Celestar wrote:You are aware that a standard (26.4m) passenger car is around 40-55 tons empty?
Celestar
I'm assuming this was directed at me.
I'm aware of the fact that empty cars are quite heavy, though I wasn't aware of the exact numbers. 40-55 tons is still a pretty big range if you're an engineer who's designing a train or its components to perform to specification. Even if we assume passenger cars are about the same weight as freight cars, you're still looking at a huge difference when you add up the difference between a full passenger car and a full freight car over 10, 20, 30, 40 iterations along the length of the entire consist. Or we could assume a passenger car weighs 55 tons and a freight car weights 40, which I'm not sure is fair, but it doesn't seem fair to do this vague, pseudo-intellectual, bullsh*t forum math if we don't have the specific models that we're going to assume are used for passenger cars and freight cars. At a difference of 27 tonnes for the cargo payload, a difference of -15 tonnes for our crude assumption of a difference between the weight of a freight car and passenger car, you're still looking at a 12 tonne difference between freight and passenger cars, assuming they're all full. 12 tonnes x 10; 12 x 20; 12 x 40 =>> can be a big difference. I'm not going to bother to do the force / energy / friction math in front of you, since it will probably turn everyone off to the thread and prevent them from even starting to read this, but the realistic acceleration is supposed to take into account the mass of the cars, the mass of the cargo, rotational friction on the axles, the friction between the train and the tracks due to gravity, air resistance, tractive effort and horse power, changes in acceleration due to the force of gravity on slopes, remind me if I left something out. I have faith in the sheer math, even if the real world isn't quite as ideal.
Point is: I hate discussions about whether something is "realistic" in reference to a video game. The last time I rode a Eurorail I never saw a single full passenger car. So its not exactly realistic to portray people lining up to get on a train; not a huge portion of the world population rides around on trains nowadays. Don't ever see articulated buses rolling around New York City, or Seattle or Los Angeles either, and vehicles don't usually take 4 days to load with passengers and planes don't usually pay for themselves after two trips. To some people the "realism" discussion matters, maybe. That's fine. To each their own. To me, no, it doesn't matter. Why no? Well because what the hell are we using as our base of reference? What is our "tolerance" level for "non-realism"? Do we make dispensations, do we make concessions in order to make the game more fun? Or are we going to be die-hard and insist on realism even if it ruins the game? And why the hell am I getting so worked up?
... End rant? I guess. Haven't slept all night because of work-related crap. It was sunny yesterday, a Friday, and I spent all day inside working....
I prefer not playing with the cargo weight multipliers myself, since, like Pikka mentioned, passengers aren't subject to the weight multiplier, resulting in a huge discrepancy between the performance of passenger/express trains and freight trains. When you look at all the custom train sets, the freight cars have speed limits that typically run as low as 40% of the maximum attainable velocity of the fastest train available. Combine the speed restrictions with a cargo weight multiplier and you get... a pain in the ass. Play with breakdowns also and you're probably a bit of a masochist.