Watercooling for Turbos in the Unreal Engine?

I would trade the choice of watercooling/air cooling instead of choosing the size of intercooler. Literally, there is only one intercooler size that is optimum and there is no case in selecting a bigger or smaller intercooler.

Water cooling adds a little more power but is more expensive, heavier and requires more engineering time, which is a nice tradeoff when considering to chose between one and the other.

6 Likes

I agree. I actually use mostly A-A intercoolers since they’re cheaper and lighter, and most of my applications don’t need the extra performance. Maybe make the W-A intercoolers a little heavier and more expensive, and nerf the octane boost a little. Meanwhile the intercooler size really is a pointless decision, as Sillyworld said. It should just be a slider, or maybe even just automatically set the optimal size since there’s basically no point in choosing anything else.

8 Likes

Automatic selection of cooler size would require the game to know exactly what you’re building (Eco vs. mobile power station). There may be an ideal size based on the turbo profile, but not on engine size itself. I only ever used air-air on super-rubbish not-so eco small ones, but that’s just me.

Umm, not really. I didn’t encounter any situation where an intercooler not providing the maximal flow would be optimal - so if the game would just choose the smallest size providing 100% flow it would probably be perfect for any build, no matter if it was an eco box or a supercar.

To qualify my above:
Inline 4 1.5Lt “eco” preset turbo
Tiny a-a turned out to be better than a large a-a.
If that’s in the same vein as what you’re outlining, I’ll just shut up.

In what way “better”? I guess just lighter, cheaper and less limiting to throttle response, while offering the same (maximum needed) flow, isn’t it?

1 Like

I’ve had occasions where a non-optimal intercooler size led to fitting into a Production Unit or Engineering Time restriction without a significant reduction in engine performance. Sometimes, to fit in that budget range, you need a sub-optimal airflow. A 10 horsepower difference didn’t hurt the car, and if we had a pure “This is the exact intercooler you need, take it or leave it” setup, I would have had to compromise even further just to fit the challenge restriction.

That said, I would actually like to see a few years in the game where turbos are a thing, but intercoolers aren’t available for them. A lot of the early turbo cars were “hot air” cars, lacking any form of intercooler and just feeding their hot compressed air to the engine.

4 Likes

There is a bit of an Issue with that, most of the basics of forced induction were invented for piston aircraft decades before they showed up in cars. Perhaps they could be prohibitively expensive in the early years. Would also be cool if there were options for side mount and top mount intercoolers as well.

They should also technically be called “aftercoolers”, because “intercooler” typically means it goes between two compressor stages, but I guess that’s why some people just call them charge air coolers (even though I don’t think it becomes charge air until it’s mixed with fuel?).

Once in awhile a non intercooled car will still be released, the Evora S and all the V6 exiges don’t have charge air coolers.

1 Like

I think we can all agree, what we really need is water/meth injection. =P

2 Likes

Yeah, the first american (maybe world wide?) factory turbocharged car had this. Cheap charge cooling for a maintenance hit?

1 Like