Some questions about the factories though, will the factories only produce one engine at a time? or can you produce multiple engine designs out of one factory?
Each factory size will have a number of production lines. Smaller factories may only have 1, larger factories will have more.
Will the tooling for engines mean that any engine type can be produced in any factory, or will tooling be specific for certain engine types or sizes?
As you will design an engine around a manufacture year, its costs of production can vary factory to factory, based on when that factory was tooled. The exact mechanics of this have yet to be set in stone.
After you have designed an engine, and set it up in a production line, there will be a tooling time, where the factory is re tooling the machines to the new engine design.
Will there be any benifit to using similair parts across different engine lines? For example, Can I make a series of I4 and I6 engines that share similiar blocks, the same pistons and con rods and things like that to make it cheaper? (like the Nissan L Engine )
Me and daffy have discussed this very topic at great length, we did at one point have planned that to build an engine, the factory would setup a whole set of production lines for conrods, pistons with all unique manufacture parameters. You would have to build a stock of these before you could build an engine.
Therefore you would be inclined to make engines of similar bores and strokes to share the piston/conrod production lines etc.
All of that became a nightmare to managed, the stocks, keeping track of changes becomes a compounded problem.
If you change the quality of a piston, tracking that through the different engines, to then the different cars they end up in. Updating the buyer demographics to manage it. It all became a nightmare to handle, not fun for me to program, and probably not fun for you guys to manage. That would of been a micro managing nightmare.
It is something that daffy and I will probably discuss again.
Sun Feb 06, 2011 9:28 pm 
