0.2.50.9 (EXPERIMENTAL) - Cost system & Transmission realism pass

Hi all,

There's an experimental build of 0.2.50 up on the experimental branch

It introduces a new cost system and some significant changes to transmission sizes:

Cost system

The goal of this is to give value to material rarity and construction complexity.

The cost system sums the cost of every part in the vehicle. Each part considers its material, assembly and forging cost. Crew members, which were pretty cheap before, cost significantly more now in living and training costs.

Overall this flattens costs, making tankettes more expensive and heavies cheaper. Costs are in Industrial Complexity (IC) units, with 10 units being equal to 1 gram of gold.

Transmission sizes

The first thing you'll notice is that transmissions have gotten quite a bit bigger. Their size wasn't realistic and they would have had to be made out of alloys several times stronger than anything that existed at the time. This resulted in transmission design being a non-problem, with it being quite easy to get just about any vehicle up to 60km/h. It's much more rewarding now to build a vehicle with good mobility.

It might hurt a bit having some of your compact designs being considered impossible now, sorry about that!

I've exposed the material strengths in the transmission and driveshaft tech files via "materialUTS" fields, so modern tank mods can simulate modern transmission sizes better.

Changelog

8 new parts

All made by Dario:

• DSHkM

• German headlight

• Early Pz V muffler exhaust

• Grate vent

• Short muzzle brake

• Welded muzzle brake

• Wooden crate

• Spoked wheel

Fixes

• Fixed clutch braking not redirecting all engine torque to one track when the other is disconnected.

• Twin transmissions now split torque correctly, resulting in its transmissions only needing to support half the torque.

Changes

• Made transmission internal shaft diameters more realistic (they were ~7x too small). This resulted in gears getting dramatically bigger.

• Transmission gear width now scales with engine torque.

• The final drive ratio is now editable in the transmission editor.

• Added transmission multi-stage reductions to dramatically lower transmission sizes with higher early gear ratios. Large reductions get split across multiple gears, adding length instead of width. Implemented via the "Multi-stage above" field, which defines the ratio above which a gear will be split into multiple stages.

• Added an auxiliary gear option. This lets you double the number of speeds in your transmission at the cost of two extra gear pairs and another gear selector mechanism. As an example for how this works: A transmission with [5:1, 1:1] drive ratios with an auxiliary gear of [2:1] would result in ratios: [10:1, 5:1, 2:1, 1:1]. Each gear can be run at 2:1 or 1:1. The auxiliary gears are much bigger as they have to support the maximum torque output of the first transmission.

• Disabled custom control over transmission torque ratings. This didn't have any consequences for being too low.

• Transmission gear slider soft limits set to [1..20]. You can still go outside of this range by entering values into the input field.

• Transmission gears are now visualized during editing.

• AddedRaised transmission gear count limitsWWI 3->6, Interwar 6->8. These get balanced by the new transmission scaling.

• Made transmissions +25% heavier.

• Ammo rack shells are now spaced 1cm apart.

• Plate structures can now use structural steel, instead of RHA. This halves the cost but halves the armour effectiveness.

• Disabled depth of field in the vehicle editor.

• Driveshafts require a significantly smaller diameter for short sections (Roughly half the size).

• Driveshafts scale up as their length or maximum rotational speed increases, in order to prevent them shaking themselves to pieces.

• Reworked the transmission gear ratio 'G1 / n' button. It's now 'Smooth' and interpolates the ratios between the first and last using a much more advanced function provided by Colson.

• Removed the throttle limit for neutral steering. Allowing full engine torque to be used for neutral steering.

• Slightly raised the max rpm of engines above WWI (Up to +10% in latewar).

Give it a go and let us know what you think!

• Hamish