IR and it's insane fuel consumption.
Morthgal opened this issue ยท 3 comments
IR has an incredibly high base level fuel consumption. I am aware this can be adjusted in the config, but it should probably be adjusted mod side too. Having done some testing, I've found that with Dragon's Class 20 model, which has an accurate fuel tank size of 17 buckets (IR itself in the config lists 1mb equaling 1 litre, with 1000mb per bucket, the Class 20 IRL has a fuel tank size of 17,000L), you can get as low as one litre being used every 4 metres (this is around 0.01 miles per imperial gallon), at notch 5 of 8, which is just enough power to keep the loco running at it's top speed of 75mph.
The same goes for steam locomotives as well as diesel locomotives. Most smaller engines have far higher water capacities than they do IRL. Especially tender locomotives, which are of course usually built for longer distance travel, but are unable to cover these distances in IR. Coal consumption is also high on steam locomotives, with modellers "enlarging" the size of tenders to compensate (though this is a difficult thing to balance, due to there not really being a size of coal, besides the weight coal is given by IR at 10kg per item).
By lowering the consumption rates you make early game IR far easier to use, which i know has been an issue considered by the dev team for a while. I understand this is partially done for balance, as players often don't cover the distances you would IRL, but consumption, in my opinion, is too high and finding a balance between realistic figures and the high current base level consumption i believe would be a small but important improvement.
Parameters like individual locomotive fuel efficiency and capacity are set by resource pack creators in the .json files of their respective resource packs. Because of this, inaccuracies/inconveniences with individual models isn't something that can be directly resolved on the development end.
However, I don't believe that it is clear what the fuel efficiency rating should be set to when creating a resource pack. Fuel capacity is usually simple as you can just plug in values from official specifications (if available). Fuel efficiency/consumption is a lot more difficult especially when there is no obvious way to use that single value to represent the actual performance of the locomotive. It is possible to find real fuel/water consumption statistics for certain models of both steam and diesel locomotives and then try to approximate these figures in-game using trial and error. However, fuel consumption/efficiency statistics are not available for all (or even most) locomotives and (especially with steam power) results can vary widely depending on the design of the locomotive, the type of fuel used, and how it is operated in practice.
An ideal solution in my opinion would be a more complex algorithm that can approximate fuel/water consumption based on multiple values derived from locomotive specifications that are usually available to research. The easiest solution in the short term would be to request higher fuel efficiency ratings in the individual resource packs, as changes to base efficiency in the mod itself may detrimentally affect locomotives that do not need changes.
