Fri Mar 27, 2015 2:07 pm
Historial note re Variable Valve Timing
I've learned so much about engines in the last few days!
And there's a peice of trivia that a friend of mine who once worked for Nissan shared, which might be useful as a content update. In the very early days of Variable Valve Timing, it was mechanically controlled, and there was a very complicated mechanical thing (unfortunately this is all I know) that worked out what the timing should be, and controlled the timings. When they switched it over to microprocessor control, VVT became far more reliable, and cheap to manufacture (because instead of 15 or so moving parts for VVT, they just moved the camshaft back and forth, and the cams had a shape that adjusted the timing as the shaft moved).
So in terms of gameplay, VVT should ideally work like fuel injection - there's a mechanical version that gets invented a few years before the electronically-controlled version, and which is worse than the electronic version in pretty much every way.
And there's a peice of trivia that a friend of mine who once worked for Nissan shared, which might be useful as a content update. In the very early days of Variable Valve Timing, it was mechanically controlled, and there was a very complicated mechanical thing (unfortunately this is all I know) that worked out what the timing should be, and controlled the timings. When they switched it over to microprocessor control, VVT became far more reliable, and cheap to manufacture (because instead of 15 or so moving parts for VVT, they just moved the camshaft back and forth, and the cams had a shape that adjusted the timing as the shaft moved).
So in terms of gameplay, VVT should ideally work like fuel injection - there's a mechanical version that gets invented a few years before the electronically-controlled version, and which is worse than the electronic version in pretty much every way.
