-
100% Agreed, That’s just not done yet, when it’s in it’s finished state you’ll be able to make visual changes to each trim of a model.
-
It’s not quite as simple as changing over internals, it’s a different set of casting equipment, so you’d lose some of the efficiency of shared production. We’ll have a think on that one. Every piece of information we could find at the time said that iron heads kept slightly more heat in the combustion chamber, translating to a slight efficiency increase, although agreed, in that particular test you linked it seems to be pretty much identical between alloy and iron. I’d be interested to know how alloy heads improve airflow though, as that should really only depend on the shape of the ports and valves.
-
The number of valves is locked to prevent you from basically designing two wildly different engines (for example the SOHC, 8 valve Toyota 4AC, and the DOHC 20V 4AGE Blacktop) and reaping the benefits of a shared engine family. Those engines should not be able to effectively share the same production line, nor should the 4AGE Blacktop get much of a techpool advantage because you’ve been building the 4AC for ages.
Variants could best be considered “States of tune” of an engine, more than they could be considered full on variants. Think of a turbo version of an existing engine, or a sportier version with twin carbs, a hotter cam and more compression. Maybe one with a different crank thrown in for a shorter stroke. Not one with a completely different head design, once you get to that point then it’s really a different but related engine.
Maybe we should have named them “Engines” and “Tunes” really.
Modern OHV is there because everyone was complaining that it was impossible to replicate really well designed modern pushrod engines, but every possible balance change we made ended up making your average mundane pushrod engine way too good compared to real life engines. It’s a bit of a band-aid fix, but it gives the required result of “with enough research and money you can build an OHV engine that revs pretty hard” It may need some further balancing and tweaking on it’s stats though, as some things still do in Automation.
- Techpool will most likely be gained by building the same engine for a long time. For example the Buick V6 got a lot better over the 40+ years it was in service, as the engineers learned more about it’s design. A big part of that is that they made no major design changes, they didn’t go DOHC 4v, they just refined the same basic engine over a very long period. That’s your reward for keeping old designs in service and perfecting their engineering.
This mechanic, along with the fact that you’ll gain production efficiency by having similar engines on the same line, are the reasons why there aren’t wildly different choices within one engine family.