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The Triton - Piston Powered

Peak Rotational Speed: ~1000rpm (Wheels), ~1255rpm (Engine)
Combined Peak Torque: ~27000Nm (Wheels), ~33000Nm (Engines)
Combined Peak Power: ~3700hp (Wheels), ~5800hp (Engines)

This is my first successful attempt at making a truck that utilizes pressure engines. This is quite difficult to pull of as I insisted on having both engines in the front for a flatter rear load floor, while still having awd and being balanced properly despite its inherently asymmetrical drivetrain layout. As of now that makes this my most advanced drivetrain by far and being one of the most powerful trucks you will find on the workshop.

W/S - Forward/Reverse
1 - Parking Brake [Manual Toggle]
2 - Torque Vectoring Lock
3 - Exterior Lights [Hold for high beams & fog lights]
4 - Cargo Bay & Rear Exterior Lights
5 - Hazard Lights
6 - Radio
7 - Horn

It will normally be managed fully automatically by the vehicle, disengaging as you press W or S and engaging as you leave the seat. It can also be manually controlled with a button and the interior & exterior light red lights indicate if its on or off. This can be useful for parking on a hill while in the seat for example.

DISCLAIMER: This vehicle uses logic gates attached to the seat to detect you and for some stupid reason SM removes those, if you reload the world with the vehicle in it. This is why you get the manual button and the indicators in the first place.

The torque vectoring this uses relies on clutches that open partially on the inside while turning, which could be annoying offroad or with a lot of load as you effectively lose power. See it as the equivalent of a diff lock.

The main principle behind these is the way the pistons provide power. Instead of using the pistons power from a logix input, they use joint compression under high speeds (aka what we call the "pressure effect"). This gives very significant power benefits (going well into the 1000s for hp/piston) which is easily over 30-100 times higher than what your conventional engines can do at most. Due to not needing timing, nor being speed capped in any other way they will synchronize to the games tickrate with most examples (including the ones on this build) running at ~1255rpm, which is very much sufficient for most application and allows for high speed vehicles with that high power at the top end, which is basically unheard of with any timed engine design. They do come with a relatively large weight penalty and require blueprint edited controllers to speed up the pistons (still spawnable in vanilla btw), but are still very much worth it overall.

Here is a video to explain pressure engines in further detail if you're interested:
https://youtu.be/YULRhRh3ehw?si=PYkpQuvkrQOXts5t

Similiar to my other builds it uses a type of engine with the geometry of effectively a scotch yoke boxer 2 design with a flywheel to increase power consistency. Blueprint edited pistons are used to create frictionless sliders on 1 axis while being able to provide power on its normal axis.
At the current point it has become the most mainstream pressure engine design in our community for its mechanical simplicity, inherent balance, low complexity and higher power efficiency.

Another big piece of technology this truck has are its transmissions. Any transmission you know of is most likely dependent on collisions, which makes them non viable for this kind of power and for these speeds. By using 2 axles perpendicular to eachother with a blueprint edited bearing (aka what we call a "wonky bearing") inbetween, you can create a fully collisionless single speed transmission that can have any ratio you want, including negative ones.
Pressure engines offer no throttling naturally, no engine braking and are hard to start in either direction quickly. The transmissions fix all of these issues naturally and allow for a very easy to drive and versatile drivetrain. As these engines create high power, their torque will also be quite high and would usually require a quite crazy torque compensation system, but not if you can make the second engine counterrotate. As I am already using 2 engines for AWD, this makes this quite easy to do and allows for very low power torque compensation with just weight to be sufficient, like on a gas car with equivalent power.

Unlike all my past pressure power vehicles (and most you will find on the workshop) this has both engines right next to eachother in an interconnected fashion, instead of being fully independent for each driven axle. The main reason its nice to have here is for the sake of having a lower and bigger cargo space in the back (as mentioned before) and a more naturally front heavy vehicle, but its quite a difficult to build drivetrain with just how many things need to be in the same place. It is also a bit more complex, due to 2 extra seperations for the longitudinal axles for its components to not move around a lot under yaw speeds. It also allows for a bit more independence on power transfer between the front and rear, that being a torque split of 40/60 front/rear here that's more ideal under load.

To still give it fully independent suspension and steering, you would usually need quite a complex and large assortment of u-joint driveshafts, but not if you utilize wonky bearings with their degrees of freedom on a plane orthogonal to their axis of rotation. Using 1 of these on each wheel allows for an easy power transfer that can move vertically for suspension, aswell as being able to allow rotation for steering at the same time (the geometry is even very much near a constant velocity joint). Using 2 bearings to make them double bearing clutches adds a full torque vectoring and throttling system on top of that.

All the torque- and power numbers have been measured with a dyno, here is a link of mine and Ben's:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2959348546


Tags: cargo, utility, lorry, heavy duty, 4x4, four wheel drive, all wheel drive, kein engine, pressure engine, piston engine