In Progress Let's Play Automation Car Company Tycoon

[Burning Bridges]

"Turbocharger"

Cuntington, England ca 1974

What car designers want? Always more power.

Engine design has arrived at a crossroads. Normal, natural aspirated engines have physical limits to their power output that can only be overcome in miniscule amounts. Now in the early 1970s people are beginning to realize the performance increase that is possible by using turbochargers.

A turbocharger forces additional air into the combustion chamber. The turbocharger draws air and compresses it before it enters the combustion at increased pressure. This results in a greater mass of air in the cylinders and thereby more power. The power needed to spin the turbocharger is taken from the easte energy of the exhaust gas. That means that when the engine produces more power there is also more exhaust pressure which in turn is used to push even more air into the cylinders and so on. Thereby the power output of a turbocharged engine is a circle that theoretically unlimited.



Now having said that .. if you played the game yourself you will know how extremely difficult it is to make a Turbo car that does not absolutely suck penis.

The problem is not so much getting the power. A turbocharger can generate huge amounts of horsepower (as can be seen in the ZLIN Z-911) but when you put it in a car it becomes practically undrivable through added weight, a degenerate power curve, and several penalties that the game creates (drivability). The result is usually a complete embarassment.

So we've set ourselves a new goal.

Mr Cosplay said in a speech that blew everyone away:

We believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, to develop a turbo and return him safely to the Earth. We are going toi build a urbo that is not just creating impressive horsepower figures but also is practical and driveable enough to put it into cars that have high desirability on the market.

And:

We choose to build Turbos. We choose to go to build Turbos in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Hello, my name is Cuck Keithworth, chief turbo engineer at Cosplay aka the soldier who must get the dirty work done in this project.

Now seriously.

This is a challenge that we can also absolutely fail. Precisely, apart from utter embarassment I see three different success levels in this project:

1 (MINIMUM) to build a turbo - any car - that is somewhat competitive - and then quickly forget about it
2 (GOOD) to build a turbo that sufficiently doesn't suck that will be further developed
3 (BEST) build a turbo that is absolutely competitive against the best

We don't know how the turbocharged car will actually behave and if we will even sell a single unit. This lead to fierce debates in the team if we should actually build two cars, one with Turbo and one without?

The consensus is that we work on two engines start with a good naturally aspirated version that we can sell for $ and then begin tests with the turbocharger. That way we can always see how the turbo fares against a naturally aspirated engine of the same size, and if it sucks, we can discard it.

Now as to the basis of the new engines, what would be more logical than use our hugely successful Cosplay line of engines? We already ascertained that we have free reign to develop six and four cylinder versions of the DFV as an independent engine line of our own.

For our intends and purposes a turbocharged 8 cylinder would be way too complex. We are therefore faced with three competing options:

a 4 cylinder inline
a 6 cylinder inline
a V6 cylinder

The V6 is probably the most tempting because it is compact and least heavy. The straight 4 as it is understood is more fuel economic and simpler, but we are not sure that this is going to interest many people. The straight 6 is the least favored perhaps, it offers the greatest smoothness but no one really considered it as a race engine. It may not fit into many cars, maybe the crucial factor.

 

[Burning Bridges]

One thing that has been learned before is that making an engine without a car is not a good idea. We need a car to continually run tests. But we are not a car manufacturer and would need to build one up from the ground. The better option is that we find a car.

This comes at a time that several new contenders in the 1970s are looking into new car concepts.

Our bid to BRC for their wedge car was outright rejected because of politics - they have their own engine department. We secretly felt their car sucks on race the track anyway, so we are not overly depressed over this.

Our sponsor in America was also not interested in a possible GT turbo, because he finds the idea "nuts". Developing an engine with small displacement that generates more power than a large one is against all his principles of sportsmanship. We did not want to risk an extremely profitable relationship and did not bring it up again.

Folgore? Forget it, never called back.

The Jensen Malström car seemed an option, and the Swedes would be interested. And it would be certainly one of the fastest and most nimble cars we can get. But this would be very risky. The small coupe may be already at the limit concerning tyres, and may be best equipped to handle a 4 cylinder. We are not sure, maybe it will be tried at one time in the future. But right now this is not a safe bet, because this car could be already a little too light for us.

So, most options are way too heavy .. we want a light, nimble car that can cut through the corners of the test course in under 2:20 min. And we also want to be able to mount a relatively powerful engine, so some cars are already too small.

We are only a small company but that does not mean we do not have excellent connections. We need to make use of those now.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Trolled

Some good news, we have found our car in Germany!

It had suddenly came back to me under the shower that I knew a guy who said he knew another guy who had heard of someone by the name of Fredinand Proll, who had claimed to have build a ground breaking car. And he apparently got one massive chip on his shoulder because it was turned down in favor of a tractor. Being an absolute racing car nut all his life he had been working on an extremely innovative design that was going to have a rear mounted, air cooled engine and be extremely light and well handling.

It was internally reviewed by the company that he was working for, Germanys leading tractor producer. Fortunately for us it was eventually turned down because they simply did not know what to do with it.

Still, he was so adamant that they allowed him to build two cars and run them under the name Proll Racing. But lacking any sponsorship or connections it was mostly just something that was going on in his garage over the weekends, and nothing really ever came from it.

So when we went to their headquarters in Schweinfurt and asked if we could see the cars it was quickly agreed that we pay 100,000 DM and before we knew it, we had signed a contract that said we had bought two prototype cars from Germany.

The car was in a very good shape but not much had been done on it lately. Apparently they were still waiting for a small miracle that the company would change their minds one morning and get into the sports car business afterall.

We could see at once it has some very interesting features. For example being a rear end pusher it is a bit on the unusual side. We can expect a good weight distribution maybe at the expense of some cooling. They also seemed to have left a lot of space so we can probably fit our engines without problems, and also made provisions for mounting some pretty large tyres.

The engine it came with is of course crap and we simply gave it to some Poles who said they fetch any scrap metal.

So with the car securedly in our garage it is now time to begin work on an engine for it.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Beginning with the basic layout of the engine was easy. We would just use our hugely successful Cosplay line.

We already ascertained that we have free reign to develop 6 and 4 cylinder versions of the DFV as an independent engine line of our own, an excellent deal for us. This project had received massive cash influx from American Dillinger company, so we got ourself a huge head start almost for free.

As the new engine will uses the same bore and stroke of the DFR, a V6 is basically just a V8 with 2 cylinders removed and a inline 4 is a V8 cut in 2 (or one bank of the V8).

So here is a small table with the possible variations of the DFV that can be achieved by scaling it down, and the performance figures. Either because we know them or by what we calculated by experience.

*the performance index is actually the integral over the whole rev band, so it is in fact more meaningful than the peak horsepower

This results in a displacement of 2.25 L for the 6 cylinders or 1.5 L for a inline 4.

Since it was already known that a V 6 cylinder is a very compact engine, has very good performance and relatively good weight, we had decided that it would be a V6. This configuration is in our experience the most safe candidate. So we took a loan of 100,000 pound, built a few V6 DFVs after which still had most of the money left. It was basically just a question of building the engine with a slightly different cylinder angle, a different crankshaft and case but most of the parts and good features retained.

As you can see the engine performs exactly to spec. Ca 215 hp @ 6800 rpm for the natural aspirated DFV V6 makes it a first rate engine product in its own right. We could be able to push 10% more out of the engine using expensive hand made parts and ridiculous manufacturing processes, but what we see is enough. A good reference engine to compare our turbo, for a few thousand pound, and also one that we can sell to customers.

You can also see the compact measurements of the engine, 40 x 48.5 x 40 cm definitely another positve boon for the V6, as well as the ludicrously low production cost for a race engine.

Now, with the first engine already complete the next task was to get one of the Trolls ready for some laptimes.

 

[Burning Bridges]

All right so we did a quick job on car number 2 and gave it some expensive racing parts and tyres. That wing currently does nothing but could be useful later to do final adjustments to the aerodynamics.

We then immediately put it to the track. Without doing too much too it this car was already running low 2:20s. A result that puts it within 1 seconds of the GT 67 racing car, and is already 1.5 second faster than a regular 67 GT.

The car is really light, just 771 kg and this together with wide tyres and a powerful engine make a very good combo.

We also have the values for sportiness = 43.7 and drivability = 31.5. Not the most stellar we ever seen but already in a league with the best sports cars.

A very encouraging first result, because it means the Troll/DFV combo is already proving itself to be a 1st rate car before we even done anything to the Turbo.

A market analysis actually demonstrates this. We have done nothing yet but put an engine on the car, and the Troll V6 would already be aiming for a spot in the champions league.

So what have we achieved. We got a German car, have it set up and tested with our naturally aspirated V6 engine. That means once we have figures for the Turbo, we can see which is better and why

Now begins the difficult part. We now must actually develop the Turbo engine see what it can achieve and if it can even surpass the natural aspirated engine.

If it's demonstrably slower and worse handling than the N/A engine, we can conclude this as a failure. If it's superior we must see how far we can get it, and then analyze if the benefits justify the effort.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Now let me say again, what we don't want is just minmaxing the horsepower or performance index.

To show this let us look at another turbo engine, the ZLIN 1601 I made for the 1991 AVUS challenge. There the track is basically just two straights and the car that reachest the highest top speed earliest is the default winner.

As you can see we have 620 horsepower from no more than a 1.6 L engine that could be for example in your Golf.
This is achieved at 1991 tech (allowing much higher revs at 10,800 rpm), an insane production cost (see the production units and engineering times) and .. a terrible powerband.

There is nothing that can be done about the first two, but it is this part about the power band that interest us, because it defines the characteristics of the engine at all engine speeds, whereas the peak power just describes the highest, most optimal rpm.

In the top left you see two lines. Red being the torque (i.e. the force that the crankshaft turns) and blue the power of the engine (i.e. horsepower, which is basically torque times revolutions). Let us ignore the red line for a minute (most people have problems understanding torque).
But the blue line shows us how much power we have available at a given time, and we want this to be as high as possible.

Now if you look again at the grap the power band of this turbo looks like a very unfit girl attempting a pushup. Most of her body and abdomen hang on the floor and only a little bit at the top end comes up. In power terms, this means this engine has relatively few horsepower during the forst 55% of the power band and then it suddenly shoots up. But in order to use that peak power the driver has to keep the rpm in the optimal range all the time which is normally not possible. Whereas a good engine with a lot of low end power and torque doesnt break a sweat whenever you hit the throttle, be it at high speeds or even at lower speeds.

So, in order to get the best performance and drivability we want low, mid, and high end power to be high and in balance. We also want a rather straight power band so that the driver can handle the torque, and it does not change up and down all the time (drivability). Just to give you an another example, when you'd push a normal street car very hard and stay in first gear until you reach lets lets say 80 km/h, you would see that the power suddenly drops at some point, a very shocking feeling when you see it the first time. Because you think that you broke your engine, when in fact the powerband drops into nirvana.

We have already shown enough different engines. And this would be an example of a power band that goes straight up like a line. In game terms this is optimal because the game considers every change in the powerband as undrivable and you quickly see your drivability reduced to almost zero. So what we want is a power line that look a bit like that. But I can already tell you now that it is impossible to have such a line with a turbo, because with the turbocharger pushing in more and more air and increasing pressure at higher rpms it wants to look more like the first example. That means turbos want to always have lots of high end power with the band shooting up at 5000 or 6000 rpm, and hardly any low end power, and it is very hard to find a compromise.

So if we put one of those high end turbos in our car, we could probably achieve 400-500 horsepower or so in 1975 but no one would buy it. If we want to succeed with our turbo we need to find the best drivability we can get from a turbo and see if it is good enough to sell the car.

 

[Burning Bridges]

And then the first engine runs are like this. When we set the turbo into action it stops running and stalls. Every possible warning light that can go on goes on. Everyone panics and our chief engineer Mr. Woodcuck is on sick leave. He got depression or something and we must work without him. This is terrible, just terrible.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

[Burning Bridges]

We have ignition!

Cosplay garage, England ca 1975

Step by step, we have been able to produce the first unit of the V6 turbo that fits the requirements.

First we only tried to get a good setup from the someone else's LP but in 1975 the internet isn't invented yet. So we had to do it on our own, from the ground up and after some weeks, cubic metres of coffee and mountains of pizza boxes we got the first version of the turbocharged engine that we can send to Cuntington.

This is how show she looks, with a medium water-air intercooler, turbine, compressor, hoses and all and a big thing on the top that says "Turbo"

Lesson1: RONNIE is not your friend

Actually, when you do turbos one of your first problems is gonna be fuel.

RON is basically the octane number of the fuel that the engine's fuel system requires to run.
(RON stands for "something with octane number" - henceforth will just call it RONNIE).

If the RONNIE for the engine gets higher than the fuel, the engine starts knocking and eventually, stops running at all.

We already know that with a turbo RONNIE immediately gets insanely high. We have initially seen values in the 110 - 120 range.

If we could we would use aircraft fuel 100 octane or more but it is 1975 and high octane fuel is not easily available. Anything over 92 octane is bad because that's the best fuel that is available on petrol stations. So we need to settle with 92 octane which is gonna be a huge pain in the ass.

Lesson2: Drivability is at odds with Sportiness

If we can get more power from the engine, especially peak power, drivability drops to the floor. And vice versa if the engine makes the car drivable, it usually means negative numbers on the sportiness.

This seems to be the overall picture, and from an engine designer's perspective, it just sucks.

Lesson3: In order to succeed, you need to have a plan.

We had already understood beforehand that we could not just click around until we somehow arrived at a great turbo setting.

With turbos you have so many variables, compression, CAM, the ignition, fuel mixture, turbine and compressor size, AR ratio, boost pressure and so on, as well as RPM limiter and exhaust size.

You cannot just dick around blindly and expect to get anywhere.

So this is how we did it ..

First, before we began, we prepared a setup with some initial tricks that actually prove quite useful

Set CAM, ignition and so on to the values of the natural aspirated engine. If they are the best for the NA, they cannot be totally wrong for the turbo, though if we see an improvement we will change them later.

1. set max Boost to 3.0 bar (maximum)
This ensures that the turbo will not cut off boost at some point. Having a boost limiter may be nice in some engines, but here we want to make use of all available boost.

2. Set AR Ratio to 1.4 (maximum)
This is a value that no one fully understands yet. It has something to do with constricting the turbine inlet or something. But it makes the power curve look even, so this is the value we will use.

3. We also increase the quality of the fuel system by +6 clicks. This ensures ca 1 point less RONNIE, and since the fuel system is cheap, we can get this almost for free.

4. Give the engine the most unrestricting exhaust size possible. That means the initial pipe is huge and good for 2,500 hp. Thereby we prevent that the test process is restricted by the exhaust in any way.

Now in order to get a running engine we still had to reduce compression to a point where the engine would run. At the same time we also adjusted the fuel mixture to a point where power is best. This is because compression and fuel mixture operate on the same relationship, determining how much air and fuel gets into the combustion chamber, and in which ratio.

From here on we had to test, test and test.

During testing we discovered that we were first decreasing compression (to reduce RONNIE) until we came to a point where we increased it again.

In fact after we changed a lot of values we arrived at a compression of 8.5:1 which was the value we had started with.

We ran occasional laps, compared the times, calculated the black magic index (BMI) - which is the sum of the cars engine drivability, sportiness and torque curve bonuses (this can be seen in the detail stats).

In the screen above you can see that our engine has an engine drivability bonus of 9.0% a very good values for a V6, even if it was just a naturally aspirated one. And for a turbo this is exceptional.

This is mostly the result of a highly balanced power curve.

This does not look like the power band of a turbo does it? The curve has no apparent dents or anything, just a relatively even increase in power.

Now, we do not want to get away thinking that this engine is extremely powerful. Torque is quite low throughout the power band and this keeps drivability in an acceptable range.

We could easily be getting much more power - in fact just by a few clicks 50-100 horsepower can be made available - but right now we had to keep it low enough to retain the best drivable conditions.

And if you ask yourself if this is even worth to do a turbo .. it adds almost 80 extra horsepower and 25% more power index. Not extremely much for a turbo but this is achieved while actually improving the drivability, sportiness and 2 seconds faster laptime so there appears to be no actual downside to it.

This is not quite enough to catch up with a 3L V8 DFV yet, but we just started. This engine develops 286 horsepower from a 2.25L V6, close to 130 hp/liter compared to ~95hp/L for the 3L V8

A race engine of this engine would easily get 350 hp and more and surpass the 3L NA, just at the expense of the excellent drivability.

Eventually we would see how overall sportiness and drivability was effected. The score normally went either up or down, that means either drivability or sportiness goes up while the other goes down.

We calculate a BMI of +10.3% which for a turbo is unheard of. Normally values are deep in the negative with up to -20%. In fact this value is even superior to many (badly designed) natural aspirated engines.

This results in a bonus of +10%, and eventually SP = 32.1 and DR = 43.1
Especially the sportiness is fantastic, and the drivability is on the same level as naturally aspirated car. This is in fact alread better than we could expect.

You can also see that the turbo is pretty hard on the engine.

Especially the valves are subjected to pretty high wear. It can of course be mostly cured by reducing the max rpm from an insane 8,000 to lets say 7,000, and using an iron engine block. We just found that the rpm give 1-2 seconds on the test track, and we also want to keep the weight down by using aluminum.

All in all the engine is somewhat unreliable. This seems not a problem for the projected customers (no influence on the market score for sport cars), but we must keep it in mind.

Finally, here is a more detailed rundown of what we did during development:

+6 fuel system quality
AR 1.4 and boost 3.0 (max values)
adjusted turbine for smoothest curve (a more even power output at the expense of peak and low end power)
lower compression
race intakes
fuel mixture increased to 11.4 (rich)
+1 valve quality
decrease CAM to 74 and ignition point to 78
this in turn decreases RON, we now can work with a few more
last changes
give exhaust correct size
increase the compression until RON is 92

The engine has been stamped with the first serial number and sent to the factory. And here is the final sample of our first turbo engine.

Cosplay M7523-T2
2,25L V6 Turbo
286hp/258Nm @ 8000 rpm
Turbo Max boost 1.12 bar

Production units 49.0 (low)
Material cost 1619$ (average)
Engineering Time 67.48 (average)

Next task will now be to setup the car and see what it can eventually achieve on the track, as well as its ratings. We are already running laptimes in the low 2:18s range, faster than anything that has been shown in this thread except the Fulmine V12 (we ignore the 1991 car of course). And this can only get better when the mechanics get their hands on it and give it the final improved setup.

EDIT: And here the inevitable video that demonstrates also how the turbo engine sounds

 

[Burning Bridges]

Here is another comparison of the turbo to the other engines in the DFV family. It shows that the 2.25L Turbo can match the 3L V8 in peak horsepower, but at a lower power index (i.e less torque is available over the power band).

Considering that power has a huge influence on laptimes, we are thinking about two different lines of Turbos from now on. One for the production car that has excellent drivability, and another one that goes for all out performance and much less respect for drivability. This race version we think could get over 350 hp.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Turbocharger (Conclusion)

When the suspension team first saw it, they were noticeably adverse to our "stillborn" car, then they seemed to be astounded and finally we had to use force because they didn't want to give it back.

Whether it was them or the car that did it, the result was outstanding and the car has been immediately declared a success.

A drivability of 43.0 and a sportiness of 49.0 make this arguably the best on the market right now. We feel absolutely positive that the sportiness could be brought over 50, if we can get the funding for a up model.

This is also reflected in the lap time. 2:17,56 is on par with the 1969 Folgore Fulmine (2:17,46) - which has twice the displacement. The Fulmine has a 4.5L engine to our 2.25L, and costs over 142,000$. An incredibly satisfying result, that we have been able to demonstrate that Turbos can be competitive, and also race with cars with much larger engines!

Here another comparison with the natural aspirated V6, as to what makes up Drivability. Green means the Turbo is better, Red that the NA is better.

And the same comparison for Sportiness.

The suspension options show a pretty wild picture and tbh we must study a bit more before we can say what's going on. We can only say that this car is "lively" and fun to drive.

The markets show that we can sell our car at a profit, which was the challenge we set ourselves.

We could offer it for a much higher price. But since we are not a well known car company, and our cash income mostly comes from the deal with Dillinger, we decided to set the initial price very low. At 15,600$ this is an absolute steal and we dont expect the price will remain like that for very long. We will at first produce a limited edition with only 25 cars sold. which will make it also a valuable collectors item.

 

[Burning Bridges]

STATE OF THE LP - SOME OF MY IDEAS ABOUT NEW CARS

1 this one is on my TODO list for some time. Could be a british Jaguar with a long engine. It could be called the "Pavian" or "Januar" or something equally retarded and it would allow us to study the legendary 6 cylinder inline of the Jaguars.

2 a solid looking Saab, the destined successor and next car for the Jensen company. Ca 1982

3 a 2005 body that looks like some popamole italian yuppie car. Not extremely exciting but certainly something decent could be made from it

4 ca 1988 .. the Cuntach? this car looks like a solidified boner to me.

5 this one is particularly special. I think it should be Japanese and be called for example "Shinkansen". Of course a Wapanese car would have to be something special in its own right .. ca 1997

6 uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugly. But women and Americans like cars like this. 1990

7 looks like someon tried to make a Porsche, only totally ugly.

8 no idea what this is supposed to be. looks like a Ferrari made from clay and then someone sat on it.

9 this looks half decent, for making a Datsun ("my summer car"). Too bad I know next to nothing about making ordinary cars ..

 

[Burning Bridges]

STATE OF THE LP

With that done I would have no immediate plans for the next car. I will just conclude this round by introducing some car bodies that could be next. Maybe someone likes one of those or has an idea what it could be.

I'm also open to questions about the game at this point, and there are some things that I would like to research myself.

TO BE CONTINUED ..

 

[Zarniwoop]

Wait, they actually made the "tycoon mode" aka THE ACTUAL GAME after all these years, and it sucks? Dammit, that sucks. But I did kind of expect it. That's the problem with true autist developers, the games ends up equally autistic. Amazingly deep in one area, utter shit at everything else.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I kind of agree, the game is incredibly deep in some areas and the rest is simply utter ridiculous crap.

They did get away with that until they got on Steam, with their what 150 users or so. Then it was ok for a while too but they probably realized that Steam users would not tolerate that a "Automation - The Car Company Tycoon" is continually sold with the campaign button greyed out.

So what they did is they release a quickhack that is so called "Lite campaign" and it basically looks like a video recording software. After you have clicked yourself through an incredibly tedious sequence of ca 50 modal windows, set up a car new and an engine which - of course - cannot be one that you had previously made in the sandbox but must be created from scratch - you can hit a play and stop and fast forward button that progresses time and you can see a number at the top change which is your bank account.

As much as I love this game purely for the engine designer I think that the person who comes up with this stuff just sucks. They should just move the office and never inform him about the new adress.

Ah yes, and they are "porting" the game to a new engine, I guess that is admission that they realized this one is crap and now try to escape forward, rewriting their assignment on the last day before the exam. I have seen some screenshots that look like an entirely new game - pretty crap actually with bloom enabled indoors and all - and I think they that they basically have to redo the whole game and hope that people will not notice it.

So I would recommend to backup the game folder in time because sometime they may replace it with a new product that could be totally different.

 

[Burning Bridges]

The End of the Road for the BRC?

If there is one company that could be in trouble it's the BRC Company.

With all those recent developments it became clear that by the year of its arrival (1974) their attempt at modernization has already fallen behind considerably with an ailing V8 and a relatively heavy car.

Their 1974 Tornado - while heralded as the glorious comeback of the British motor racing car - was quickly gathering a reputation as a dog, heavy, underpowered and - with a test track time of 2:26 - in no way able to compete with the the older Dillinger GTs, Fulmines or the Cosplay Turbos.

They are still not willing to let go on the wedge car, though it is painfully slow on the race track, it looks very modern and could still be something that sells well on the markets.

Currently they are just a few people who bought it because of its Britishness. But they'd need to make a more up to date car if they want to sell to a broader audience.

Cockton, 1976

After 50 years of messing about in formula 1 and car making, we really need to get our act up .. unless we come up with a success we may have to close down soon.

Now with turbos being the shit recently we have ordered a Cosplay engine to see how it behaves, and if we should try to make a turbo of our own.

In our garage we are experimenting with a lot of things, like space frames and other ideas. Somehow there must be ways to come up with some innovation that no one else has found yet ..

Or is there?

Now the first results of this proces seem to be that the wedge car is also really limited in engine space and a larger engine is not an option either. What could be the answer? Build an engine that perfectly integrates into the car, or try to come up with a small turbo that goes for all out performance??

 

[Burning Bridges]

One of the first finds is that we might get most out of our engine space with transverse mounted engines.

One young technician tried to fit mockups of several inline engines an saw that it could support a 4 cylinder of up 3.5L, as well as the maximum compressor size for a turbocharger.

The 4 cylinder turbo would be interesting because no one else has done it yet. But it would incure a further penalty by the number of cylinders and for some reasons customers dont like engines with less cylinders ..

In fact it seems - and this would be extremely surprising - that we could even fit a six cylinder inline engine of ca 3000 cm³ and then still have space for all parts we need for a turbo. That means we could develop a 6 cylinder without getting problems with compressor size later on.

Now should we go the route of a straight 6 turbo, something that no one has considered yet?

This question is not settled at all, because we dont want to got the route of the H-16 cylinder again, that had once cost us our domination in formula 1.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Another harebrained scheme?

The technician has measured and measured and come up with an even more crazy idea. If there is space enough to mount a 6 cylinder, then why not a V12 too?

A transverse mounted V12 you ask? Well yes, our engine bay is wider than it is long and if the engine is reasonably small, it could actually fit in.

This would have many advantages actually, the technology is much easier to develop and it may even be more drivable and prestigious. A 3L V12 would accurately fit the Formula 1 specification and be a contender to the DFV and develop over 300 hp.

We have already established through a model that such a car could be quite fast (topspeed of 280 km/h). The question is, should we build it?

 

[Burning Bridges]

Cockton, BRC garages ca 1976

We weighed our options. The turbo would be very time intensive and we need a new model asap. One that offers something so special that people inclined to own a British product will readily pull the trigger.

And we have nailed down the major problem with our chassis to weight. All else being equal - the same engine and all - our wedge cars weigh ca 70 kg more than the Proll-Cosplay Turbo. The turbos are fast, affordable cars and currently the shit on race tracks. Fortunately for us our competitors in Cuntington have no big production capacity, and buy their chassis from Germany, so we would have a small chance if we get to the market with our car very soon.

Everyone these days has access to the same lightweight materials, so just simply saving extra weight is not an option. But we may be able to get more power from the weight that we have.

How can this be done? One would be using a turbo, and though the turbo incurs another 100kg or so just by default, it may really take us over the threshold. But like already said, developing a turbo is time intensive, especially as we also want a high drivability rating as well. The competition has set the bar already quite high.

Another option is the undersquare engine. Undersquare means - if the cylinder bore gets smaller and the piston stroke longer - an engine becomes relatively lighter, compared to an oversquare engine where the relationship is reversed. Most engines these days are square - the two variables in balance - or slightly undersquare - the Cosplay DFV for example uses an excellent 0.938:1 ratio - incidently the same as the Audi R4.

Undersquare bore/stroke ratios also add the advantage that the engine develops more torque in the low rpm range. So what are the disadvantages? The main disadvantage is rpm, as the torque is higher the stress induced on the engine is higher and undersquare engines are generally not high revving.

But there is another twist to this, and this is the size of the combustion chambers and the number of cylinders. That being said - at the same displacement it's obvious that the combustion chambers of a 12 cylinder engine are about 1/3 smaller of a V8. And it is also clear that at a relatively low displacement, the effective stroke length may actually be shorter, and the rev penalty equalized. Can you follow? What we think is that by making a V12 with a massive undersquare ratio, and also going to a relatively small displacement, we think that we get away with high revolutions per minute.

And fortunately it had already been calculated that we can fit inline 6 and V12 engines of about 3L in transverse configuration, so we think we should have a go at this concept and see if it turns out the way we think it does, namely that we get the horsepower/weight ratio of the car up, and make up ground against the lighweight Turbos.

Just look at this example at a bore / stroke of 62.3 mm : 82.0 mm we have about the same stroke length as the 3L Cosplay V8. So the torque should be roughly identical. At the same time power is higher due to 12 cylinders, and weight down because of the undersquare ratio. (V12s tend to be naturally heavier than V8s so we must improve by a good margin to offset this but we believe this is gonna work out.)

V12s also have the better engine sound, a very important aspect in car design. And not least this has a high coolness factor. We think our customers are gonna be proud of their transverse mounted V12, and immediately jerk off in their garage when they are alone. At least that's what we are gonna do.

 

[Burning Bridges]

"Never was so much owed by so many, to so few .."

We are nearly broke and only have a few months before the landlord switches off our electricity.

In this race against time, we must go from design to production immediately. Management has set us a deadline that the first drivable sample must get ready by the end of a month, otherwise they would have to file bancrupcy.

Fortunately our shop has long craftsmanship tradition and can do just about anything. The men - short and stocky english blokes in their 40s, with skinheads and blue overalls - began working feverishly at the specified engine. Parts could often be cannibalized from older F1 cars, Graham Hills trophies were molten down to get the badly required molybdenium and titanium. And most of the engine tuning was done from memory by our old 80 year old foreman, who was so kind and returned from retirement .. almost voluntarily.

A lot of passers-by who had already been watching and banking on the machinery sellout on our premises .. were quite surprised when - instead of a demolitions ball - the aggressive sound of a V12 could be heard .. and it was lighter and higher revving than anything that was ever seen before.

This V12 has a very aggressive bore stroke ratio of 62.5 : 81.5 (0.767) and can still be pushed up to 8000 rpm. The weight is ~160kg which is the same as a 3L V8, but at slightly over 300 hp all power and performance values are 5-10% better than a V8. This is a small improvement but it happens in an zone where further improvement is usually very hard, and the difference adds up to precious tenths of seconds.

Though the engine isn't exactly cheap to make, this a low production cost version with minimal manufacturing cost and only one minimal change on a quality slider (we have discovered the trick Cosplay is using to improve the carburetors to get RON down). 10-15% extra performance is normally possible through higher production cost.

The engine was immediately fitted into a new chassis, and the car weighed. At 890 kg we are still at a disadvantage to the Turbos, but we have a definitive race car. An we can compensate a lot with the engine.

The team skipped the protracted setup preparation and directly went to testing.
While the drivability is still not very good - owing to the lack of suspension setup - a sportiness of 51.1 is getting us excited. No other car manufacturer has ever such achieved such a high value in a street car.

The engine has a BMI score of 15.4 - while this is lower than the Folgore V12 it is also at a much lower displacement. And directly compared to the 3L DFV (11.9) we have increased this important score by 40%, meaning the engine is about as drivable while it also has more power.

We hope that eventually we can get the car at least 10 points higher in the drivability score, but in our situation production was immediately ordered. We will start to sell the cars immediately and apply the final suspension setup the night before we deliver them, and no one will smell a rat.

The car accelerates insanely well (4.3s), brakes are default, cornering is default. Top speed of 280 km/h is very good for a 3L car.

And the lap time already beats the competition by over 2 seconds! The best they can do is low 2:17s, and this even before there was even time to tune the suspension!

Whoever wants to win races will have no other choice to buy from us - we practically own the track premium market section by default!!

Though the Tornado 76 is so rushed that it will initially have some teathing issues, it is the fastest car on the market. We could already sell a few units immiately at a good price - 28,000$ - at 100% profits - and earn 2 dollars for each 1 we spend.

While the bank accounts slowly fill again with cash we can think about more refinement, and maybe we can even a cash cow. For now the company has a future after all!

Our technical staff is now on somewhat reduced schedule to recover from this tour de force and we will come back next month with new energy and do the final touches on the new Tornado.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

 

[Burning Bridges]

The demand for the Tornados has been overwhelming. When performance minded buyers saw what it can do on the racetrack, it seemed like everyone wanted to placed an order before anyone else.

That way er have taken orders for several hundreds of the cars, and our production capacity for the rest of the year is already full.

All the while our mechanics were still working on the suspension while the cars were already being prepared for shipment, and somehow managed to iron out the remaining problems.

The product that arrives at the customers will have a good drivability rating of 42.4, while we even increased the sportiness to 53.0

In other words our cars are the number 1 world wide, at least for this moment. Neither the Italians nor the new Turbos have so far crossed into sportiness - 50+ territory.

How we did it? 80% of the sportiness and drivability appears to be the V12 engine, which seems to have been a master stroke. The other 20% will remain our secret, we have a few tricks with camber and oversteer/understeer, as well as the right tyres. And since the chassis has also been upgraded as well to 70's wedge 2.0 we are now finally able to mount a decent tyre width, so the engine power does not get wasted on the wheels.

With a proper setup, the cars have become even faster. A test lap time of 2:12.02 means we are now a full 5 seconds faster than the previous - Cosplay Turbo and Folgore Fulmine at ca 2:17s

Some people here are seriously scratching their heads how we accomplished this. In fact we we even 3 seconds faster than the 1991 ZLIN 620hp turbocar. At least in the published, undrivable form it came in.

The price for the track customers will remain at 28,000$ or +100% base price, and the competitiveness has skyrocketed. At 3964 points we are over 800 points ahead of the next best competitor and still 10% more affordable.

That means we will be able to sell as many cars as we can make.

We are also selling the same car for 54,240$ to complete schmucks. The only difference is a) handmade seats (which we just order from some sweatshop in India, where they make leather from frog vaginas to get the unusually comfortable seats) b) a silly phonograph and c) Advanced Safety Package which is something we consider putting in the basic version as well. The conversion takes only a days and the rich snobs pay twice as much per car.

There is definite potential to get even higer into the hypecar segment - which is currently the exclusive domain of the Italians - and thereby make a small fortune. But we stay reasonable and thereby keep the car at the top of the hyper and supercar range simultaneously - which means we can sell more than twice as many cars.

If we still need more money we can invest in more mahagoni, silver and frog-cunt leather that the snobs go crazy about, andturn out a true hypercar at a price point to sell for 100,000$ and more.

 

[Burning Bridges]

1976, near Schweinfurt / Germany

Meanwhile in Germany, another beneficiary of Cosplay Turbo's success was the shunned inventor of the car himself.

Reassured and convinced that success was largely owing to his chassis, Professor Proll has not given up on it and raised some money to build another prototype.

And in the many years of waiting the Professor had built up connections of his own ..

He can now turn to engine partners Popamol AG, a leading German engine specialist. They are world famous for building engines with the least possible hassle. As usual they went directly for the most popamole choices, a bore/stroke ratio of 86x86mm (which is the default value for new engines in the game). So they basically just set the compression and ignition timings from what they already knew works best and then fiddled a bit until it makes use of all the available fuel octane.

A bit further down the road some actual refinement did go into the engine and Popamole produced this compact, naturally aspirated 3L V6. A very interesting concept, as it combines low production cost with rather large displacement and excellent power output. In fact with an output of 300 hp and almost 200 power index its every bit as good as a Cosplay DFV V8. Although the comparison is not valid (the Cosplay is of course 10 year old tech) it's still an interesting development as it is a more lightweight, much cheaper and more promising construction.

For sure Popamol will be interested if they have found a whole new engine family for the 70s and 80s. And the 86mm square V6 could even be awesome if paired with a turbocharger, it definitely can pack a much larger compressor/turbine combo than the Cosplay engine.

When the professor received the new engine and put it in the back his car, it quickly showed that this combination is already potentially ahead of the Cosplay Turbo in most aspect. It's lighter, has more power, cheaper to make and more reliable.

Even just in early development stage it already shows good drivability of 41 and an excellent sportiness of 51.

All in all it promises to be every bit as good as the Cosplay Turbo but without its quirks. The remaining question is the track performance.

The lap times are 2:14.66 and can not quite catch the latest BRC V12 yet (2:12), but are faster than anything else seen so far. The Proll-Popamol V6 is therefore a good contender for becoming the second fastest of its time, while being more low cost. It's definitely 2.5 seconds ahead of the Cosplay Turbo, which should raise some new-old questions about the turbo concept.

Here it can be seen how excellently the car will penetrate the markets.

Proll is now ready to go to his employer one more time and ask them if they will help him and produce this car. And if they refuse again the Professor is determined to have to find another way. That means, he could even quit his job at Pörschel and work for Popamol if he had a realistic prospect of building his car there.

 

[Burning Bridges]

1976, near Schweinfurt / Germany

While the bureaucracy within Pörschel is still debating on the sports car - which could take them until the 1980s - the Popamol AG has made a swift proposal directly to the Professor.

They have been interested in the Turbo concept for a long time themselves and suggest a joint-venture to which they will contribute a new engine: the Popamol Turbo

The first sample of the engine is only going to be a prototype, but they will offer it completely free of charge. Everything the Professor must do is to put it in his cars and do the testing. This is of course an offer that someone in his cash-stripped situation simply cannot refuse.

The first of the Popamol Turbo engines was already delivered to him. It's the same 3,000 cm³ V6 engine he had received before, but with a turbocharger. Apparently they had been working on this for some time now and were only looking for a suitable partner.

The engine is visibly larger and more powerful than the Cosplay. At the same time, they have been pretty successful at reducing weight and the car still weighs only 60 kg more than its direct adversary. the whole package with the car and the 430 hp powerplant still weighs only 880 kg, reaching an unheard power to weight ratio of almost 1/2 hp per kilogram.

Now what they sent is still a bit of a rough engine. The Popamol develops more power than the Cosplay .. much more, up to 431 horsepower. There is a complicated relationship at play in a turbocharged engine, between the cylinder bore, compressor and turbine size, ar-ratio and boost, and this turbo engine is completely different to the one we saw before.

For comparison let's look at the Cosplay 2.25L Turbo (above). While the Cosplay looks like a man (who has no lower arms) doing a push up ...

.. but this one resembles a half-erect penis that gets straight high up until circa half way, and then turns flaccid toward the end.

Now, it is not at all bad. In fact the performance index of almost 300 is impressive, especially from a 6 cylinder engine, because this has already more power then the best Italian cars got from a 4.5L V12 just a few years previously.

There is a very large potential in this engine. With a little bit of imagination, 450hp and more can be available for small cars, cars which could never house a big V12.

It can be seen from the Turbo setup that Popamol is using a completely different approach: a lighter air to air intercooler helps to reduce weight. They also have a boost limit at 0.8 bar which is completely different to Cosplay.

And they've used a very small compressor and turbine which gives more power in the low range but also fucks up drivability. The reality is that they had no choice, because otherwise they would never meet the 92 RON requirement nor produce a running engine. With unlimited boost their engine would just disintegrate at a certain rpm, and RON would also get way out of control.

But the car can develop a shitton of Nm torque from medium rpms up, without taking the engine apart. In fact it is still very reliable for what it does.

As per requirement of most car companies the engine still runs with 92 octane fuel, but Popamol has suggested that the overdue step to 98 octane could be made, that alone could easily produce 20-30 hp more. which could move them towards 460 horsepower without changing much else than the compression and exhaust.

As could be expected drivability takes a big hit. -12.0% for the engine, there is really no point to calculate BMI for this one. It's shit and puts this out of the easy to drive category.

But it's just a prototype anyway, and the real test for this concept will be on the race track.

As can be seen the car does the track in under 2:11 minutes which is already faster than the BRC V12, even before any tuning has started, and tops 300 km/h.

That means, from the pure track performance this car is already promising to become the new leader and it is only at the beginning of its development (the first test was still done with the setup of the non turbocharged version)

Just for comparison. The 1976 car thereby reaches into dimensions of previous cars at least one engine class higher. It reaches 300 km/h which matches the fastest Italian car the Folgore (albeit a model that is 7 years old, it's still the one with the most engine power and top speed)

When we make the direct comparison between the two 300 km/h cars, the Folgore and the Popamol have about the same power in practically all categories. But the Popamole uses a much smaller engine and is ca 240 kg lighter (880kg) than the Italian car (1120kg). This means it is promising to be a completely different breed of racecar. One that could take on the BRC in track speed, and the Folgore in top speed, both at the same time.

Now there still remains that problem of drivability. For now, this is very difficult to address with a turbocharged car, and there are markets which don't pay much attention to drivability. The Popamol company makes enough money for the moment. So for this one the order is speed first, prestige second and sales a distant third.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Back to the drawing board - the Popamol approach to the turbocharger

Turbo research at Popamol is progressing as they shipped yet another improved engine, in which they unravel some more of the secrets of turbocharging.

The engine now delivers 450 hp peak, a massive increase in power index (almost 320), and the car a has already timed on the test lap at least 2 seconds faster than the V12 BRC.

This is very good, but what is more important is that I have managed to produce much more power at lower revolutions, and as a result I was able to lower the redline as well. 7,200 rpm is really not much in 1976. This is of course important because it increases the reliability, reduces the cost and power curves tend to drop at a certain rpm (the valve float thingy) so I am now trying to undercut that as much as possible.

What is also clear is that the game is ensuring that one can never have a really powerful turbo without completely fucking up drivability. So we definitely cannot have everything.

The overall engine BMI is shit, but "only" -10% compared to -30% previously (these are negative numbers!). -10% is still over 20% worse than the Cosplay, but this is the best value I have been able to achieve so far.

What I see is that a high power index means optimizing at the expense of drivability. However a good lap time results from optimizing the torque curve value.The value here 8.2% is really one of the highest I have ever seen. i.e. even if I may not find the highest power index I can still find the best torque curve without overly compromising drivability. Laptime and torque curve can be optimized, drivability will be low but that's inevitable. Power index and peak power are not the first consideration, they will come out at the end and are not a means in itself.

At the moment this is about the engine and only about the engine. Car development has to wait. The plant was just installed in the car and lap times have again significantly lowered. Some values like acceleration and top speed have absolutely scyrocketed, especially the second acceleration 80-120 km/h in 1.4 seconds - typical for a turbo that kicks in at some point over 4000 rpm.

This is the second attempt at making a turbo,with a new approach. In this round, which is more experimental, I am trying to fix as many parameters about the turbo as possible.

That means I try to find as many ideal values as I can, which I then consider fixed. The more variables I am able to fix the less there is to experiment, and I can concentrate on just a few.

So far I have narrowed down on the air-air medium intercooler which is absolutely enough and helps with saving weight. AR RATIO I have fixed at somewhere around 1.20 to 1.28. CAM is ca 70 which is extremely important for the low end curve. All this together with other values like a low compression, a limited boost, and a high fuel mixture and fixed ignition timing (92 or so as this seems to work well).

Bore/stroke seems to be the least important. And while the fixed 1:1 ratio (86x86) works so well in this engine, we may eventually end up with making it oversquare, which could further cut down weight and maybe also produce some more power.

 

[Jazz_]

Is this game like My Summer Car? Sans the humour?