any car guys know that more often than not you can see the same engine block sporting a viariety of bores and strokes…
would it be posible once one block is created to expand/contract bore and stroke without needing a new casting? (therefore more $$$)
Maybe, but I’m not sure how you’d handle it.
The problem is that you need to have bore and stroke somewhat tied to overall engine diamensions, to make sure a 2.0 V8 is a lot smaller than a 10.8L v8. So then you come to the point that we’re at now, where the engine scales to a certain degree based on what bore and stroke you select.
Sure you could make it that you can design an engine, then later revise that engine to have say, 4mm more bore without changing the overall engine size, but then an engine you’ve made with an 80mm bore and revised to an 84mm bore would be physically smaller than an engine you design with an 84mm bore straight off, thus creating a weird exploit where you’d ALWAYS revise every engine after it was made.
maybe there should be an option to add stroke/bore engine limits depending on the casting
an expandable 5.0 V8 would be bigger and heavier than a non expandable V8
Yeah, possibly, though I think it’d still be hard to balance properly. I think what we might do is allow small displacement changes at minimal cost, but it WILL increase the size and weight still.
would need to find out how much can normaly the engines be bored out without compromising relaibility and integrity
That’d vary a lot between different designs in reality. We’d probably simplify it into something like a 4 or 5% increase or decrease in bore or stroke is cheaply possible.
Again, without “safeguards”, that solution brings in the possibly of an exploit where you revise an engine in 5% increments till you get the size you’re after.
Yes, from a gameplay perspective I don’t see any good solutions. Also: for simplicity reasons that should not be an option, the engine designer is a beast as is already. 
[quote=“maffc”]
Again, without “safeguards”, that solution brings in the possibly of an exploit where you revise an engine in 5% increments till you get the size you’re after.[/quote]
Oh, no I mean if you have an 80mm bore engine already in production, and you wanted to re-engineer it to be an 84mm bore version, that you could do that with a less significant investment in retooling and engineering. But the engine would still be just as physically large as if you’d designed it 84mm from the start. Plus it would have cost less total engineering and tooling costs/time if you’d designed it 84mm from the start and never had an 80mm version.
Don’t know if that’s the way we’ll go with it, but that’s the ONLY solution I think would be exploit free and simple.
You could have block size be based on bore spacing and constrain the range of the bore size to that, and have the bore spacing vs bore size affect mtbf and weight. Probably not worth it if I’m perfectly honest but would more resemble how engine families are actually designed.
If you would like to have engine families really in the game then you should have to design every part of the engine separately and combine those in certain ways. You could for example use the same block with same bore but different kind of crank to have bigger stroke (=bigger displacement).
I would like to see this kind of game play mechanic in the game. I know it’s not coming because it adds micromanagement in the game. But I personally would like it.