First of all, I know that we would hardly be able to make Gasoline or Diesel for cars - that’s not what I was thinking here. So away with you, trolls!
Now, to the Idea at hand. I recently watched an older episode of myth busters, where they used >Moonshine< as fuel for vehicles. Moonshine, as it stands, is apparently up to 92% pure ethanol. Now looking a bit further, there is Ethanol and Methanol fuel for Race Cars, and normal Gasoline Cars can handle Ethanol based fuels.
Considering this, one could add new Engines, working with Ethanol, or modify the old Gasoline engines to accept high percentage Alcohol/Ethanol as Fuel-source or fuel additive. Ethanol, as it stands, should probably have a higher power output, but it would also burn faster.
Now, if one would add Ethanol-based Engines, why not make a rare multi-tile building like a Racetrack, with several, partially crashed, Race-cars. You could even make differnet Racetracks with different kind of vehicles ; that could be a good source for fast or powerful cars or car parts while being outside of a town.
To make it more fun, some extra-rare car prototypes could be added to the game as well, powered with a reactor or something like this ; Hell, some cars could even have weapons, considering the state of the USA in the backstory
Opinions on this?
Would it even be possible to fill a gasoline-tank with ethanol additives, like if you add sinew to a sewing kit? Could it keep track of the % of Gasoline and the % of ethanol and react accordingly? The more Ethanol is in there, the harder it is to start the gasoline engine (because it’s not optimized for Ethanol.). This could potentially make for interesting scenarios, where a horde of zombies is closing in and the engine just wont start
I got to say, if we have distilled ethanol/methanol in-game, burning them in gasoline engines should be very possible.
Maybe not in its purest form, but diluting gasoline with eth up to 20% Eth, 80% Gasoline would not destroy a car. Today 10% is considered safe, but if one really needed to, using a bit more won’t really destroy his car (100% will eat up some non-metal components)
So there could be a recipe for E10 or E20 gasoline, functionally the same as pure gasoline.
What about building a furniture/carpart that extracts CO² from the air and turns it into diesel?
Should probably be made heavy enough so that installing it into your dethmobile isn’t a valid option.
It would, however, be a thing to add to your base’s solar panel rig.
Sorry, didnt knew about the Diesel-recipe Still, Gasoline engines can also work on Ethanol, it will probably destroy the engine a lot faster than gasoline, but it will do the trick, if nothing else is available. As I said, a normal gasoline engine >can< work with (nearly pure) ethanol, it just has some problems starting the engine.
The pure Ethanol/Methanol Engines are also still an option, they would be a lot more powerful but also burn a lot more fuel I guess? I could imagine them to be rather useful for bigger vehicles, or as an emergency Engine in case you need to leave fast.
Also, i’d just love the Idea to have a car, fueled by an enormous tank filled to the brim with Moonshine!
They don’t need to be stronger/larger engines, rather they need to be modified so they will not dissolve under pure ethanol.
There is the fact that ethanol has about 50% of the calorific value of gasoline (even if it also has more RON), so an engine roughly needs double the amount of Eth for the same distance. (thus, larger tanks are needed)
