18:47 <Pinkbeast> The noisy idiot in the pub has just been proclaiming how the French never conquered anything after 1066. Barman: "Well, there's Napoleon". Hee hee.

18:51 <Pinkbeast> Perfectly deadpan delivery

20:51 <Iskierka> yes, he did kind-of conquer everything except britain and russia

20:52 <Pinkbeast> & if he'd started building steam tugs in 1801...

20:53 <Pinkbeast> Re Railworks/Train Simulator, I asked the developer of the HUD overlay tool if we could see firebox temperature; TS doesn't simulate it, so we can't. :-/

20:54 <Iskierka> that's ... odd

20:55 <Iskierka> but not surprising with the lookup table based boiler properties

20:56 <Pinkbeast> Not boiler but firebox - in practice you can kill the firebox temperature by overshovelling (hence "little and often") or eg it may need a while to recover after closing the dampers and waiting

20:58 <Iskierka> yeah but I don't remember what it was that we thought might be because of different firebox temp

20:58 <Pinkbeast> It was you driving two apparently identical A4s.

20:59 <Iskierka> though the real problem, now, is probably just some strange areas in the performance curves where if you have enough steam to push hard up to higher speed it just gives you higher steam generation basically for free by its guesstimate of damper airflow

20:59 <Iskierka> so the right approach will just punch you through and let you hold there

21:02 <Pinkbeast> Uh well to be fair this is one of the fundamental features of a steam locomotive, that the exhaust's draught on the fire means steam generation rises with steam consumption. Perhaps I misread you

21:03 <Iskierka> I mean that because it's not a physical simulation a small error in the guesstimate could easily be exaggerated to allow performance that really shouldn't be happening

21:04 <Pinkbeast> Ah, yeah, ISWYM. Perhaps we should just give up and play OpenRails (although with this new steam HUD I'm working through ~all of Railworks)

21:04 <Iskierka> as it's not simulating temperature it's also likely not simulating that you're going to be constantly shovelling and need to heat each new load of coal, so a fast burn will probably give you a lower average than slow sustained

21:05 <Iskierka> (average temperature of the coal itself, that is. Constantly having to use the released heat to heat new coal)

21:06 <Iskierka> a humble bundle offered motorsport manager so I've ended up on that. Will come back to trains at some point

21:06 <Pinkbeast> The big thing in reality was that each shovelful first outgasses a bunch of combustibles and if there's not enough air through the firebox to burn those they go right up the chimney, so shovelling a crapload at once is very inefficient (unless everything is going so fast there's lots of air)

21:08 <Iskierka> Noooone of which is simulated by RW

21:09 <Pinkbeast> Even given the (reasonable) expectation that some of the stoker's duties are elided - your coal never ends up in the wrong bit of the firebox, etc

21:12 <Iskierka> I'm neither sure how you'd simulate or control that in a reasonable way

21:13 <Pinkbeast> Oh, indeed, I don't think it should be in - a specific scenario might establish you have crappy coal, but beyond that...

21:14 <Iskierka> crappy coal is much easier in trainz which actually takes the energetic properties of coal and mostly simulates them :p

21:14 <Pinkbeast> ... although something inobvious is that the GWR managed with 4-6-0s partly because of their excellent Welsh steam coal, and do you represent that in a sim by giving them artifically good performance or by having a variable for coal quality?

21:16 <Iskierka> If you can get actual data for the coal then it can be accurately reflected by good performance

21:17 <Pinkbeast> This alas is a problem for GWR engines in preservation where everyone-ish is using crappy Russian coal but it's more of a step down for GWR engines

21:18 <Pinkbeast> crappy> this is a bit unfair, it's more that since power stations can burn any coal very well, no-one is picking out the best coal

21:18 <Iskierka> interesting. So there would be a struggle for a modern record attempt finding a way to get enough power

21:18 <Pinkbeast> Oil diring.

21:18 <Pinkbeast> *firing.

21:19 <Pinkbeast> Wardale's 5AT is oil-fired and he thought it would do 140mph

21:19 <Iskierka> Wouldn't exactly be a performance match though

21:19 <Pinkbeast> ... and he is the last giant of steam so probably right. If I had 20 million quid I'd build the 5AT

21:20 <Pinkbeast> No, but if I wanted to smash the record I'd be oil-fired.

21:20 <Iskierka> I was thinking about if you could do something like using sugar stuck to the coal to increase the average energy release to match welsh coal

21:20 <Iskierka> would be super-expensive but could possibly make it a match

21:21 <Pinkbeast> There's just the question of how much you can shovel. The American Project 130 was going to have a mechanical stoker, but that's harder to keep the firebox bed even and it consumes steam itself.

21:21 <Pinkbeast> Better off with oil firing where you just open a tap.

21:32 <Iskierka> does it not need a pump? (perhaps if only at low oil levels and therefore low gravity pressure)

21:34 <Pinkbeast> It consumes a modest quantity of steam, but a very modest one.

21:34 <Pinkbeast> Whereas a mechanical stoker uses quite a bit.