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OK - once we put in a submitted entry, are more revisions allowed? And are there going to be mid-season upgrades? I want to talk about what I did but not at the risk of giving too much away when people can still crib off of it.
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Oct 30, 2018 00:00
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mekilljoydammit posted:OK - once we put in a submitted entry, are more revisions allowed? And are there going to be mid-season upgrades? I want to talk about what I did but not at the risk of giving too much away when people can still crib off of it. Unfortunately there will be no revisions and no mid-season upgrades this time.
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Oct 30, 2018 02:18
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It feels like it's changed quite a bit since the Kee engine, and I've lost my feel for suspension and chassis tweaking - I've got a pretty effective flat four making 520ish horsepower, but I can't seem to get my hatchback around Trois-Rivieres in less than 1:44.9ish
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Oct 30, 2018 03:18
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Boksi posted:Bigger engines can have a lot more shiny toys stuffed in without breaking the rules, after all. Isn't the opposite of this true? Using the Engine calculator, increasing either cylinder count or engine capacity lowers the production units and engineering time allowed. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills to get anywhere near the outputs people are talking about in here, I'm just dragging around sliders and getting more and more frustrated.
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Oct 31, 2018 06:03
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slothrop posted:Isn't the opposite of this true? Using the Engine calculator, increasing either cylinder count or engine capacity lowers the production units and engineering time allowed. Two words: MORE BOOST
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Oct 31, 2018 07:00
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I've got one of my earlier I4s I could throw on Google drive after work if people want to see one way to 500hp. Not all the tricks I found but pretty solud
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Oct 31, 2018 13:55
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After I've found that I "need" 19" wheels on my car - they are faster around a given track than say, 15" wheels with the same profile tyre. Is this just down to gearing, and I could in fact pick that time back up by playing with my gearing? It's a bit of an aesthetic decision at this point but it'd be nice to not have my car look so silly 
slothrop fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Oct 31, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 14:31
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slothrop posted:Isn't the opposite of this true? Using the Engine calculator, increasing either cylinder count or engine capacity lowers the production units and engineering time allowed. Hang on, did I write that? I meant smaller engines, obviously. Must've been half-asleep when I wrote that or something. slothrop posted:After Says on the tooltips that bigger rims can potentially increase your grip, and grip is gonna be very important in this kind of race. It means better acceleration and braking as well as steering.
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Oct 31, 2018 19:23
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SCRUTINEERING RESULT LEGAL Woooo!
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Nov 1, 2018 03:13
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Sweet, mine also passed that. By the way, is there going to be a vehicle showcase thing? I've seen some of them on past Automation build challenges, I was wondering if something of the sort is going to be a part of this one as well?
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Nov 3, 2018 07:29
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There will definitely be a showcase, and I am working out, beyond just scoresheets, what kind of presentation I want to put together for each race. Until then, there's nothing saying you guys can't post some pictures of your cars!
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Nov 3, 2018 16:06
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I'll write ad copy tonight if I get some beers in me. Otherwise... planning on releasing a full technical writeup on the PepperBOMB after it's too late for people to change things hopefully as an impetus to get people to talk about what they did and why.
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Nov 3, 2018 18:06
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 Somehow managed to make a boxer do this while still being just barely legal for the competition.
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Nov 3, 2018 19:24
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I haven't tried messing with boxers - are they badly screwed compared to the other engines? The peak number looks pretty OK but that's a narrower powerband than I'd like.
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Nov 3, 2018 20:01
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The thing about boxers, and boxer-4s in particular, is that you really need to follow the current convention for tuning them. So, you want to set your turbine size to the absolute minimum, your AR ratio to the maximum value, and adjust the turbine size and boost accordingly to get the power you want. For a boxer-4, your compressor size is going to be very, very small more than likely, and somewhat larger in the boxer-6. Automation's simplistic, 80s-tech turbocharger model wants as many cylinders exhausting into a turbocharger as possible, which is why inline-6s and V12s are so godlike in comparison to other engines right now.
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Nov 3, 2018 20:19
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Are I6s really that better? This sounds silly once I ask - I'll just try one when I get home.
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Nov 3, 2018 20:53
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The real advantage those engines should have is in the reliability and smoothness department due to their inherent advantage in how unshaky they are in general.
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Nov 3, 2018 21:59
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Inline-6s are most definitely better, and not just better because of their smoothness and reliability. If you've got a bit of time, here's an exercise for you; build a series of engines, one of each type, with the same bore, stroke, quality sliders, etc, with the only differences being different turbochargers and exhaust diameters. Tune each engine to make the same power per displacement (say, 100 horsepower per litre), trying to maximise efficiency and also how early the turbochargers spool up. Then once you're done that, build another family of engines, all of the same displacement (say, 2 litres), and keeping everything but the turbos and exhaust diameters the same, then see how much power you can get out of each engine.
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Nov 3, 2018 22:40
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IMO 400 KW is the bare minimum anyone who's planning to build a rallycross car should aim towards, so work that as your goal.
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Nov 3, 2018 22:45
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Just tried an I6 - same concept I was down 20kw after retuning. Nooooope.
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Nov 3, 2018 23:21
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OK, because I've been fooling around, I want to provide some benchmarks for what is possible. Over 500kW is possible within the rules, albeit barely. Depending on how you do things though, it may or may not compromise the rest of the car. Sub 1:40.0 at Circuit Trois-Rivières is possible. I don't know how the strategy or the rest of the simulation will play out in the actual races so it may not be as relevant, but there ya go.
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Nov 4, 2018 18:20
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How many entries do we have, at this point?
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Nov 7, 2018 18:44
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Currently sitting at 5 or 6; I haven't counted for a while, to be honest. At the rate we're going, I might make it two cars per entrant.
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Nov 8, 2018 07:07
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I'm kind of interested in submitting a car. It's already finished and mildly compilant, I just need to figure out how to do better than 1:43:30.
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Nov 8, 2018 23:56
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Sort out suspension and aero for that. Also, don't bother having more than 240ish KPH as your top speed because this is knife-fight of acceleration and handling.
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Nov 9, 2018 00:13
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TBQH, 205km/hour seems like the sweet spot to me. Only hit redline in 6th at one track. I do not understand why the suspension on my entry works, and I say this as someone who has a pretty sound practical and theoretical knowledge how to do this stuff IRL. I literally just made a change, tested, made another change, tested, see if that change is faster, if so go another step that direction... rinse/repeat. A lot. I completely ignored the drivability / sportiness levels, they do not in any way represent what goes fast.
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Nov 9, 2018 00:38
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Sportiness and Driveability are still necessary to ensure the challenge factor is on a sane level so it won't result in stupid crashes.
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Nov 9, 2018 01:15
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Sportiness and drivability are pretty easy to mess with without changing lap time in a bunch of ways, and optimizing them doesn't really do much for lap time, is my point.
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Nov 9, 2018 01:16
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mekilljoydammit posted:TBQH, 205km/hour seems like the sweet spot to me. Only hit redline in 6th at one track. That's exactly how I did the turbochargers on mine. There's so many areas on the chart where the turbines have emergent or unintuitive behavior. There's no good way of doing it aside from testing it hundreds of times. The finished turbines are white-hot, by the way. I mean literally, hitlerally white-hot at full throttle. I have no idea what sort of exhaust stack material would be able to handle temperatures over 950 C, but given that google gives a bunch of utterly useless and generic results, I can safely assume it's classified (and probably the exact same thing used for ballistic missiles).
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Nov 9, 2018 01:39
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How Disgusting posted:That's exactly how I did the turbochargers on mine. There's so many areas on the chart where the turbines have emergent or unintuitive behavior. There's no good way of doing it aside from testing it hundreds of times. The finished turbines are white-hot, by the way. I mean literally, hitlerally white-hot at full throttle. I have no idea what sort of exhaust stack material would be able to handle temperatures over 950 C, but given that google gives a bunch of utterly useless and generic results, I can safely assume it's classified (and probably the exact same thing used for ballistic missiles). It's not much of a secret. It's just really expensive and it requires a very skilled TIG welder who specialized in titanium alloys, extensive heat treatment and design work to handle such duress and a thermal barrier coating to ensure all the temperature stays in the right places.
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Nov 9, 2018 16:46
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Usually Inconel, actually - titanium is lighter but not as strong at elevated temperatures.
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Nov 9, 2018 19:23
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Well, I guess Westward is going to make an appearance.
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Nov 10, 2018 20:13
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So, the challenge continues; I've got a couple more cars in the ensuing days. I have also decided that I'm going to combine this challenge with the concurrent ARX I'm running on the Automation forums, the upshot of this being that there will be quite a few cars in the field - more than 20 as it stands, and likely over 30 by the deadline rolls around in the week. I will be sending everyone new TeamIDs in the next couple days, and anyone who wants to resubmit a revised version of their car is welcome to do so.
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Nov 21, 2018 02:12
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Working on revised car now! This little shitbox is incredibly finely honed at this point. edit: OK, I literally cannot find anything to revise anywhere on any part of the car or engine so I submitted the for-real-now final version of my entry. 1:38.x at Circuit Trois Rivieres. 
mekilljoydammit fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Nov 21, 2018 |
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Nov 21, 2018 14:21
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I haven't gotten my updated scrutineering report yet. E: 671 hp, wow. I'm feeling kinda underpowered with 339.
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Nov 21, 2018 23:51
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Don't get too discouraged - I had earlier versions with a lot less and I'm not sure how much the last couple hundred HP was worth. The car I submitted is a result of, oh, 40 hours of tweaking and, I'm convinced is within 10hp of the absolute maximum possible within the rules (I made a few tradeoffs that hurt power) But there's compromises inherent in going the direction I went. I may have tuned them out with suspension tweaks, but there might be other design directions that just plain work better.
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Nov 22, 2018 01:09
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I fully expect it to have drive-train and controllability issues compared to most other vehicles.
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Nov 22, 2018 01:38
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There's a red exclamation point warning about oversteer. I find that really funny. I'll spill the full beans after submissions close.
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Nov 22, 2018 02:10
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Yes, while mekilljoydammit has definitely set the horsepower bar high, it's not the be-all and end-all statistic. There are a a couple of other ways you can attack this challenge and be more than competitive with substantially less power!
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Nov 22, 2018 05:08
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Yeah, I have my doubts about how useful 650+ horsepower is actually going to be; I'm very curious how much weight that horsepower is going to cost you.
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Nov 22, 2018 15:20
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