Hello all. I'd like to ask pakset creators who aim for maximum reality, how do you set the vehicle capacities for various goods, especially piece goods?
Just as a reminder what you originally wrote - you asked how to deal with what we have. Not sure why you go 180 and dismiss suggestions in favor of turning it into an extension request.
There are several issues with your idea.
To begin with, you claim pallets, barrels, sacks, furniture, lifestock and cars could/would all be piece good. In p192c, pallets are piece goods. Sacks are used for mail, a special good. Barrels are intended to become their own category for dedicated barrel cars. Furniture is transported in containers. Lifestock and cars are both special goods. By seperating categories, you never need to compare a car to a sack, never have the problem that any vehicle could load more sacks than it could load cars. Instead, you can indeed check the size of a pallet, it's approximate weight, and get close enough. So reducing the good categories would artificially blow up the problem in the first place.
Anyway - assume you have a good that requires a larger space/more weight per unit than a vehicle that transports the type of good can offer. Would it stay empty while there are goods waiting in the station? How is "full" defined for wait on load? Can it never be filled, or is it full as soon as it tries to load something, but does not have the required space/carry capacity? Or would you scrap other units and simply have a few square meter of rum barrels?
What happens if both heavy small goods and light large goods are waiting for the same destination, will Simutrans automatically optimize usage of each car, or will they just load whatever, requiring more of them in total?
Would stations follow suit, even though their capacity is occupied by several goods simultanously anyway?
If you had lightweight vehicles that can carry a lot of space, but not a lot of weight, and bulky vehicles that can carry a lot of weight, but not much space, and want to transport very light feather pillows and very heavy gold bars both from A to B, how could you prevent the lightweight vehicle from unprofitably transporting gold?
And then, of course, someone will tell you that a specific vehicle had only 1.4 times 1.4 area of space in reality, which is a bit more area than two europallets, yet two europallets wouldn't fit. So why would they fit in the game? So unrealistic- then we need a way to solve
that problem too.
All in all, it would be a pain to find a solution that could work in theory and be enjoyable for players - long before someone would actually start coding it.
After some researchs, they're no legal limitation of weight (or I didn't found them)
https://www.epal-pallets.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ntg_package/images/Produktdownloads/Produktdatenbla__tter/D/EPAL_Europalette_Produktdatenblaetter_DE.pdfI can only provide it in German source, but it's directly from EPAL. "Tragfähigkeit 1500 kg" (it's not 1.5, German uses dots as seperators for large numbers). Not just a recommandation.