Anthony Jackson wrote:
Pauli Hakala wrote:
Great many real world vehicle designs do use pods - if there was
no advantage at all to using pods, then why do so many real world
vehicles use them?
Pods do have advantages with respect to access space. Those advantages
are just poorly represented by the way Vehicles handles them.
The basic point of access space is that maintenance crews need to be
able to reach the component they're working on, so the vehicle has
access space to make those components reachable. In general, a vehicle
with long term access space has spaces you can actually walk into, while
a vehicle with short term access space has spaces you can reach into or
possibly wiggle into, and a vehicle with no access space can only be
maintained by disassembling it. You basically need long term access
space for any component above a certain size (which depends on the
component, but one hullspace is fair).
Pods make the inside of a component easier to reach because they place
the guts of the component close to the surface. What this means is that
they only give you a benefit when the pod is small enough that the
insides can be reached from the outside.
You can get reasonable pods by saying pods have short term (not no)
access space, and then placing an upper limit on the size of a pod
(upper limit depends on what you're working on, but is generally less
than one hullspace in Space 3e terms).
Short term access space is about equivalent to what one finds under
an average modern automobiles hood, right? (Roughly half of the engine
compartment is empty space for maintenance needs.)
I have seen some opened-up pictures of jet engine pods, and now
that I think of it, it seems fairly obvious that they do not
have nowhere near that much access space (+100%) in relation to
the engines overall volume - the empty space inside the jet
engine's tube is there for the airflow regardless of maintenance
needs, and so does not count as added maintenance access space..
(..I also have a hunch that Ve2 standard rules for jet engine pods
without the access space would provide fairly close +/-20% matches
with real world aircraft performance specs..)
Perhaps a case could be made that engines in the pods would not
require nearly as much access space as an internal short-occupancy
installation?
What if the engine stats in Ve2 already include the minimal
maintenance access space necessary for components built into pods?
-Pauli
--
"..Wings on my back, I got horns on my head. My fangs are sharp
and my eyes are red. Not quite an angel or the one that fell.."
-Lordi, Hard Rock Hallelujah
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