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How mothball ship canal?

Started by AP, December 19, 2017, 07:24:13 PM

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AP

Is it possible to mothball canals? If so, how?

Ves

Logic would be that a mothballed canal returns to be whatever river was there before. That probably would mean that the tile would have to store that. If the canal was built on dry land, a dedicated mothballed canal would be used to preserve the forge cost. But without water, so unnavigable.
Since you can't wear the canal with vehicles, it would be weared over time

jamespetts

I do not think that I ever added mothballed canals, I think partly because I am not sure quite how they would work (how much maintenance does a canal actually need in any event? I suppose that it needs dredging), and partly because I had not worked out quite how to produce graphics for it (algae, perhaps?).

Does anyone have any data on this?
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Vladki

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baťa_Canal

This canal was mothballed for more than 30 years. I have found a pdf book about it in Czech. If you have specific questions on what data is interesting fod you I'll look for it and translate.

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AP

The Severn & Thames canal is a good example,  it's dry but intact earthworks eg around Cirencester .  I know of several canals that were converted to railways on the south coast (Andover Canal,  Portsmouth section of the Portsmouth & Arundel Canal) so I would strongly support any mechanism to allow railway construction to occur straight over a dry canal, saving on Forge costs.  The Portsmouth section of its canal was a ship canal.

jamespetts

The Wikipedia article does not give any description of the state of the canal during its abandonment, its appearance, nor the amount of maintenance saved. I will need to know what mothballed canals look like if I were to implement them.

However, I now recall a more fundamental problem: the forge cost for canals is relatively low compared to the cost of actually building the canals because there is an orders of magnitude difference between a ship canal and a tub boat canal in the basic earthworks required. This is fundamentally different to the difference between, e.g., a railway branch line and a high speed rail line. Also, canals, unlike other ways, are set not to wear out: they require only regular maintenance. With the current mothballed way mechanic, it would not be possible to have a specific mothballed ship canal, mothballed tub boat canal, mothballed barge canal, etc.: there would just be a single mothballed canal. In order to avoid exploits, it would have to be just as expensive to un-mothball a mothballed canal as it would to upgrade a tub boat canal to a large ship canal, as mothballing is free, so one could always build a tub-boat canal, mothball it, and then build a ship canal on top of the mothballed canal. The game would not remember what canal used to be present before the mothballed canal was put in place, so would charge the same for upgrading a mothballed canal that was once a tub boat canal to a ship canal as it would charge for upgrading a mothballed canal that was once a ship canal back into a working ship canal again.

As to railways and canals, allowing a completely different type of way to use the upgrade mechanic would require very major changes to the code to achieve, and would be conceptually difficult: would one be able to upgrade a narrow gauge railway to a large ship canal? Defining the limits of what could and could not be upgraded and at what price would be very challenging.
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wlindley

As to basic forge costs, I have wondered why bridleways on flat open ground cost nearly as much to build as roads; one would imagine merely riding horses across a field should be a simple low-priced matter and suffice for the early low-volume farms? 

Vladki

I know of some abandoned railways that were turned to roads.

And I agree that a bridleway should be almost free (both to build and maintain).

AP

Railway to road is tricky because it requires a double track railway to be wide enough for a two way road.  Which occupy different numbers of tiles in Simutrans.

Vladki

I know of a single track narrow gauge track that was converted to an asphalt road. Of course the road is still quite narrow and probably some more earthworks were needed, but they still have saved some money. But I do not think that this is an important feature. It might be interesting if we have generic tunnels and bridges. One could keep the tunnel and replace railway with road...

jamespetts

Quote from: wlindley on December 23, 2017, 02:48:20 AM
As to basic forge costs, I have wondered why bridleways on flat open ground cost nearly as much to build as roads; one would imagine merely riding horses across a field should be a simple low-priced matter and suffice for the early low-volume farms? 

The costs are not balanced yet - but every type of road will have the same forge cost as every other type of road, as that is how the forge cost system works. Then, upgrading a bridleway to another type of road, no further forge cost will be payable.
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