Cars Engine damage at high revs?

[Ghiaman1334]

Hi there,
Quite a few of the car mods I have damage their engine at high revs, some more drastically than others. I don't want to turn engine damage off, both because to do that you have to turn off damage completely and because I want the engine to be able to get damaged in other ways, but I'd just rather not have my engine explode when I go to shift gear. For an example, the Plymouth Superbird mod kills its engine after changing gear four times. I'd rather not have that happen, thanks. What can I do?

 

[aphidgod]

In engine.ini:

[DAMAGE]
TURBO_BOOST_THRESHOLD=1.5 ; level of TOTAL boost before the engine starts to take damage
TURBO_DAMAGE_K=5 ; amount of damage per second per (boost - threshold)
RPM_THRESHOLD=7000 ; RPM at which the engine starts to take damage
RPM_DAMAGE_K=1 ; amount of damage per second per (rpm-threshold)

Adjust to taste.

 

[BobGreece]

Was it really so easy to blow an engine in those cars in real life?

 

[BobGreece]

The brakes are so rubbish on these old American muscle cars that I need to use the gears to slow down the car on the corners and sometimes that wrecks the engine. On the Dodge Dart it gets damage at 7600RPM and the rev limiter is set to 7500RPM so I don't know why it is getting so damaged. Maybe it's the frequency of the rev limiter?

 

[Stereo]

Reading a bit of literature on 1950s Le Mans races, at that time it was pretty easy to blow engines, and it was rare for teams to allow drivers to use the "real" rev limit unless it was a close race. I don't know if that still held by the late 60s.

The mods in question are definitely not based on any real-life info though so who knows.

 

[armos22]

With some cars/engines, at least those that are more common, you can often find discussion threads with anecdotes about how high they can rev. You have to take everything with a grain of salt though because people exaggerate, and a lot of enthusiast owned cars are modified.

When I'm tweaking car mods, I like to set low damage that starts earlier - so less severe revs aren't catastrophic but the wear will build up if you keep doing it. I think that's more realistic than an engine that's totally unaffected until a more serious threshold.

I also like to set a phony "rev limiter" at a 1Hz frequency to imitate valve float. I do this on cars that don't have a real limiter and whose stock valvetrain won't allow reaching catastrophic RPMs.
The combination of these means if I keep accelerating, I'll start to get minor engine damage before valve float cuts out the engine for 1sec, and if I still don't shift the cycle will repeat like that.
Now if it's an interference engine, high damage at the point of valve float could be appropriate.

AC's damage model is simplified to a single number that increases linearly with RPM, so it can't cover all the details of things that start to wear or suddenly break at different points.