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Thoughts on vehicle retirement, increase_maintenance_after_years, etc

Started by Vladki, June 07, 2018, 08:49:56 PM

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Vladki

Hi,

I have a question about how to properly set up the timeline for rail (and other vehicles) in pak128.CS(-ex). So far (in standard) there was an agreement that for road vehicles, the retire_year/month will be set to date when the vehicle went out of production, while for rail vehicles it would be the date when the last vehicle was taken out of regular service. The reason was, that road vehicles are produced in much higher total numbers, sold continuously to more customers, and the production usually stops only when there is newer model available. On the other hand rail engines tend to be produced in batches, several 10s or few 100s, produced usually during few years, and then they serve 30 years or more. In the meantime the factory would produce some other engines, which might not be suitable replacement (i.e. a batch of fast express engines, then a batch of shunters, then some heavy cargo engines,...) But theoretically, if there would be more demand, they would be (and often were) able to make another batch of a few years old model (perhaps with minor improvements). And trams are somewhere in between. So the question is, where to put the retire_date for rail vehicles (or any that were produced in smaller batches). And with extended, we can also play with increase_maintenance_after_years and years_before_maintenance_max_reached.
I would suggest the following:
1. when the last piece was built = retire_year
2. when a suitable replacement becomes available = retire_year +  increase_maintenance_after_years
3. when the last piece was taken out of service = retire_year + increase_maintenance_after_years + years_before_maintenance_max_reached.
For road vehicles time 1 would be equal to time 2. For standard I would put retire_year to time 2 (for all vehicles).

Other ideas?



jamespetts

For Pak128.Britain-Ex, a mixture of (1) and (2) are used: (1) is preferred, but (2) is used where using (1) alone would produce unacceptable gaps during which players are unable to purchase suitable vehicles, which would not be realistic in any event. (3) is not used at all, as this is not the purpose of a retirement date, representing the date when players can last obtain vehicles new, not the date on which the last player decides to withdraw the vehicle from service.
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