You ever construct a custom mega-tank-death-mobile-and-breakfast-nook and later realize that there is not a single gas station in the town?
Me neither!
But that is beside the point.
The thought has occurred to me, time and time again, that perhaps alternative sources of fuel would be nice.
Sure, we have nuclear and solar, but not steam or hooch.
Booze burn, so why not fuel a car with it? Distill it yourself at your base and you’ll have all the fuel you’ll ever need, as well as all the booze you’ll ever need (because if there are two things that go well together its a pan-galactic gargle-blaster and a machine that would make the spetsnaz run in terror).
Further more, We already have tanks for water, why not have a fuel compartment to burn the tons of zombie corpses in a giant-death-steam-train.
So, what do you guys thinks, and how do you think we could improve this concept?
A steam-powered vehicle certainly sounds awesome. It’d be a custom job, of course, but eminently more practical than the gasoline-powered vehicles of a fallen age, especially when wood is so omnipresent. Probably more difficult to code, though.
Alcohol engines shouldn’t be too hard to code. It’s mainly a modification of the current engine from what I understand. There was an entire system for this made for the old pen and paper RPG game twilight 2000. It was a WWIII game set in the 21st century. I had been meaning to mention modifying engines to burn alcohol. I think alcohol and wood gas are much more likely then steam. Steampunk is a different genre altogether.
I forgot to mention. You’d need to be able to make stills for the alcohol powered engines. You would gather the undergrowth and wood and other plant materials to make it. The alcohol from this would not be good for you to drink, but would burn. It’s generally considered a worse fuel then the alcohol made from grains and other edibles. But obviously these materials are more plentiful.
Alternate fuel sources: Hydrogen -> Electrolysis
Running a heavy voltage through salt and water causes the two compounds to break down and form new bonds. Salt is NaCl and water is, of course, H20.
Both materials break down. The Sodium (Na), some Hydrogen (H), and the Oxygen (O) form Sodium Hydroxide (aka Lye). This leaves Chlorine (Cl) and Hydrogen (H) in their relatively stable and self bonded forms. Here is the chemical formula: 2 NaCl + 2 H2O → 2 NaOH + H2 + Cl2
Also there is good old Fusion power. We are currently unable to make it work (last documented attempt in the Wiki only got back 65% of the power used to try and start the reaction). Maybe in the game a high end lab might have a fusion generator of some kind…
Right now the game already has engines that run off hydrogen, plasma engines (though I’m unsure if they show up in any vehicles right now, you might only be able to get them by finding them lying around). And even if you were electrolyzing rather then using salt water that generates toxic chlorine gas, why don’t you just use normal old water? Clean water probably won’t work due to the lack of free ions, but normal water should have enough dissolved in it to allow for electrolyzing without the generation of a highly toxic gas to go along with it.
Also a note on ethanol (alcohol) based engines, but in the real world ethanol is a very corroding substance. If you stuck it into a normal car it would immediately begin eating away all of the various rubber hoses and gaskets that it came into contact with (this is why we don’t usually run engines on straight ethanol). As you can believe, this causes all sorts of problems.
Yeah, but we’ve seen that Cataclysm cars seem to be made almost entirely out of iron, steel, and manliness. Besides, if CBMs are around powerful enough to let you shoot balls of plasma at things, chances are they worked out an ethanol engine sooner or later.
Honestly, if I have enough power to fire dozens of blasts of fusion energy from my arm, I probably have enough energy that you could just plug ME into the car to run it.
Seriously, we’re starting to run into a few pretty absurd comparisons between CBMs and cars here.
Car should probably just be overhauled so that they work like android players: they run off a central battery core, which can be powered through gasoline, alcohol, solar panels, batteries, etc. There should be car modules allowing all of that. Just let players install CBMs in cars, basically.
It’s also weird that this game is supposed to be 50 years in the future or whatever yet almost all vehicles still run off of gasoline. You’d imagine that in the future more cars are hybrids or fully electric, or that car engines would have advanced in some ways.
According to my thermodynamics professor in 50 years we most likely will still be using gasoline/diesel, it’s just that the majority of our fuel supplies at that point will be synthetic or bio-derived; so mostly better ethanol fuels or biodesel (which actually makes my complaint about the corrosive properties a little stupid now that I think about it o_o). It will be the point where better car engines that run fully on batteries are starting to come out though, which I think makes sense considering the game has things like the bubble car.
I will take a look into possibly whipping up a hybrid car of some sort for the game to spawn, but it might need to wait for a week or two since finals are going to be cutting into my time a fair bit.
Hah, that sounds like fun, will make a note to add that (the conversion rate won’t make it very practical, but when has that stopped us before?)
Hybrids? HYBRIDS!?!? You’ll have to pry my smoke-belching pure gasoline vehicle from my cold, dead hands (and then where would you get updates from? :P)
Seriously though, the various engine types are pretty darn unified, why add the intermediate battery/motor deal? Right now you can add as many engines as your mechanics skill allows, and the code just iterates over all of them and has them contribute power. I really don’t understand what you’re saying about car parts, they’re super modular already and work more or less like you describe.
And car CBMs… cars aren’t people, that makes 0 sense.
Even if most “future cars” were hybrids of some kind, I guarantee that most “future death japopies” would run on straight gasoline engines, the technology is FAR simpler to work on.
Hah, that sounds like fun, will make a note to add that (the conversion rate won’t make it very practical, but when has that stopped us before?)
Hybrids? HYBRIDS!?!? You’ll have to pry my smoke-belching pure gasoline vehicle from my cold, dead hands (and then where would you get updates from? :P)
Seriously though, the various engine types are pretty darn unified, why add the intermediate battery/motor deal? Right now you can add as many engines as your mechanics skill allows, and the code just iterates over all of them and has them contribute power. I really don’t understand what you’re saying about car parts, they’re super modular already and work more or less like you describe.
And car CBMs… cars aren’t people, that makes 0 sense.[/quote]
I haven’t really organized my thoughts in this very well, but as I was explaining in another thread… car engines can generate lots of electrical power, like several kilowatts for a large engine. That’s enough to run a refrigerator. Yet we do very, very little with this in-game. At most you run a couple of flashlights off of it.
Yet on the CBM-side, the human body and human-sized modules apparently produce vast amounts of power. Like truly absurd levels of energy for fusion blasters, to laser fingers, to incredibly strong electromagnets. With that much power I should be able to very, very easily run an electric car that goes very fast. Even at short ranges, my fingerlaser has to be putting out more energy that a contemporary commercial engine.
I guess what I’m getting at is that there’s a disconnect here: why exactly am I limited to having a laserfinger and internal batteries? Why can’t I just put the battery system in my car and use it power electric motors and car weapons? It just feels really bizarre that we have things to integrate that into human/android players, but that it would actually be vastly easier and more efficient to attach them to a car, since the car is already capable of generating tons of power and doesn’t have the same volume restraints I have as a person. Whatever tech you expect me to be able to install personally as an android, you’d expect vastly more powerful tech on a vehicle scale.
I’d like to be able to plug into a car and drain energy either way, but as far as high-tech car solutions go, there are already minireactors and plasma engines and plasma turrets and such, but more variety would be great. CBMs would probably be incompatible due to scale, but another set of car-sized options for some of the more interesting CBMs would be nice, such as an Internal Furnace engine, an ethanol specific engine. Maybe a gyroscopic attachment for seats to reduce recoil, active/offensive defense systems, etc. Give us a reason to need a minireactor (or two) and a half dozen storage batteries to run our death mobiles.
More high end options in general would be nice, I’m probably going to start modding some in soon, now that I’ve got a better feel for the DDA branch of Cataclysm
I think I understand where you’re coming from now, battery packs in the car used to run features like a car-mounted fusion cannon, or electrified car body. That the kind of thing you’re thinking of? If so that does sound like a good idea.
Btw, evidently I was in a weird mood the last time I replied, didn’t mean to come across as hostile or anything, just wasn’t getting what you were saying.
How hard would it be to make a simple “boiler” part, that produces steam(fuel) that gets stored in tanks for steam engines?
I think the hardest part would be making the custom boiler code. the rest should be fairly simple. boots into linux, things start falling apart instantly.
