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Originally Posted by swordtart
There was however no apparent logic to the car electric plants either, none of them neatly fitted the load limits of the vehicles.
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There was -- just not as you've described it.
Back-when, the largest PP was the Super, at 2,600 PP; the heaviest max-load was the XH-chassis Pickup, at... 7,800 lbs., or 3x 2,600. The Large PP, at 2,000 PF, was a little more than a Midsize needed, but not much (5,760 lbs.), and a bit over what a XH Compact needed (4,440 lbs.), but not enough to give it Acc. 10. The Medium PP was for designing "speedball" Subcompacts, while the Small was for "big-gun" (relatively) Subs. So one was forever having to ask: "Do I use the next size plant up, or do I leave some unused max. load on the table?"
Then PC and SCs came along, as well as the gasburners....
Quote:
Originally Posted by swordtart
Alternatively you could have gone the way of GURPS vehicles and come up with a formula rather than specified each plant explicitly.
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You're not far off here -- I have such in my files.
On the subject of these files: It was my bad luck to be born when I was (1972 -- and that barely); had I been a few years older, I would have been out of High School in the mid-'80s, when _CW_ was peaking, and might have been in position to become CW Line Editor myself. But I was in HS, and let's not kid ourselves: No one was going to hire a high-school kid for that job, no matter how well he wrote, and was able to explain tech-stuff to those for whom "that's Greek".
Quote:
Originally Posted by swordtart
A simple way to fix the extra-heavy trike problem is to disregard the rule that cycles and trikes have unique electric plants and let them use any of the electric car plants as well, they can already use the same gas plants of course.
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Back when I was with NOVA, we experimented with the loophole you described -- letting Trikes use car PPs. Then someone strapped a Thundercat with upgrades to a trike.... [cough] :)
The technobabble explanation is "cycle PPs are designed to deliver power differently than car PPs" -- which isn't far off of the Dreaded R-Word; a bike engine lives at upwards of 8-9,000 RPMs, where a car typically redlines at 2/3 of that (this is discounting "freak show" stuff like F1 engines, or what the Argentine 6-cylinder stock-cars have). Granted, I've seen some cars converted to run bike engines, but those were all one-offs.
More thinking required....