Jack-of-all-Trades Powerplant [Challenge]

I want to do another low-key engine-build challenge that’s easy.

A jack of all trades engine should be able to be outclassed in every category, such as: power, reliability, efficiency etc. , but benefits from being able to perform admirably in every category. This challenge does not consider sale-price affordability much.

[edit]
Year: 2016-7
Displacement: N/A
Configuration: N/A
Valves: N/A
Power: 100.0 HP/L >
Performance Index: 200>
Economy: 28.30% >
Emissions: 32 Parts/Million <
Dimensions: 30" / 762mm < (for all dimensions)
Mass: 385.5kg / 850lbs <
145kg / 320lbs >
Turbo Tuning: Effective range > 5000rpm (from max spool to peak power)
Redline: 7300 >
Production Units: 350 <
Engineering Time: 500 <
Material Cost: $7500 <
Reliability: 83.5 >
Loudness: 22 <
Smoothness: 68 >
Service Costs: $2500 <
Octane: 91 unleaded <

Engines are based on points and can be submitted here however you’d prefer, as long as there is an entry to beat.
every 1.0hp/L over 100hp/L = 10 pts
every 1.0 reliability over 83.5 = 10 pts
every 10.0 Performance Index over 200 = 1 pt
every $100 material cost under $7500 = 1 pt
every 100rpm over 7300rpm = 1pt

My initial entry suffers from being ridiculously expensive. Just to come out ahead I’d probably need to charge about 25 grand.

Same, different measurments
[edit] (85pt entry)

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I like the idea, but… How the engines will be judged? Is there any scoring? What is the deadline? Why there is a minimum weight of an engine? Why production units, engineering time and material cost limits are so astronomically high?

I set it high and make mine very easy to beat just for ease of entry. Weight is specified, minimum and maximum.
Besides all other restrictions, the easiest/cheapest engines to manufacture are the highest scoring since all other restrictions are not so easy.
Cheers

Uhm, yeah, for me it’s just a normal modern engine.

Anyway, how do we enter the competition? By posting the engine here? Sending an export to you? If the latter, how should we name it? What is the deadline, if there is any? Who will judge the engines? Will this have an end and a winner or is it meant to be continuous chase for the better one? Why didn’t you set minimum size or power of the engine if the cheapest are the best? One could simply create a small full-iron unit, which would be dirt cheap, and win against more effective (in terms of power to weight ratio) ones - is that the point?

Edit: As I said, a normal engine… With just abnormal reliability and emissions, only two things lifting the price so high.

Okay I see why you’re confused. Obviously I was too tired to be posting this morning, I’m sorry.

Engines are based on points and can be submitted here however you’d prefer, as long as there is an entry to beat. Naming will not matter as entries will all end up here.

Here is the scoring system I’ve made.

every 1.0hp/L over 100hp/L = 10 pts (516/5000=103.2) =30pts
every 1.0 reliability over 83.5 = 10 pts (85.0) =10pts
every 10.0 Performance Index over 200 = 1 pt (372.8) =17pts
every $100 material cost under $7500 = 1 pt (5496.85-$7500=2003.15) =20pts
every 100rpm over 7300rpm = 1pt (8100) = 8pts

My entry sums to 85pts overall. Again, sorry about that.
Cheers

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If you want a jack of all trades powerplant I suggest that you also add in a strongly weighted efficiency component, otherwise as it stands we’ll just crank up the AFR and boost :joy: as that would probably be the most cost effective way… focusing on specific output.

Edit: some tech slider spam will actually reduce your material costs, so I would also suggest that some scoring does take into account engineering time and production units. I mean, all I had to do was turn the exhaust tech up to 15+ and boom, a good 5 bonus points of reliability and saved 200 bucks in material costs :joy: Right now I have an engine that has a specific output of somewhere around the realm of 200bhp:L with 83.5 reliability and a performance index of about 500, and it’s only costing me 4400 bucks in material costs… because it’s basically tuned like an 80s F1 car.

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Guys…

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If you can get 200 hp/l with 28.3% or higher efficiency then good on ya man. I personally can’t because the two generally conflict. But anything with that efficiency or higher is the baseline.

oh I see, are all of those attributes listed that aren’t scored minimum requirements?

Because if they are then the challenge is kind of meaningless unless you want copious amounts of tech slider abuse. With the same materials and components (yes, there is a single best way to go about this in the modern age), with more powerful configs you will tend to see more noise and less smoothness, with better parts you will see higher service costs etc. etc. So right now my best bet is to clone your engine and then turn the exhaust tech slider up to 15.

Perhaps consider taking out some of the variables or scoring them alongside the others so we have some wiggle room.

@ramthecowy The challenge is similar but different, besides, that one was already finished, so there’s no problem doing a rerun. Unless you’re posting that as a suggestion as to how it should be run.

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Copying my first entry isn’t even close to your best bet, you haven’t tried. Case and point. My 20 min second entry scores 161, 76 points over my V8. The point is not to have a realistic affordable engine, but rather one that puts out amirable modern horspower with out sacraficing linear power or fuel economy as well as being cheap to insure considering the strictness of the EPA. Because price is almost out the window, while not wanting to have a +15 tech spam war, you do have to use the tech slider to your ability, that’s the point. You have to use either 15 or close to it anyhow, the reason the emissions is at 32 is because once you load it to a trans and have mass, its going to make much more heat and thus NOx, exeeding the current 40 ppm restriction to new cars.
Sorry that our entries might be similar.

161pt second entry

But you do realise that your rules say nothing about linear power (which is the opposite of the easiest route for this challenge) and that the emission rating isn’t given in ppm, but rather just some arbitrary number that we don’t really know the meaning of? And that putting an engine in a car might actually lower it?

What am I even suppose to say to that?

All entries thus far have been linear inherantly so there is no need to say otherwise, even yours


even though I had not told you directly to make a linear engine, just by making it to spec, it was very linear in powerband.
And yes, up to speed and at part throttle emissions lower considerably. But Automation puts just about any engine that has an emsission rating of around 33-34, even a 950kg hatch rates at about 41 so I compensate further for 32. You’re beside the point, I know this game has a ways to go on it’s accuracy and will continue to progress. I’m just roughly basing it on the game in it’s current state.

You’re damn right I haven’t tried. My point is that you’ve got too many damn variables listed which are apparently criteria and if you don’t prioritise them in some meaningful way, nobody’s going to bother engaging because it’s too meaninglessly complex.

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Why would I care? I don’t know what kind of turn-out you thought I was expecting, but you’re wrong. I very clearly stated at the very top of the post that it is “low-key” and for fun, there is no need to post, there is no reason, there is no reward. I don’t see how your opinion is my problem, I’m glad I got feedback from you but I don’t care if you like it regardless, if you see something that bores you, just ignore it…?

ok maybe I was a bit too strong and brief in what I was saying. I’m actually interested and am trying to be helpful, so let me get back to the original point and go over it in full:

Your challenge may be low key but it’s confusing. Are we or are we not supposed to be looking at every single factor that you’ve listed above? To be entirely clear I mean this list:

As in, in order to even submit something, we should be aiming to better all of these figures?

At first because all you scored was this:

I thought that was all that mattered. But then you said wait, no, we have to consider the economy too, and so that’s what made me look at the first list.

Thing is, that first list is ridiculously long. A ‘low-key’ ‘casual’ challenge shouldn’t have such a long list. So my suggestion, which I’ll now flesh out, is that most of those things should be calculated in the scoring. That is to say, the easiest way is to generate a spreadsheet which automatically calculates the variables and all you need to do is input them and get a nice simple index value at the end.

As it stands you’ve placed a significant onus upon a user who is even contemplating building something for this, before we can even begin, and since most of the requirements appear to be a strict binary yes/no, they also seem very arbitrary. I’ll absolutely acknowledge that it should be easy enough to build an engine that can better each and every one of the stats, but the reason we’re discouraged from even trying is the sheer number of things we have to check every time we make a change on an engine, and trust me, people who actually want to take this on will be doing that more often than you think.

So my suggestion here would be to make most of those factors part of the scoring metric. Things that you don’t think are as important. Attributes that are necessary to keep things to a level playing field should be kept strict, like the octane. It’s also reasonable to place a hard upper limit on PU and engineering time. Dimensions are harder to track without switching back and forward and also you’d be crimping certain engine layouts more than others, and if you’re going to amalgamate specific output and performance index into that, then why don’t you simply go with a more meaningful measurement like a lower and upper limit for displacement?

The other thing you have to watch out for is redundancy in your variables. Some variables will count certain things within their calculation e.g. performance index is an amalgam of peak power and redline, and I see no reason to require that the redline be >7300 unless you want to make it harder to achieve peak reliability and pretty much preclude people from building with low friction pistons. If that’s what’s implied, then it’d be simpler to state that directly. I could go on, but I think I’ve said enough there.

In short, if something was meant to be quick and easy and simple, it should actually be quick and easy and simple, not like trying to open an 8 pin tumbler lock with a hairpin. After all, if you weren’t thinking somebody might want to engage, why did you bother making the thread? You get me?

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I don’t know. I’m just informing you that your limit of 32 emission rating might translate to 32 ppm or 100ppm or 10 ppm as well. So reasoning it by EPA requirements is quite irrelevant. I doubt that engines in Automation should require such abuse of quality just to meet real world emission requirements.

And my engine is not really an entry, but rather an example to prove my point (now, after revising the rules, irrelevant) and has linear power output just because I’ve created it as I would create any modern, non-extreme turbo engine and then just tweaked it a bit for emissions and reliability, instead of creating something especially for scoring high in this, which would be something very different and WOULDN’T have such linear output.

PS And I have no idea where this 40 ppm number comes from, I can’t find any source for this. Could you link me one? At best with earlier norms too.

Well, my proof-of-point engine posted above uses low friction pistons :smiley:

Okay, I admit my use of language is piss-poor at best and confusing at worst. There is a lot of minimum requirements and a differnet number of scoring methods and it is complex. I admit the checklist before even scoring is long and obviously I wanted a too of narrow and specific compitition that is clearly univiting. Regardless, I appreciate your dedication to feedback and understand what is so offputting. Thank you.

But the only thing I added (after the first few replies) to the regulations was the performace index, I obviously failed to state that all those were binary requirements.

30" restriction was used in conjuction with minumum weight to keep the engines compact, as you said, some configurations are then restricted. Over boring changes size significanlty so I wanted all entries to theoretically all fit into an example car, that’s why I didn’t choose displacment. (failed to state the reason for that) That’s the same reason I put emphasise on HP/L instead of net HP., because of the disparity in displacment. However, I realise now too many of the wrong regulations were put and not enough of the important ones. Royal fuck up.
But, I wasn’t expecting no one to respond but rather throwing what sticks to the wall, and was clearly too tired to be throwing in the first place…

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I think main focus on specific output is a good idea. Since that often is balanced against reliability, economy and complexity (costs, engineering times and servicing costs), I’d suggest focusing on scoring those things to see if one can optimise all those things.

Quietness would favour a smaller engine. I don’t know exactly what you want to do with regards to displacement, but basically feel free to leave out some things depending on what you think the engine might be put in, if even that.

I have an exam coming up and then a trip but if something comes together I’ll take another look!

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And yes, you’re right on the money. My brain is stuck in places in time and am still useing the class 5e emissions reg, which isn’t even a thing anymore. 40ppm in 2017 MIGHT pass as a 1 ton truck here, but I digress.

And yeah I’m full aware of that, It’s kind of confusing because you could theoretically pass the emissions test with some seemingly dirty engines just based on rpm and net mass. And getting an Automation engine to meet the same regulation takes WAY too much tech as there are cars still being produced today irl that both meet regulation and are under the price of a Zonda… And I acknowledge that being aware of this flaw and including it in the regulations anyways is quite perplexing, but I chose to include it as more of thought-food, failure, I recognize.

It sounds like Strop wants to revive this idea so maybe I can beat a dead horse in the mean time to make this a little-lot less arbitrary.[quote=“szafirowy01, post:16, topic:20162”]
instead of creating something especially for scoring high in this, which would be something very different and WOULDN’T have such linear output.
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But again, if you can make an engine peak like the 5000HP 10.8L V8s that are posted everywhere, get 83.5 reliability and 28.3% or higher, I aplaude you, good sir. But personally, not matter how high scoring my engines are, I do not have the ability to make that hapen with these regulations, I simply do not have the know-how, I’m deeply intrigued.

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Quick side note: just banged together an engine as an example to perhaps show you where some requirements could be loosened and which ones may be focused on. This engine will not score nearly as well on the challenge but it sure will be better value for money… and it does very well to fit all the other criteria (I think, if I didn’t miss any). I’d actually advocate for decreasing the engineering time and PU limits much much further (like engineering time <80, PU <80), then things could get quite exciting. Of course you’d have to loosen up the other restrictions but then you might be able to really have a jack of all trades engine.

McHorseguy - Family 101.zip (17.9 KB)

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