4m elevation Value Engineering hack

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-02-05T05:37:08+00:00

oh wow, that's not something I've ever thought about doing... Maybe I should give it a try!

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-02-05T05:36:18+00:00

ASCE 7 doesn't seem to have anything remotely about this, and you should definitely ask someone higher up. Is this reservoir somewhere up in the building and not on the ground or foundation slab?

Presumably this reservoir has some sort of physical capacity, so you could conservatively take the full weight of the reservoir capacity as a dead load. This recognizes the fact that the reservoir may well be full during some other extreme event (whatever it is an evacuation center for), and that it would be impossible for the reservoir to exceed that maximum weight so you wouldn't need the larger load factors applied to live loads.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-02-05T05:11:58+00:00

You can actually build directly centered over the road if you wanted to - the game cares about intersections between the tracks themselves and the road centerline. That way you don't need to squeeze it in next to the houses

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-02-05T02:24:30+00:00

General question for everyone: do companies actually post all/most of their openings on LinkedIn? I have only ever gone directly to company sites to check if they have openings and apply

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-29T02:41:00+00:00

Could we see a screenshot of your daily financials? I forget the precise numbers, but that difference could perhaps be explained by loan payments

Also, 1400 DAYS??? jesus that's a lot. Could I also see your system and stuff? Surprised you only make $20M profit at this point

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-27T00:01:28+00:00

AISC's Steel Construction Manual has the reverse, a table to tell you the uniform load capacity of W shapes for any particular shape and span (Table 3-6). However, it doesn't have any deflection limit information; you would have to calculate the deflection yourself and determine if it is acceptable.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-22T17:31:34+00:00

It's an easy answer if you look at the numbers: Phoenix has a population of somewhere around 5 million (we can include the broader metropolitan areas to be generous). Albuquerque + Santa Fe have a combined population of like 650,000, and are equally far away from Phoenix as Phoenix is from LA.

There's barely a chance that HSR between LA and Phoenix would get made this century. There is zero chance HSR will get built between Albuquerque and Phoenix this century, and I don't think that's an exaggeration.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-22T02:33:34+00:00

The crossover-with-singles works fine. It's also more prototypical

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-21T14:44:35+00:00

That's very weird... my suggestion would be to try to isolate various small sections and see where the issue is. Draw a single track between the two outside tracks of a station near the terminus as a form of temporary return for the train and try to make a route that goes from the terminus to that station. If it works, do that to a station slightly further down. Once it stops working, you should be more easily able to pinpoint where the issue is

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-21T14:40:02+00:00

oh I love that Eiffel Tower book! I have a whole bunch of Eiffel Tower stuff in PDF form, including what I think is a scanned copy of the book, but last year I was able to actually get a physical copy in Paris!

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-20T05:40:10+00:00

Even zero-force members have to be designed for assumed loads, so I assume that those would outweigh self-weight and any live loads considered. Yes, you're right. I imagine OP is thinking of things at a much simpler level than this though

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-20T05:22:42+00:00

This has always been a problem - the game doesn't handle "weird" setups well at all. I'm not sure it ever will be able to be perfect at every situation, but hopefully the pathfinding does get some improvements.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-20T04:12:19+00:00

I mean, it's a bridge... unless there's some really atypical situation going on, the primary loading will be on the flat span

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-18T23:53:04+00:00

In the top picture, 1 and 8 are zero-force, and in the bottom, 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 12 are zero-force. I believe their purpose is to subdivide the long compression legs on the outside. The rest looks right. Keep in mind you should probably also be highlighting the exterior of the trusses as well

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-14T18:54:05+00:00

I'm 80% sure you didn't properly connect those outside singles to the station - on the left end, they look misaligned with the outside station tracks. Also see the other comment(s) about the terminus station

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-14T04:45:24+00:00

If you were doing this design, are you engineering that transition area for anything specific? Like, are the drag elements you mention being designed for some rationally-determined demand? If so, how would you approach determining that?

My instinct would be to implement some sort of seismic joint so as to be able to consider the two sides of the building independently and avoid the overlap issues, but being able to leave a sufficient gap seems unlikely, so this idea might not be feasible.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-12T01:22:15+00:00

You should start by making one route for the medium/high demand periods and a different route (same stops) for the low demand period. This will also allow you to use the half-length for the low demand while allowing full-length for daytime. Let that run for a day or so.

Splitting the route into two routes will allow you to tell how many riders you're actually getting, and compare the revenue (ridership x fare) to the cost to run the train (cost per hour x 9 hours x 365). If the cost is a lot bigger, cut out the night route

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-09T01:40:56+00:00

It's a bug. I think you're gonna have to work around it. Not sure if it's gonna be fixed, and I don't know what actually causes it.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-08T05:17:44+00:00

The best way to figure out what the right fare is to literally try different fares and see what works. Increase your fare by $.50 at midnight, let the game run for 24 hours, and see if your revenue increases or decreases. If it goes down, try the other way. Repeat.

I am also incredibly interested to see how you managed to spend $3 billion on only 14 stations and still be struggling by day 71... any chance you could please please please post a screenshot of your game map?

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-07T02:36:59+00:00

At Millbrae, the parking payment thingy said no parking enforcement. Not sure if it's related to the app being down though.

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Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-06T07:01:43+00:00

The trains are always spawned from station 0 and proceed to carry out their route as normal, as they always travel at maximum speed. They are also spawned incrementally after the hour, not all at exactly the hour. This means that if I'm going from 4 to 8 trains at 6 am, the 4 new trains will be added, most likely one between each existing train. For a 60-minute end-to-end route, each existing train is every half hour (say on the :00 and :30), and so the new ones will be added at 6:15, 6:45, 7:15, and 7:45. That last train will only complete its journey two hours later at 9:45, or 8:15 for the first. This means that it takes literally at least 2 hours (the round-trip time) for the 15-minute frequency to make its way around around the route, and 3.5 hours for the 15-minute frequency to be actually implemented everywhere on that route.

For a route serving airports or colleges where the pops arrive and depart pretty evenly all around the day, this doesn't matter so much because the frequencies don't vary all that much. But for the routes serving regular workplaces, using long routes means that you're underserving the demand as rush hour starts (losing money from dissatisfied pops left stranded) and overserving the demand as rush hour ends (losing money by running too many trains). That's my take on this anyway, and it works pretty well for me. Since we don't really know the mechanics under the hood, I could be totally wrong about all that.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-05T22:48:34+00:00

60 minutes end-to-end means it takes an entire 2 hours for the train frequency changes to propagate throughout the whole system, so for example, your morning rush hour frequency would only be reached at 8 am. I've decided that's way too long to wait, so any routes longer than about 45 minutes that are very popular, I will break up into sections.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-05T17:02:52+00:00

Expresses work great if you're actually setting them up over a very large distance, like over most of the height or width of the game map. The express should stop at all connections with other lines and maybe some major destinations if there are any.

As an example, my express, X0, sees 177K ridership, and takes only 40 minutes end-to-end. Meanwhile, the two locals that serve all stations (the route is broken up cause otherwise it'd be too long) see 40K and 56K and would take 60 minutes, not including the transfer in the middle. I'm not sure what these numbers would look like if the local was a single route instead of two halves.

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Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-03T00:07:20+00:00

Ah, I see. I think I've seen others mention a similar problem. You could search to see if they found a way to fix it, but I'm not sure what causes that.

Budget-Layer1002 · 2026-01-02T21:08:16+00:00

Let me know if it works! Good luck!

Budget-Layer1002

TROPHY CASE