seat belt, but I never usually went over 40 MPH, anyway) a Vehicle Welding Rig, Forge Rig, FOODCO Kitchen Buddy, and Onboard Chemistry Lab, then fill the rest of the interior with Cargo Spaces. Electric Engine, of course, six to eight Storage Batteries gradually as I find them, and all the Solar Panels it could fit. Eventually if mechanics reached eight, I’d install the most powerful gas engine I could find, along with two 60L gasoline tanks, plus a truck alternator to supplement the Solar Panels when the batteries die.
This setup probably shows what I don’t know, but it’s always worked well enough when I got it. I’ve also heard vaguely that there might be problems with multiple engines, I probably won’t understand if anyone tries to explain it to me, you’ve seen the vehicles I make, but how close are these problems to being resolved?
From my experience so far it seems like the engine efficiencies are too low. It’s not much fun to stop by each car on the road to siphon some gas.
I totally gave up on electric cars after trying one out and having it die on me after about 2 minutes of driving, and then also gave up on diesel after my truck got me to town with a whopping 1% left right after leaving a gas station.
Right now I’m in a smaller size car with 2 gas tanks and 32" tires (almost no offroad speed loss with these). It comes out to about 3 tons and gets me from one town to the next for about 30-50L, which I estimate is about 10x more than previous builds.
While it is manageable, it is really annoying and just not any fun. Perhaps if the haul from a large gas station was more than ~50L it would be somewhat more acceptable, but even then I dont understand the need for super realism on this particular aspect of the game as it drags the overall experience down by eliminating one of the major aspects that made it fun while also adding in new tedious and annoying tasks.
sounds like welder doesn’t draw as much power as it should. It should draw SUBSTANTIALLY more power than a fridge. Fridge being a power sounds about right anything electrically cools something generally will be electrically inefficient, but welders have monster power cables for a reason, you have to ark enough electricity to melt metal together, or at the very least, melt an intentionally (relatively) low melting point metal rod along a joint to join 2 pieces of metal together, preferably stronger than the surrounding metal. (it is generally preferable to have things break somewhere other than a weld joint as you don’t have to grind before re-welding)
Of coarse, I speak only from a Realism perspective. Game wise, this is WAY better. WAY to tedious to have to do that much battery charging.
When you’re looking at KWh? You’re not running the welder for hours, or even minutes at a time, even on heavier tasks…
you probably mean 135A as this is a bobby welder the wattage you are using is calculated volts x Amps = Watts 1000 watts = 1KW and costs depending on supplyer 7p per hr.the voltage you are using should be on the plate near the the power lead and this is known as an open circuit voltage probably about 28v if it is 135A you are not going you are going to struggle running the power flat out so you may manage 125A as this is dependant on wire dia and speed and cheaper sets strugle to give the power they say.
28V x 125A = 3500W = 3.5kW this is if you are pushing your set at full power with a good ark.
if you are fabricating you are welding a max of 5% of the time.
if you are doing production fabrications you are welding maximum 25% of the time.
if you are plating you are Welding a max of 40% of the time and your set will be dead after about 200hrs as it is not made for this.so if you are fabricating like I would expect there is a maximum of 5% of the time welding more realistically 2.5% as you are not doing it proffesionally.
3.5kw x .025 gives you 0.0875 kW at a cost of 7p ish a kw meaning it will cost you .6125p per hr.
I have you an important question how many lights do you have because these will cost more.
the lights in my old workshop used to use approx 8kw and this was the most expensive electricity cost on the workshop.
yes a welder will make your elecrtic meter go dizzy but only whist it is running. but so will your kettle as this uses about the same power and runns about the same length of time.
Just as an additional detail since the raw numbers may not be particularly useful to folks without an electrical background. a typical modern battery (circa 2006 when I took electrical classes and learned this little factoid) is about 2.5-1.5 Watt hours Most of those numbers are in KILOwatt hours. 1 kilowatt hour is 1000 watt hours.
A quick google search shows that a typical car battery has about 1.2 kilowatt hours.
Using the fabrication 5% number from SenorOcho’s figures an hours worth of welding would use up about 175 watt hours. Which if my math is right (it may not) is going to equate to SEVENTY AA batteries to power a welder doing fabrication welding, for an hour. And you’d be able to weld at the 5% fabrication rate off of a car battery for a bit under 7 hours.
This is ignoring the possibility that the batteries would lose power to various inefficiencies in the system, or the power levels being too low to power the welder before a battery can fully drain. Honestly someone would probably have to be some kind of electrical engineering wizard to even rig 70 AAs up in a way to power the thing. In parallel they’d probably lack the voltage. In series they’d probably lack current. So someone would have to do the math to figure the ratios.
Someone may want to double check my math. Math was not my best subject. But this is more or less telling me that it would be completely impractical to power a welder off of a simple flashlight battery. Unless our liquid batteries are some kind of magical super battery with massive energy potential, that still gets drained by a flashlight super fast.
EDIT: I should also point out that I am not a professional electrical engineer. I’m a computer tech, I needed to take some electrical engineering courses as a prereq to my computer degree. So while I probably know more than the average person, I don’t practice it regularly.
