That is… REMARKABLY similar to the layout I use.
I generally use spikes on the front instead of rams, I arrange the back portion slightly differently (an extra chair for sleeping in the dark/carrying an NPC), and you have an extra row between the driver’s seat and the back… weird. I suppose it makes sense (every part of that layout is there for a reason), but it still feel strange.
I generally name it the ArmoredMeCarrier. I might have posted it earlier in this thread…
Hmm, hope this isnt the wrong place to ask questions about vehicles.
I had an idea for a three-wheeled motorcycle:
-o-
¤=¤
“o” = wheel
"-" = mirror
"#" = seat, controls
"=" = box (with solar panel on top?)
“¤” = Wheel, gasoline tank and solar panel.
Now, I was hoping you all could tell me if there is room to fit an electric and a gasoline engine in there, and if the setup is at all possible, as I havn’t really built vehicles before.
Any suggestions, critics or Improvements are also welcome.
Well, yes you could put an electric motor and a gas engine on that, also a battery to hold electricity power and a gas tank to hold the gas. I mean there’s not really anything to critique unless you tell us what it’s for.
I mean if you tell us that you’re going to be using that to mow down a zombie horde, I ‘might’ be able to pick out one or two flaws… But I’d much rather salute you and watch you drive away in to the sunset never to be seen again.
I’d go for a cargo carrier or trunk instead of a box. More space to put stuff in it.
The mirrors are not necessary, you should be able to see behind you just fine without them. You could put some blades in their places instead, for some points in badassery.
You might not be able to properly power an electric engine with only 1 solar panel. Even if you put solar panels on most of the vehicle, it might not be enough, especially not for longer trips. It would be acceptable as an emergency engine though, I guess.
You might want to put some seatbelts on your seat 
Put a window or something similar on the front wheel. Anything you can see through and stops movement through it, basically. You don’t want stuff to hit you directly if you happen to ram something in the way. Even something small can cause quite some damage on your character if the speed is high enough.
You could try a different version of this bike with either a welding station or a fridge attached to the point where the box currently is. Both of those options can hold a certain amount of items as well and have more functions, they do block your movement though and drain power when active. Still, a place to put your perishables, or a vehicle mounted welding tool to fix any damages might be extremely useful for you, especially if you’re going hybrid.
Again, a single solar panel won’t be enough to power a fridge nonstop - even 3-4 aren’t enough I believe, dependinig on the solar panel, but you don’t have to keep it running all the time, so…yea.
You might want to put frames or something similar on the sides of your seat. That way you can put a roof on all 9 tiles and your Seat would be considered to be completely roofed, negating any debuffs from being in the rain. Those can’t stack up quite high if you have to drive around in the rain for a while.
While speaking of rain, with an extra tank, a funnel and a faucet you could have your vehicle automatically catch rainwater. You still need to clean the water, but having some spare rainwater might be very useful.
Some of my ideas for your little motorcycle, Grand Sage. Most of them should be quite easy to do and would improve the overall utility of the vehicle. Of course you wouldn’t be able to do all of them, due to the small size of the vehicle, but that’s what I’m workign with.
Thx for the feedback.
While I can see where you are going with this, you are turning my motorcycle into a three-wheeled car Kadian! Still, I might want to replace one of my gasoline tanks with a storage battery of some sort.
You were quite right that the solar engine isn’t supposed to get me everywhere. Ideally, i would want to get top-speed out of the gasoline engine and max mileage from the solar engine. Any idea what kinda engine types im looking for?
well, Umbra, if i put a windshield and a little spiked plating up front, couldn’t I take down a zombie or 2? 
I just gave you ideas on how to improve the utility and safety of your vehicle. Even if you want to keep the motorcycle feel, I’d strongly recommend something bigger than a box as cargo space, or you will hate yourself eventually when you have too much loot to take with you.
Spiked plating and a windshield up front would give you the ability to drive over a lone zombie or two, you would need to make sure it’s a reinforced windshield though or you’d have to repair it very regularly. Still, your vehicle isn’t all that great for head-on collision, because it’s too light - crash into anything and you’d loose most of your speed, even if it’s just a single zombie. you would also need a lot of speed in the collision, or you might not make enough damage, this is also related to the weight
If you want pure speed for your vehicle, simply find the biggest engine you can. For Gasoline, the maximum is a V12 Engine, for Diesel its a V8. If you want to have even more speed, grab 2 fuel tanks and a Diesel and a Gasoline Engine - that way you can use both fuels, and you can use both engines at the same time for an enormous speed boost, if necessary.
Of course, the bigger the Engine is, the more fuel it uses up, you always have to remember that. a V8 Gas or V6 Diesel would still give you a nice top speed without using quite as much fuel as their bigger cousins.
For the electric engine, you probably want to look for a small electric motor, or a normal electric motor. Depending on the weight of your vehicle, the small electric motor might actually not be able to move it all that well - the type of frames and fuel-engines you’re using would be the main factor there. A normal electric motor would definitely be able to move your vehicle, but it will eat through your power supply relatively quickly in the current setup. Big or enhanced electric motors aren’t an option at all, you would probably empty out your batteries in a matter of minutes, because you basically have nothing but a single solar panel to get power.
Definitely going for the motorcycle feel. So probably more saddle then seat anyways.
As for the engines, that’s gonna be real helpful, thx! However, I count 3 solar panels? all on the back row?.
I’d love to have both gasoline and diesel engines, but I cant see where they should go
[quote=“Grand sage, post:1288, topic:207”]Definitely going for the motorcycle feel. So probably more saddle then seat anyways.
As for the engines, that’s gonna be real helpful, thx! However, I count 3 solar panels? all on the back row?.
I’d love to have both gasoline and diesel engines, but I cant see where they should go :P[/quote]
The seatbelt is because you WILL fly off your vehicle and probably die if you hit anything at a reasonable speed. Consider your survivor smart enough to realize that a seatbelt is advisable when running over zoms at an almost mandatory ~60+MPH Brave as they may be, its going to be hard to hold onto the handlebars when that speed reduces to near 0 because 1 zombie was hit… or a squirrel.
Edit: small vehichles are fun and funny unless your not saving, not wearing seatbelts, and care about your character. Then its just alot of frustrated character creation.
[quote=“Miloch, post:10, topic:207”][size=36pt]It’s the Segway of Doooooooooooooom![/size]
FYI: Doing 100 on this thing with no seatbelt and hitting a zombie is a bad idea.[/quote]
Main reason why I switched from having a bed for a drivers seat to an actual seat the 5 point harness.
Can you put a seat belt on a saddle? cause If so, im gonna do it, but if not… well, im not saving the game 
Screenshots or it didn’t happen! Don’t forget your V8, you have a spare in your handlebar basket. Have fun storming the castle!
[quote=“Grand sage, post:1288, topic:207”]Definitely going for the motorcycle feel. So probably more saddle then seat anyways.
As for the engines, that’s gonna be real helpful, thx! However, I count 3 solar panels? all on the back row?.
I’d love to have both gasoline and diesel engines, but I cant see where they should go :P[/quote]
So, I quickly built the vehicle from Scratch with cheats, in order to get a better feeling for it.
First off: Ingame motorcycles are 4 tiles long. You might want do keep it that way, so it looks nicer.
Secondly: I kinda lied I realized. There is a damn V12 Diesel Engine. Must be one of the newer additions, because I have never seen that thing.
Third: Seatbelts & 5 Point Harness isn’t a thing with a saddle. You really kinda want a Seatbelt or a harness, it’s your choice in the end though. I kept it like you wanted, with a saddle.
With all that out of the way, I used more common ressources (car battery instead of storage battery for example) to build you vehicle. Even included your mirrors, even though they are still unnecessary.
On the left side is how it looks when you’re not on it, the right side is how it looks when driving it.
As it stands, the Vehicle i quickly made has space to spare. It has 3 engines (Diesel, Gasoline, Electric), 2 Vehicle Tanks (1 gas, 1 diesel. There is place for more, if wanted), 2 batteries and your box.
If you’re interested, I can give you the save file and you can look at it more closely. Or I guess I could do it with images as well, since it’s a relatively small vehicle.
You could even put a water purifier + a tank on the tile with the box, get rid of the solar panel overhead and put a funnel in its place and you could have drinking water without the vehicle looking different.
Now, to the electric engine itself:
A small electric engine has a safe/top speed of 8/16 mph. It’s acceleration ‘0’ mph/t, but it’s pretty close to 1 once you started. Moving a few sqares already drained one of the car batteries from 100% to 97%, which is roughly 75 power units from the 2500 of the battery. Driving anything higher than 8 will break the electric motor pretty quickly too, so that’s not an option.
Exchanging the small electric motor witha normal sized one and switching out the batteries to storage batteries will give you a safe speed of 40, with an acceleration of 3. the Storage batteries have a capacity of 40k power units, so they should, for all intent and purpose, hold a little bit longer than the car batteries with the small motor, but not by much.
Only using a V12 Diesel engine gives you a safe speed of 344 with an acceleration of 28.
Only using a V12 Gas engine gives you a safe speed of 317 with an acceleration of 25.
Using BOTH fuel engines gives you a safe speed of 529 with an acceleration of 43. Driving either of them for more than a few seconds will drain the tanks, I lost around 1.5L of Diesel/gasoline for…eh, let it be 20 tiles?
And holy damn, do you have to be careful with those speeds. I crashed into some trees because the acceleration was way too much xD The Electric Engine will drain the storage batteries at a relatively slow rate as long as you drive during the day and keep your speed around 30 mph. Still, they are draining. Driving around an evac shelter took around 2% off.
Overall, looking at the Speed of the fuel engines, you could easily use V8’s or even V/I 6 Engines and you probably still hit a safe speed of around 100 - this would also lower the overall weight of the vehicle, making the electric motor a bit faster in the process.
Wow, thx, thats a lot of info right there!
Im playing with ascii graphics, so looks are relatively unimportant
I think a safe speed of 300 mph is already more than I bargained for, so i might just stick with one type of fuel and the electric motor. I am however still tempted in keeping the saddle, though the mirrors might go… I think the idea of this vehicle is to move me around between far-away bases (not that I have those yet, still trying to find a damn hacksaw), at least at those high speeds, so i would already know the route. Still, thanks a lot for the advise!
I just test-built one of these, but with light wooden frames, and a floor trunk for the best weight/storage ratio (2.2 lbs/87500 storage) and with just a foot crank it has a speed of 17/59, with an acceleration of 1 for my all-10 stat test guy. So doable, but you’d better have some lead on any zombies that are chasing you if you don’t want them to whack your bike a couple of times.
Slapping on three solar panels to it, a car battery, and a small electric motor, gives you a safe speed of 20/60, and an acceleration of 2. This will drain the battery pretty quickly, but it means you can accelerate to a decent speed and then maintain it indefinitely with almost no stamina spent, even with 5 steel frames filling the trunk for an added 220 pounds, nearly doubling the bike’s weight. You can even do 30 mph for a while if you’re willing to burn stamina, it seems to put the excess load on your legs instead of the motor, so it didn’t break it in my testing.
Upgraded solar panels still aren’t enough to maintain the battery, and are heavier, so they’re not really worth it.
Would it work to make a corpse harvester with something at the front to kill zombies by raming them and some scoops under it to pick up the corpses ?
I don’t know how scoops works since I never got to use it .
[quote=“Fris0uman, post:1297, topic:207”]Would it work to make a corpse harvester with something at the front to kill zombies by raming them and some scoops under it to pick up the corpses ?
I don’t know how scoops works since I never got to use it .[/quote]
you need to turn ON the scoops (i didnt know that at that moment) and for what i have seen, scoops just pick up one thing on the same tile per turn (so if there is a tile with a dropped item and a corpse for example, it would need 2 turns on the same tale to pick up both).
But yes, it works, i recomend putting them on the middle or end of the vehicle (just to be sure they are dead) and to still butcher them, if i recall it correctly, a corpse yields like 25 blob feed, but if you butcher it and get lucky, you can have 4 chunks of meat and 4 bones, for a total of 50 blob feed.
But they are worth it, if the piece isnt too damaged, they repair they selfs
Here is my nifty little solar powered base station. The front is a water tank with funnel and right behind that is an opaque hatch. The station can be backed into the base with the hatch closed to protect the fragile solar panels while still collecting rain water.
Behind the hatch we of course have the panels, followed by a seat and controls and then finally the rear is where any workstations end up. For now it just has a chemistry station, eventually I’ll add a welding rig and then maybe a mini-fridge but I’ll probably leave this base before that happens.
Here it is with the solar panels stowed indoors;
Quick Question : if I put a solar pannel inside but infront of a window and in a bright area will it generate power ?
I’m making a base inside a house with glass doors and I was thinking to use that to keep my power generation inside for once.
If the tile is bright, it’ll work. I personally like to build a fence around my generator when I’m doing a static base. Stockade walls are quick to build, and you can use an existing building’s wall to cover three sides at first. Then when I determine how much power I need, I can add the fourth and an entrance.
