The LMR 4-wheel mail van

[AvG]

James,
Here a real balancing issue concerning LMR-4Wheel-Mail'
In your Pak this vehicle has a load-cap of 24 mailbags, or 1,2 ton.
On http://www.traintesting.com/Research74.htm I get the impression that the origin of the vehicle was a 16-ton freight-car.
Even if you take in consideration the weight of the special cabin (hull,structure) one gets the idea that a load of 24 bags is quite small.
200 bags looks possible but is maybe a bit high because then the content of the bags could be damaged.
Furthermore looks the weight of the car itself also quite small. Did you take that from literature?
Please your opinion about this.
AvG

BTW: -Is my maintenance-cost/bits_per_month problem now clear to you?

[jamespetts]

AvG,

I have moved this topic out of the general Simutrans-Experimental balancing thread, as this issue is specific to Pak128.Britain, but is not specific to Experimental. It was not I who produced this vehicle in the first place, so I cannot account for the intentions of its original author - perhaps The Hood will be able to help?

[AvG]

As you can see I changed the Subject-name into LMR 4-Wheel mail.
Intro-year 1830.
Has The Hood an opinion about this?
AvG

[The Hood]

If I remember correctly, although it was a long time ago, I didn't have any data to go on so I was simply extrapolating backwards from the numbers in kierongreen's more modern vehicles to get something that seemed sensible for something of that size.  Increasing the mail van to 200 bags throws everything else out too - given how simutrans produces similar amounts of passengers and mail they are roughly equal in vehicles of the same size. It is probably best to envisage 1 "bag" of mail as much more than a bag.  Does this help?

[kierongreen]

The Hood has pretty much explained this - but just to elaborate a bit further as the timeline gets further back into the past capacity per vehicle AND per unit length goes down (as well as speed and weight). Thus old 4 wheel vans, which are shorter than more modern vehicles have to have significantly less capacity (else there's no reason to upgrade them). Possibly weight of mail could be balanced - would have to check this against modern vehicles to see if it produces reasonable loads though.