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whirligig-girl · 11 months ago

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First of all, with robotic parts provided by the second DLC or by mods, the game you are looking for actually is Kerbal Space Program. :P

there needs to be more games in the KSP genre. We are graced with one other pretty solid space exploration sandbox (though one that i feel lacks most of the charm of KSP) in Juno: New Origins, and a few 2D versions like Simple Rockets and Spaceflight Simulator. And there's also KSP-lead-developer Felipe Falanghe's new game KitHack, a scale model vehicle constructor.

Felipe said recently in an interview that he'd pitched a Kerbal Avionics game, a prequel about building like, canvas-wing WWI planes and building up to supersonic planes and stuff at which point KSP would take over. And I love that idea!

But you know what I've always wanted in a physics based lego-like vehicle construction and operation game?

I really want a game that focuses on locomotive design with the same degree of detail and grannularity that KSP focuses on spacecraft design.

And because I'm autistic, I'm gonna lay out a rough design doc in this reblog! (Also because realistically the kerbal IP won't be available, assume it's like. i dunno. Gymnomi Slimegirls like Guz.

Also needless to say, a game of the complexity I am outlining is definitely overly ambitious, but i'm not a game dev and no one's just gonna make this game for me, so i think it's ok if i go way out there in terms of scope.

Kerbal Railroad Administration

About a decade ago, Kerbal engineer Richard Kerman invented a kind of steam engine that is powerful enough to be useful on the plateways in common use for dragging minecarts up and down hills. Since then, a number of companies have tried and failed to develop the technology into something that is safe and practical for freight and passengers, without resulting in so many boiler explosions and train collisions. The Kerbal Railroad Administration is a new nationalized railroad formed to attempt to solve this problem. That's where you come in.

New Game:

The game takes place on Kerbin, rendered as a spherical globe as in KSP. It might even be compressed by another factor of 5-10 or so. (At 1/10th scale, the circumference of Kerbin would be 377 kilometers) The visible curvature of the globe when viewing the map would be an intentional stylistic feature. The player is allowed to choose their headquarters from one of a few locations, including the harbor at what will one day be the KSC plateau, a mineral and oil rich desert, and a hilly mountainous region in the forests.

The player can choose the track gauge they wish to play with. The default is meter gauge (which is close to the KSP-scale version of 4'8.5" standard gauge), but you can slide all the way up to 5 ft broad gauge or all the way down to 10" minimum gauge (the rough Kerbal equivalent of 15" minimum gauge.) Narrow gauge track is much cheaper to lay, and a reduced loading gauge makes tunnels and bridges a lot easier as well, but it doesn't scale well. At any time the player will be able to rip up their existing track and regauge it, so if they start with a smaller, cheaper 2ft narrow gauge railroad and then decide they want to upgrade to 3ft gauge or more, they can, or they can run dual-gauge track.

Cities and Industries:

City or village buildings and industries are procedurally laid across all of Kerbin on a hexagonal block system, with pentagons at the corners of an icosahedron. The hexagonal meshes must be deformed procedurally to place them near the corners. The pentagons can only have certain types of tiles, like streets, for simplicity, or maybe the pentagons can be left blank. The hexagonal block system resembles the tiles of the space center in KSP. Some industries may be built into cities, requiring special care to access, such as factories, whereas others will take advantage of natural resources elsewhere, such as mines.

Facilities:

Surveyor Office. This building allows you to plan out new railroad routes to be built to connect the various industries on Kerbin and switching yards, as well as see the entire planet from above.

Roundhouse. This building stores your railway engines and allows crews to do maintenence on the various parts of the engine.

Crew office. This building allows you to hire train crews, including engineers, stokers, brakermen, and conductors.

Financial office. Here you manage the finances of the railroad, take out or pay loans, set up contracts with industries, etc.

Research and Development. Here you can pay or use experience points to unlock new technologies. New technologies can also be unlocked naturally as you use and gain experience with the existing technology as an engine driver.

Engine workshop. Here's where the magic happens, where locomotives are designed and built. Similar to the VAB in KSP, the workshop.

Freight house. This is a building with either a road connection or a boat connection, where goods can be shipped out or shipped in for delivery on the railroad.

Engine Workshop.

As KSP was set apart from other flight simulators by its ultimately quite advanced CAD software, so too will Kerbal Railroad Administration.

The player starts by placing down frames, which can be procedurally resized. Other parts will be able to snap onto the frames, such as running boards, boilers, and cabs. The boilers will be made out of set lego-like diameters, and comprised of boiler barrel, smokebox, and firebox sections. Increasing the boiler barrel stores more steam but may take longer to raise steam, larger fireboxes in either width or length allow for more thermal power to boil water.

Wheels can be attached to the frames, snapping to where they are needed depending upon the size, which is set procedurally. They can be connected with connecting rods.

Cylinders can be added at any point on the frames or boiler barrel, but will automatically point towards the driver they're linked to. Once the main rod is connected to an axle, a valve gear can be chosen, which again has to be procedural. You'd start with Stephenson Valve gear (or maybe one of the earlier non-variable-cutoff ones?) The cylinder diameter and stroke length is set procedurally, and the latter automatically affects the crank radius on the wheels.

Other elements, like couplers and footplates and domes and cabs and separately swiveling trucks and tenders can be added, but the important thing from the physics standpoint is the relationship between the boiler pressure, cylinder pressure, cylinder stroke length, and wheel size, since that determines tractive effort, as well as the relationship between boiler size and firebox size and usable steam.

That's the toy I want to build. A steam engine simulation that is not only reasonably accurate on its own (hard!) but which allows the player to change various key design elements just to see what they do, what the trade-offs are.

As you try to make the boiler longer, you'll need more wheels to support the weight. whoopsies, now the engine is binding on curves, so you'll either need to fix the curves or add trailing and pilot trucks or make it an articulated locomotive. The goal is that you would naturally run across many of the same problems the real railroads faced, and then come up with similar design solutions.

Try to make the cylinder stroke longer for more power? Well now the engine will be slower. Try to make it wider for more power? Now you're running out of steam. Fine if you only need that power in short bursts, but you'll need a larger boiler and firebox to realistically supply more power for a prolonged amount of time.

Running Trains

Trains can be driven manually or left to the devices of the Kerbal train crew, similar to Railroader's a.i. Controls include the regulator, cutoff, brakes (multiple braking systems may be in play), water injector, and firebox, as well as action groups for any of the other appliances on the train, like dynamos, lamps, etc. Play from either third person flying camera or first person Kerbal view is supported. Either the player or a kerbal may need to manually couple or uncouple train cars. Failure modes include derailment on curves at high speed, (dependent upon center of mass and track gauge, as well as wheelbase and presence or lack of pilot and trailing trucks), boiler explosions when run out of water or run too high on pressure (until the safety valve is unlocked), and collision with other trains you may have left on the line.

Delivering freight and passengers would be handled somewhat like Railroader. Loaded and unloaded cars will have a waybill set automatically or by the player, and it's the player's job to figure out how to bring cars where they need to go with the motive power they have available. At first you would likely have a small number of small cars, but as demand increases, you'll need more and/or larger cars to handle the loads, and you'll be serving more industries, necessitating both more and larger or more capable locomotives over time.

Passengers would be picked up at stations placed by the player near or inside of cities, and then let off at another station, with the fare being calculated based on the time, comfort, and distance travelled. Passenger cars can have specific destinations set or unset so that only passengers wanting to go that direction will go there. As passenger capacity increases, so does

Progression

Progression is measured by how well kerbin's industries are connected, and by the position on the tech tree. The tech tree is not unlocking whole engines and rolling stock so much as specific technologies, like larger and longer boiler barrels, belpaire instead of keyhole fireboxes, new valve gears, and eventually new power types entirely not yet outlined, like electric traction motors, steam turbines, and diesel engines. Players may even be able to select their "era" when starting a new game, with sandbox mode effectively starting with all technologies unlocked, but players with more of an interest in diesel and electric locomotives being able to start at a higher tier of research & development.

Kerbal Space Railroad

As a DLC, or stretch goal, perhaps alternate starting maps based upon the other planets in the Kerbol system can be provided.

Mun: No air, so only electric, fireless, and bipropellant-combustion-engine powertrains are allowed, and cabs and passenger cars must be pressurized. But more importantly, it would be an interesting study of how a much lower gravity would affect train design. With much lower gravity, the same mass of train would be much easier to move, but on the other hand, the engines would have one sixth of the adhesive weight, so they would wheelslip uselessly if they tried to put down their full power, unless they had huge, unwieldy ballast added. A rack and pinion rail system may be needed to deal with the lack of adhesion. Gravity is also low enough that there is risk of derailment when the grade changes as well as when the curves are too sharp.

Duna: Similar constraints as the Mun, except that it has been terraformed to allow for steam engines to work. The thinner atmosphere increases the efficiency of steam engines but decreases the efficiency of both fire and internal combustion.

Eve: Also terraformed to allow for steam engines. Gravity is much stronger, which means it's harder to pull a given payload, but it also means you're 1.7 times less likely to wheelslip. The thicker atmospheric pressure reduces the efficiency of steam engines and requires streamlining for even relatively low speeds.

Gilly: Tiny airless map with negligible gravity. Taking corners at any speed would risk derailment, so the entire railway must use rack & pinion gearing or (maglev or something).

Tylo: an airless world like the Mun, but with gravity similar to Kerbin, so adhesion is only slightly lower.

Vall: Low gravity and airless, but with tall mountain ridges that need to be scaled or dug through.

Titan: Munar gravity but a thick terraformed atmosphere.

Mez: Ultimate challenge, a whirligig world where the gravity changes drastically from nearly 5G at the poles to 0.5G at the equator. Running goods on north/south lines would put any engine designer to the test, or else require some strange logistics for interchanging goods between different latitudes as the gravity changes.

Space(?): Space stations are scattered across an empty map in 3D space. There's no gravity or air.

#trains #long post

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