14 replies to this topic

[Mazzyplz]

i decided because i have curiosity in things that don't matter, to figure out how much
horsepower the engines in game are making.

so my 300 light engine weighs 20.5 tons and propels my awesome at 60.8 kph top speed without any skill tree.

i plug this into a horsepower calculator.




to drive my 80 000 kilogram vehicle, up to a quarter mile speed of 60.8 (mechs reach top speed around quarter mile though, so just plugging in max speed here)

an engine that weighs 20.5 tons produces only 742 horsepower. in the year 3050!

lol. that's ridiculous. so what is the nuclear generator supposed to be doing in there?
i guess it's just so you never have to refuel?

it seems like a better idea to go with a one thousand horsepower bugatti veyron engine,
just internal combustion. and use the tonnage for the fuel? unless you really need
insane torques in these battlemechs?

i was going to plot the horsepower of all the engines but now i'm just rolling my eyes and having a laugh. but maybe there's some canon explanation i am not aware of

this is the calculator used if anyone want to try plugging in the numbers

https://www.calculat...calculator.html

Edited by Mazzyplz, 30 April 2021 - 09:12 PM.

[Nightbird]

This method shows the flea with an xl170 and masc has 15,000 horsepower. So either a 170 engine is more powerful than a 300 engine, or the method is flawed.

[Mazzyplz]

i did the same calculation on a different horsepower calculator:


http://www.wallacera...m/et-hp-mph.php

the same numbers for the light 300 engine powering the awesome, gave me the same horsepower there too.


"Your Horsepower computed from your vehicle weight of 176369.8 pounds and MPH of 37.77937 is 732.80."

176369.8 pounds is 80000 kilograms and 37.77937 miles per hour is 60.8 kph..


what numbers are you plugging in?

maybe it's not an issue with the calculator but rather the way speed is calculated in the game, it might be nonsensical. which is an unexpected find

Edited by Mazzyplz, 30 April 2021 - 10:06 PM.

[Meep Meep]

Mazzyplz, on 30 April 2021 - 10:07 PM, said:

maybe it's not an issue with the calculator but rather the way speed is calculated in the game, it might be nonsensical. which is an unexpected find

Remember that mwo is based off a table top pen and paper game that relies on dice rolls to resolve everything so numbers tended to revolve around that mechanic. This is why balance was a nightmare for at least the first two years of the game and has never been completely resolved.

[TheAbsoluteMadman]

Lockheed and meep meep are correct. These mechs use space age magic materials and fusion engines that don't produce or transfer energy like conventional combustion engines do while also defying the square cubed law. There's no way to determine how much torque is being generated accurately or how much power is required for system and weapon functions but I can do some really poorly estimated math to give power. Take the 80 ton awesome and say it achieves 60.8 kph in ~4 seconds. Take the acceleration multiplied by mass to get approximate force exerted and multiply that by distance required to reach top speed, maybe 30 meters? I dunno. Work done is around 9 million joules, divide it by ~4 seconds, which is time to reach top speed. That's about 2.3 Megawatts of power, or 3084 horsepower. Not very accurate though. For reference, jet engines produce ~20 megawatts of power and "modern" fusion engines would be theorized to make between 1 and 10 megawatts. Again though, it's a big fantasy stompy physics defying robot so have fun with it.

[Tarl Cabot]

And regardless of the weight itself, BT works with engine rating, not weight. A 55 ton medium using a 300 rated engine has the same walking/running speed, be it a STD/LFE/XL, and still moves faster than a 100 ton assault with the same 300 rated engine.

https://mwomercs.com...y-an-education/

Quote

In the early days some BattleMech designers experimented with using fusion engines that produced more power than a particular chassis needed. The idea was that the extra power produced would provide some nebulous benefits in combat. This idea turned was not only false, but the oversized engines actually generated too much waste heat and would either cook off explosive ammo stored in the BattleMech; or the engine safeties would cut in and automatically shut down the engine. A BattleMech can only use so much power... trying to force it to use more provides no extra benefits and simply does not work.

[ShiverMeRivets]

Acceleration of a given mass translates directly into power. That would be a lower limit on the power of the engine.

Power=mass•velocity•acceleration

Velocity near the top speed is about 150 kph.
Acceleration in MWO is independent of current velocity below the max speed. For the flee ~ 150kph/sec (it takes about 1 second to reach top speed, probably less).
Mass is 20,000 kg.

Generally:
Power HP = 0.1•M(tons)•V(kph)•V(kph)/t(sec)

Where V is the max speed and t is the time from 0 to max speed.
So for the Flee numbers above, we get about 45,000 HP.

For a 100 ton Atlas with a max speed of 50kph, and lets say 3 seconds to accelerate to that speed (I did not check, feel free to plug in a different number), we get: 8,333 HP.
Pathetic.

This is another reason why the 20 ton mechs are total BS. They have insanely boosted accelerations relative to heavier mechs.

Edited by ShiverMeRivets, 01 May 2021 - 01:18 PM.

[ScrapIron Prime]

Lockheed_ said:

1619850475[/url]' post='6394008']
does that calculator account for that mechs don't just have wheels and need to power leg actuators?
also the mech needs power for gyros, arm actuators, all the energy that weapons consume, targeting and coms, reactor shielding, auxiliary systems.

Basically this. The engine doesn’t produce horsepower at all. It produces megawatts. The internal structure (myomer “muscles”) produce the horsepower.

plus, the trap speed method is designed solely for cars that are constantly accelerating down a drag strip. It doesn’t work properly for a dump truck, for example, and isn’t going to work for a battlemech either (because the mech will hit its top speed long before the quarter mile).

Edited by ScrapIron Prime, 02 May 2021 - 07:37 AM.

[LordBraxton]

All this shows is that legs are less efficient than wheels.

Wheels, in ideal conditions, get you moving, then rely on momentum+ power...

Legs, you gotta create the momentum by moving a 10 ton leg back and forth. Think about the servo power required to constantly drag these 10 ton legs back n forth\up n down.

Edited by LordBraxton, 02 May 2021 - 08:56 AM.

[pbiggz]

Internal Combustion engines put out power mechanically. Combustion of gas in a piston literally rotates a shaft and that rotation gets used to do work; whether thats directly driving wheels, or rotating an electric motor. BT engines are not the same. They're fusion engines. The power they put out isn't mechanical, its electrical. Any mechanical work a mech does is work being done by a separate component that uses electric power to actuate itself. If anything, calculations of a mech's potential to do mechanical work are better applied to the myomer actuators. Additionally, unlike fusion engines you might find in the Expanse, or Elite Dangerous, BT engines don't seem to use reaction mass (Epstein Drives in the expanse fuse fuel pellets, and then use the electricity to superheat reaction mass, water, which is ejected out of the drive cone to produce thrust, and Elite Dangerous's engines use some kind of fuel the player has to keep topped up). A more apt measure of their power output would be how many Megawatts do they put out. Elite Dangerous's powerplant output is measured in Megawatts, but since BT's engines and speeds are based on the Tabletop game, there is no solid anchor point we could use to measure power output. Additionally, the energy output from engines in BT seems to be purely electrical.

Edited by pbiggz, 02 May 2021 - 09:25 AM.

[ShiverMeRivets]

pbiggz, on 02 May 2021 - 09:18 AM, said:

Internal Combustion engines put out power mechanically. Combustion of gas in a piston literally rotates a shaft and that rotation gets used to do work; whether thats directly driving wheels, or rotating an electric motor. BT engines are not the same. They're fusion engines. The power they put out isn't mechanical, its electrical. Any mechanical work a mech does is work being done by a separate component that uses electric power to actuate itself. If anything, calculations of a mech's potential to do mechanical work are better applied to the myomer actuators. Additionally, unlike fusion engines you might find in the Expanse, or Elite Dangerous, BT engines don't seem to use reaction mass (Epstein Drives in the expanse fuse fuel pellets, and then use the electricity to superheat reaction mass, water, which is ejected out of the drive cone to produce thrust, and Elite Dangerous's engines use some kind of fuel the player has to keep topped up). A more apt measure of their power output would be how many Megawatts do they put out. Elite Dangerous's powerplant output is measured in Megawatts, but since BT's engines and speeds are based on the Tabletop game, there is no solid anchor point we could use to measure power output. Additionally, the energy output from engines in BT seems to be purely electrical.

Nonsense.
Megawatts is just a unit of power and so is Horse power (750 Watts).
How much power goes into accelerating an object is simply how much kinetic energy does it gain in a period of time, or in other word, the time derivative of kinetic energy. For the world of MWO where a mech’s acceleration is constant up to its max speed, the calculation gives:

Power HP = 0.1•M(tons)•V(kph)•V(kph)/t(sec)

Where V is the max speed and t is the time from 0 to max speed.

This is not lore, this is simple physics. Of course the above is the net power that goes into increasing kinetic energy. Some is lost on other things so the engine output needs to be higher, but this lower limit should give a rough estimate. Since light mechs have a much higher max speed and they reach it faster than assaults reach their top speed, it turns out that light mechs have much more powerful engines than assaults.

[InfinityBall]

Your engine is also producing enough power to power several lasers capable of evaporating literal tons of armor in a few seconds.

[Zordicron]

I was hoping to see some fun here with some car guys and hot rodding stuff.
Nope, just arguments about math and electricity.

Personally, I don;t see the negative conclusions fitting the topic. For all anybody knows, by the time our society figures out how to actually make an engine of this type, it will be the size of a Walmart and weigh 3000 tons. Maybe 1000 years in the future, a 27 ton engine will seem brilliant!

I mean it's all possible. Every time I see news articles about students that actually invented myomer muscles by experimenting with fishing line and electricity, and experiments with neuro helmets or other brain mapping.... I just think, yup, battlemechs, Gundams, any day now!
has anyone invented foamed aluminum or ferro-fibrous yet? I haven;t been scrounging the web for nerd news in a while.

[LordNothing]

im kind of a fusion nerd so a reactor that would fit in the mech would likely be in the 10s to 100s of megawatt range, with a good portion of that going to waste heat. in the fusion world its usually go big or go home. because you need to contain failed particle collisions (they dont get close enough for the strong force to take over and no fusion occurs) within the magnetic bottle, otherwise your plasma loses energy. those particles need time to turn back into the flow, and you do that by increasing the time of flight, and you do that by making the magnetic bottle larger. thus there are hard physical limits on how small you can make a fusion reactor. while there are some mech engine sized fringe fusion concepts which might one day become compact reactor designs. they arent going to have the scale of economy that the big gigawatt+ range powerplant reactors will have.

Edited by LordNothing, 08 May 2021 - 08:07 PM.

[martian]

Mazzyplz, on 30 April 2021 - 09:13 PM, said:

lol. that's ridiculous. so what is the nuclear generator supposed to be doing in there?
i guess it's just so you never have to refuel?
....
it seems like a better idea to go with a one thousand horsepower bugatti veyron engine,
just internal combustion. and use the tonnage for the fuel? unless you really need
insane torques in these battlemechs?

BattleMech reactor must do more than just move your 'Mech from one place to another.

Your Awesome can fire three Kreuss PPCs simultaneously, each of them fired singly would vaporize instantly any contemporary tank (Abrams, Leopard 2, Leclerc, Challenger 2, T-14 Armata) with just one shot.

Would be that "one thousand horsepower bugatti veyron engine" sufficient for that?