Sorry about the thread necromancy, but I think this topic needs to be brought up again, not to be forgotten. And since I have some new ideas, I think it’s the right time to dig this thread up from the grave.
So the combustion engine. It should be a simple block: One RU output and one RU input opposite of each other. One configurable exhaust on any of the remaining sides.
Why a RU input? Two reasons:
- To line up a bunch of engines and add up the power of them. This makes the engines very scalable.
- To start the engine of course. Like the burning box, the combustion engine should have some challenge to overcome for using it, and that
is starting by giving it a spin with the good ol trustworthy handle, or hopefully an electric motor in your case. Stopping it is also not so easy,
as it once started will keep running. The only way to stop it would be cutting the fuel, which would stop the engine very fast, because it thankfully only has a
tiny fluid buffer.
A main advantage of the combustion engine compared to the burning box would be linear scalability.
Just line a few engines up with the outputs facing into the inputs and the torque will add up and starting up the engine will be as easy as starting one engine.
The engine should not just need fuel, but also an oxidizer, which can simply be air or pure oxygen for more speed and efficiency. Maybe even NO2 injections. But how to squeeze out even more efficiency or power from an engine? Using better fuels is one option, but how about adding a supercharger? The supercharger is a cover that increases oxidizer consumption, to make the engine more efficient and powerful. It however needs to be powered with a little bit of RU directly into the cover, making the setup far more complicated.
An alternative to the supercharger could be the turbocharger, which is also a cover that can be applied to the engine to raise the efficiency. The turbocharger is taking in exhaust gas, which can be captured by placing a pipe on the exhaust of the engine, to squeeze more oxidizer into the engine. The exhaust is however not consumed, but added to the exhaust of the engine. When the exhaust can’t be output, because the pipe in front of it is full, it will violently explode. To get rid of the exhaust from the pipe network, a new vent cover would be needed, but you still need to keep piping some exhaust into the engine.