(DRbiG's) Powered Vehicle Design Primer

Hello fellow engineers! In this document we'll explore, elaborate and exemplify powered vehicle design concerns.

A fair amount of vehicle construction knowledge is assumed, but hopefully not necessary to gain insight by reading this document. We will be basing our discussion on the latest experimental available, along with the vehicle additions mod. We are doing cutting-edge science here.

(version: 0.C-3741-gdd393ca)

Introduction

Building an awesome vehicle is a balancing act. You can't have everything, and nothing will fit all roles (but with enough luck and persistence you can have a vehicle for every occasion).

The first question you have to answer yourself before you think about design is "what will be the role of my vehicle?". The answer to that question is crucial to making good trade-offs during the design. Having answered that you need to decide how much are you committed to the design - vehicle parts don't grow on trees, and ad-hoc vehicles, while better than nothing, are usually far from optimal.

We can easily distinguish three main roles:

1. Looters/Explorers

   These vehicles focus on mobility. Usually no larger than 3x3 and limited in range, but with decent cargo space and very low maintenance costs they are perfect for all the city exploration and looting needs.

2. General purpose/Deathmobiles

   These vehicles fall in the middle of the scale. They are too big for great mobility, but too small to hold a proper mobile base. Most vehicles you can find in the world will fall into this category. They serve as a very good basis of going either way on this scale, and are the most customizable role.

3. Mobile bases

   The largest vehicles that can be make you completely self-sustainable, at the expense of mobility and fuel efficiency. The RV, Mobile Meth Lab and the coveted Military Cargo Truck serve as the best base vehicles for this role.

Being a soft-scale there are no hard definitions except on the ends: a vehicle wider than 1 will get stuck somewhere sooner or later, and a vehicle that doesn't make you completely self-sustainable is not a mobile base.

In terms of materials always consider the looting vs. crafting angle. You might be better off making a vehicle forge and hand-making that FOODCO Kitchen Buddy form scratch than scavenging for that one last component you are missing.

Design concerns

The real business. We will go over the concerns in general order of importance.

Size

Size is the width and height of your vehicle in tiles. It will influence everything else and as such is not a thing you can easily change mid-way (without starting the design from scratch).

1. Mobility

   As already indicated a big vehicle will inevitably have problems moving on. This means not only getting stuck in a middle of a Z filled city centre, but also traversing a forested area. You can offset this with "hard parts" such as roller drums for wheels and rams, but don't relay on it too much (trees are incredibly sturdy, and so are reinforced walls/tonnes of wreckage).

2. Cargo space

   To get the same cargo volume as any ground tile you'll need 4 cargo carriers. Empirical data shows that around 9 cargo carriers (9000 volume) is perfectly fine for a mobile base. Be aware that if you install more you'll just hoard more - without any real increase in utility.

3. Solid walls

   Solid walls offer you protection from the outside world but severely limit what else you can put on a tile. Remember that vehicle mounted tools are impassable (but still let light through). You'd most likely like to have the section you plan to sleep in walled off. Walls make much less sense for smaller vehicles.

4. Mounted tools

   Important for mobile bases - also limit what else you can put. The arrangement is also crucial for utility (more on that later).