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Oddities in horse-drawn road freight vehicles and ships

Started by neroden, May 02, 2013, 01:47:15 AM

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neroden

(1) The "cart" (which carries only 1 unit of stuff) has a 1 t axle load
The stage wagons have 1 t axle loads
The "wagons" have 2 t axle loads, meaning they require cobblestone roads... which aren't available yet in 1750!

Something is wrong here...

(2) There's another oddity.  The "cart", which is by far the slowest vehicle available and has the lowest capacity, has an extremely long loading time compared to everything else.  This makes it practically unusable, and it's actually odd.  I'd think the tiny cart would unload quicker than the wagon.

While I'm at it (sigh), the loading times for the sailing ships are way too fast.  I like the new, revised set of ships, a lot.  But you cannot seriously unload an East Indiaman in 1:49, can you?  Given that a cart takes 15 minutes?

The loading/unloading times don't have to be exactly right, but they should be in the right *order* so that vehicles which are faster to unload unload faster.

----

(3) The next problem with ships.  The narrowboat becomes available in 1750.  But the box boat and the tub boat each weigh 1 t.  The narrowboat weights 10 t, meaning that it runs at 5 mph, as opposed to the 7 mph of the box boat and tub boat.  The barges are even worse: the single boat horse cannot pull a bulk burge at any speed if it's full (which creates serious problems).

The real solution is probably in the physics code -- how is power and speed calculated for ships? 

Maybe the solution is to bulk up the tractive force of the horse.  Perhaps while reducing the power.  For boat hauling, there should be a very strong tractive force but a low ability to accelerate (which I think means low power) and it seems to be the reverse right now.

This may also be the solution for the shire horse problem on the railway.  Beef up the tractive effort while keeping the power low.  Have you tried this?  How does it work?  It *seems* like it's the right thing to do

jamespetts

Thank you for spotting these issues - I shall look into fixing these anomalies when I get a moment. Incidentally, the ships need a full re-balance of their loading times: many of the new ships recently added have not had a loading time set at all yet, which is why they get the very low default number.

I had raised the power of horses to be able to haul a fully loaded bulk barge at full speed, but the idea of using tractive effort instead is an interesting one which I shall look into. Also, the narrowboat ought not to be available until the 1760s (the box boat being the narrow canal boat until then). If the narrowboat is available in 1750, I shall need to change that, too.
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neroden

Oh.  The narrowboat and tub boat become available in 1761.  My bad.  The weight difference of the boat is the big issue here.

If I get a chance, I will do some tests to see if increasing tractive effort instead of power "does the trick".

jamespetts

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ӔO

it is also possible to set weight in kg now.
weight=0.456
My Sketchup open project sources
various projects rolled up: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17111233/Roll_up.rar

Colour safe chart:

jamespetts

Yes, we need to go through and decimalise the weight of every single vehicle in the pakset if possible. Sadly, that is a rather extensive task. It matters most for railway carriages and wagons, where a lot of cumulative half-tonnes make a difference.
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jamespetts

I have now reduced the axle loads of the wagons from 2t to 1t so that they work with the earlier roads. We can't have wheeled vehicles having axle loads of less than 1t because this value works only in whole tonnes (unlike vehicle weights), and vehicles with an axle load of 0t are able to use bridleways.

The rebalancing of ship loading times I completed some time ago.
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