[copperpen]

steamer_ctn, on 04 June 2013 - 01:08 PM, said:

Thanks for that.

How do you determine how much to open the blower and/or the damper?

By keeping an eye on the boiler pressure.

[Lindsayts]

steamer_ctn, on 04 June 2013 - 01:08 PM, said:

Thanks for that.

How do you determine how much to open the blower and/or the damper?

Mainly in the end it comes from experience, remember in a real loco one is VERY much in touch with the machine and one gets to know when to use either.

As state in my previous post the pressure drop that produces the draft is quite high, the dampers are used to control the size of the air opening into the grate area and therefore the amount of air passing through the fire, you essentially set the dampers to stop the draft "overdriving" the fire, ie putting out more heat energy than the boiler can use at that particular time. The blower is used to keep the draft up when the loco is not using steam (ie when stopped) and therefore the fire has no draft and the loco may have to take upload directly, its not usually required if the loco is just parked as the heat in the boiler will give enough natural convection. Its sometime used when going into tunnels is on occasion the sudden partial blockage can throw some smoke and gasses out of the firebox door and into the cab.

Lighting up some loco's can be a real interesting time as the smoke path is fairly indirect and until the boiler gets some heat into it its not uncommon to get a bit of smoke in the cab. Not to say having to take the cart over to the wood pile 100 metres or more away and get all the wood required over to the loco and _UP_ into the cab.

I do not usually drive steamers in a train sim as its so far removed from the real machine, one getting effectively none of the feedback in the sim one gets when ones in the cab of a real loco on the move.

Lindsay

[copperpen]

The AI fireman in MSTS/OR will never be able to mimic the real world version because of the lack of sight and sound and so will have to react to specific data. So the problem is, how to get an AI fireman to do a creditable job. The variables are, boiler water mass, water temperature, firemass, fire temperature and rate of steam usage. Water mass is controlled by use of the injectors and does lower water temperature thus possibly affecting steam production. Firemass is affected by shovelrate with too much causing the fire to lose temperature. The burnrate of the Firemass is affected by how much air is passing through the fire which in turn is directly affected by how hard or fast the engine is working.

[Lindsayts]

copperpen, on 05 June 2013 - 07:08 AM, said:

The AI fireman in MSTS/OR will never be able to mimic the real world version because of the lack of sight and sound and so will have to react to specific data. So the problem is, how to get an AI fireman to do a creditable job. The variables are, boiler water mass, water temperature, firemass, fire temperature and rate of steam usage. Water mass is controlled by use of the injectors and does lower water temperature thus possibly affecting steam production. Firemass is affected by shovelrate with too much causing the fire to lose temperature. The burnrate of the Firemass is affected by how much air is passing through the fire which in turn is directly affected by how hard or fast the engine is working.

I will have to think about this as there is lot of factors in the sim........ but in the real world the job of a fireman is to keep the boiler in steam without wasting fuel or water. This means trying as much as possible to keep the boiler output to match what the driver requires. If one in the AI code made the fire at any instant match what steam output the loco required at the time would probably be as good a way as any and would likely be simple to implement.

Trying to emulate a real fireman in the AI means being able to predict the future, attempting this would have a good possibilty of not succeeding no matter how much effort was put in, and in a sim such as OR its likely there would be items that would give a better "bang for ones buck" for developers. I as a personel opinion would consider a decent route editor to be way ahead of realistic AI firng code.

Lindsay

[scottb613]

Morn'n Folks,

For the AI Fireman - it could be as easy as a simple three way toggle -

• max setting = AI to produce the max amount of steam the locomotive is realistically capable of
  
• med setting = AI generates steam somewhere between min and max
  
• min setting = AI generates minimal amount of steam

While simple - I think this would add a great deal of realism that we don't have today - wouldn't require a great deal of attention from the engineer - and - would be way simpler than trying to implement some sophisticated algorithms to predict what steam production should be based on the route ahead...

If you want more control - we could just request a % of the total output of the boiler - you could call it "AI Fireman Effort" or something like that...

Regards,
Scott