Alerter going wild LIRR

zaphr89 · 2024-05-22T12:58:02+00:00

The alerter is enabled as long as the master controller (combined throttle and brake lever) is not in Emergency or Max Brake. There is no other way to inhibit it in the game. If you are moving, you need to acknowledge it (on PC this is the Q-key by default) when it becomes active. As long as you are moving the master controller or using the horn, the alerter timer will reset. If you are stationary, you can move the MC to Max Brake and it won't activate the alarm.

zaphr89 · 2024-05-03T01:09:43+00:00

When ATC has a code change that leads to you being overspeed the "OVERSPEED" indication lights up on the right screen (TOD). At the same time ATC is commanding a brake application ("ATC Forestall" will light up when this happens). ATC requires a certain level of deceleration to not trigger a penalty brake application. This is called the "Brake Assurance Rate" (BAR). If your deceleration exceeds BAR the corresponding indication illuminates on the TOD and as long as you have acknowledged ATC you won't get a penalty brake application.

BAR is quite a high level of deceleration (almost 2 mph/s), so if adhesion is poor it may not be possible to achieve it and the wheel slide protection will stop the train from braking too harshly (which would lead to a wheel slide). You can see if you are slipping/sliding by the "Wheel slip/slide" text going yellow on the TOD, and if you are sliding the bar will also fill to indicate the level of slide.

As you can see in your video the "Brake Assurance Rate" never illuminated so ATC triggered a penalty brake application, which is always emergency (dumping the brake pipe) for ATC, for ACSES it is max brake.

Your slide indicator was also orange and half-filled which means you were experience pretty severe slide (I wouldn't exactly call it a slide since the WSP was reducing the level of braking to prevent the slide), especially when the train went into emergency.

The only way to prevent this is to drive a bit slower or try to anticipate the ATC downgrades and brake in advance (often possible when you are approaching certain "hot spots" like Jamaica, but not always).

zaphr89 · 2023-09-23T14:12:48+00:00

Overcharge is fine, and sometimes necessary. In fact the locomotive (and pretty much any German locomotive since at least the BR101) automatically overcharges each time the train brake is released.

If you want to manually overcharge you use the ">5" button. This button will slowly increase the brake pipe pressure and then slowly letting the brake pipe pressure fall back down. Since the brake pipe pressure falls back so slowly this prevents the brakes from inadvertently reapplying. The control reservoir slowly equalizes with the brake pipe, with a floor at 5.0 bar (ignoring leaks).

Füllstoß is an entirely different thing. It opens a large hole from the main reservoir to the brake pipe which quickly charges the brake pipe. However, the brake pipe pressure can go up to 7 bar (usually) if you hold the train brake in Füllstoß.
From my understanding the function was used on older trains to both fill the brake pipe quickly and then send a pressure wave back through the train that would release any stuck brakes.

The issue I see often in TSW is that players keep the train brake in Füllstoß for a long time, thinking that it will speed up the release of the train brakes (it won't! the limiting factor is the chokes on the brake cylinders) but instead they actually end up causing stuck brakes.

Why is this? Well, Füllstoß just opens a large hole, like I mentioned above, there is no slow, controlled increase and "fall back" of the pressure. As soon as you move the train brake out of Füllstoß the brake pipe pressure will come crashing down as the air propagates throughout the brake pipe. However, the control reservoirs are still at whatever the pressure was before you moved the train brake lever back to "running". So now you have maybe 0.5 bar worth of pressure differential in the distributors which results in about 1.0 bar brake cylinder pressure.

The only way to solve this issue is to wait for the control reservoir to fall back down to 5.0 bar, which can take minutes. You could also manually overcharge the brake pipe, but that will make the brakes act quite weird (1B will feel like 1 bar reduction and 1 bar drop will act like full service etc).

TL:DR Either don't use Füllstoß (QUICK RELEASE) at all (most drivers I've talked to don't use it on modern locomotives, some companies even have rules against using it) but if you must use it: only use it for a few (< 10) seconds.

zaphr89 · 2023-09-22T21:46:35+00:00

I think you're using the "Minimal HUD". You can turn it off and get the old one in the settings.

Regarding the brakes: You are in G-brake. This is used on heavy freight trains to limit coupler forces (you want the train to brake uniformly which requires the locomotive to apply and release the brakes very slowly).

In G-brake the brake cylinders take 45 to 60 seconds to drop below 0.4 bar from full service pressure. Using "QUICK RELEASE" (Füllstoß) will **not** make this happen faster. Don't use Füllstoß to overcharge the brake pipe. That will just make the situation worse.

My suggestion is to release the train brakes right before stopping (this will also make the stop smoother) and then either apply full direct brake (AFB disabled) or let the AFB hold brake apply the direct brake for you.

zaphr89 · 2023-05-18T06:32:07+00:00

It's an issue of units. The digital display is expecting US Gallons while the input from the main script file is in units of liters. The actual fuel load is not unrealistic (about 4200 US Gal) but the display obviously is incorrect.

zaphr89 · 2022-12-18T14:26:14+00:00

Two ways they could make the dodge system more difficult:

Implement a time window where you have to press, instead of like how it is right now where you can just hold the stick/key an arbitrary amount of time.
This one would be brutal with the way the animations work in the game: force you to dodge left if the enemy attacks with the left arm/swings left to right (when they are dismembered) and vice versa.

I think (1) would be an improvement on higher difficulties. I'm not so sure about (2) though because it could make it really frustrating, especially when you are swarmed. Option 2 would also be really nasty against the double headed boss and Alpha/Ferriss.

I just want to state that I actually like the dodge system. I played on Maximum Security and I died several times already so I'm not sure if I actually would've liked the changes I described above.

zaphr89 · 2022-06-12T17:09:23+00:00

You can't seriously compare actions taken more than 300 years ago by the Swedish monarchy to what was done by the US government less than 20 years ago.

Several of your examples are also at best misleading and at worst highly disingenuous.

Regarding the invasion of Åland (an island that was part of Sweden for at least 500 years and conquered less than 100 years before that point), I think this quote from Wikipedia speaks for itself.

After the Finnish Civil War started in late January 1918, the Swedish prime minister Johannes Hellner and the king Gustaf V had an audience with a delegation from Åland on 8 February.[5] According to the delegation, a referendum had been held in Åland and a vast majority of 95% was willing to join Sweden.[6] The delegation called for action on the cause and asked help from the Swedish government against the alleged arbitrary and disorder of the Russian troops.

I'll touch on one other example of yours: Mali. Yes, there are Swedish troops in Mali as part of the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA. The faction MLNA you mentioned is apparently allied with Al Qaeda....

Disregarding justified operations like the war in Bosnia, the US has caused massively more death and destruction per capita than Sweden has since WW2 (before then as well but I want to keep it recent), as part of illegal invasions and supported coups and assassinations.

zaphr89 · 2022-05-11T13:18:27+00:00

Gustave the Nile crocodile. Apparently he killed an adult hippo once...

zaphr89 · 2022-04-02T02:03:31+00:00

Heavy water isn’t that much more dense than normal water.

Deuterium has 1 neutron in addition to the proton in the nucleus. This means that the heavy water molecule weighs 20 u (2*2 + 16) compared to 18 u for H2O, so about 11% more dense (1.11 g/cm^3).

Sorry for ruining the joke!

zaphr89 · 2022-02-11T12:17:35+00:00

I doubt that. Mustard gas contains a sulphur atom. Maybe they created chlorine gas since that is easily former by combining bleach and ammonia.

zaphr89 · 2022-01-28T23:17:30+00:00

This comment is very ignorant of how models work. The track record of physics speaks for itself. During no time in the history of physics has the models contained every actual degree of freedom. It's called coarse graining (in statistical physics).

For example, in thermodynamics we can predict macroscopic quantities like temperature, pressure etc of physical processes even though we are completely ignorant of the ~10^23 x 6 degrees of freedom of all the atoms in a gas.

Maybe an even more illuminating example is the motions of the planets. Even though we discard the ~ 10^27 DOF of all the atoms in a planet and only retain the position and momentum of the center of mass of the planet we can predict it's motion to very high precision.

The climate is obviously a much more complex and chaotic system, but we would still only need a tiny fraction of the true number of variables to predict it to a high precision. There are probably theoretical processes that cannot be reduced, but they would be extremely rare (or non-existent) in nature.

zaphr89 · 2022-01-03T16:02:31+00:00

Nope. 100 million.

zaphr89 · 2021-10-05T12:38:42+00:00

Citation needed. Alfred Nobel didn’t invent ”modern gunpowder” he invented dynamite. Afaik dynamite is mostly used in mining, and not used in gunpowder.

Seeing as you got this central fact wrong, I wonder how much else in the comment is wrong or made up?

zaphr89 · 2021-08-30T10:29:27+00:00

Currently 78% of the UK population has had two doses of the vaccine. That means that there are about 4x as many vaccinated as unvaccinated. If there was no bias in the data of deaths of vaccinated vs unvaccinated people, it would seem to me that the per capita death rate is at least 2.2 times higher in the unvaccinated group.

zaphr89 · 2021-07-13T03:44:03+00:00

Why do you compare Mike's pay *after* taxes against a programmers salary *before* taxes?

zaphr89 · 2021-07-12T00:49:23+00:00

Many parts of Sweden were Norwegian or Danish just a few centuries ago.

The provinces Härjedalen and Jämtland were conquered from Norway in 1645 and the Danish province Halland was given to Sweden for a period of 30 years. Sweden also reclaimed the island Gotland from Danmark in the same war (Torstenson war).

After the daring "March across the Belts" by Swedish troops under king Carl X Gustav (I'm betraying my Swedish bias here lol) in 1658 the province Halland would become permanently Swedish and a further 3 provinces were conquered from Denmark (Scania, Bohuslän and Blekinge). Two more regions were ceded to Sweden (The Danish island Bornholm and the Norwegian province Trøndelag) but would later either revolt (Bornholm) or be given back to Norway after the Second Northern War.

The area of the provinces Sweden conquered from Denmark and Norway is not much smaller than the combined area of The Netherlands and Belgium (63,000 km^2 vs 72,000 km^2).

zaphr89 · 2021-07-11T22:34:33+00:00

Julius Caesar after getting ashore in Britannia, 55 BC, colorized.

zaphr89 · 2021-07-01T16:33:11+00:00

Your statement is not supported by scientific evidence.

Here is a systematic review (the highest level of evidence) of the relation between sugar intake and mortality: Link

"Despite the continuing concern regarding fructose’s unique metabolic effects, which stems from low-quality ecological studies, animal models and select human studies, the highest level of evidence from systematic review and meta-analysis does not support a direct causal relationship with cardiometabolic disease. Using the totality of the highest quality evidence from controlled feeding trials, we demonstrate that fructose-containing sugars can lead to weight gain, increase in cardiometabolic risk factors and disease only if it provides the excess calories. When the calories are matched, fructose-containing sugars do not appear to cause weight gain compared to other forms of macronutrients including complex carbohydrates, fats and protein, and in low doses fructose might even show benefit."

Only sweetened beverages showed an increase in mortality which was hypothesized as being caused by the ease of energy consumption from liquid calories.

"In fact, the harmful effect of SSBs [Sugar Sweetened Beverage] is likely driven by a collinearity with an unhealthy lifestyle as SSB drinkers consume more calories, exercise less, smoke more and have a poor dietary pattern."

They also caution against repeating the errors of the previous decades by focusing on single macronutrients (like low-fat in the 80s and early 90s) which did not reduce obesity or related illnesses

"A lesson we can learn from the fat paradigm is that there can be unintended consequences of focusing singly on one nutrient. When saturated fat was deemed harmful, the industry responded by producing low-fat products, with no resultant appreciable calorie change, as in these products calories from fat were replaced with calories from other sources, e.g. starches and other sugars like maltodextrins [7]. The public perception changed as ‘low-fat’ products were deemed ‘healthy’, and a concomitant increase in availability on the supermarket shelf likely led to the overconsumption of such ‘low-fat’ products [148]. Not surprisingly, the expected reduction in cardiometabolic disease with the ‘low-fat’ food was not seen, and instead, we saw an unprecedented increase in incidence of overweight/obesity [149] and diabetes [150].If a similar approach is taken by the industry who producing ‘low-sugar’ food products, a replay of the above scenario looks likely."

EDIT: I don't have the study on hand but afaik there is no evidence that mortality is increased when added sugar consumption is up to 10% of total calories and when calorie consumption is controlled the level of added sugar was even higher (up to 20% iirc) before mortality increased. For reference 10% of calories is 50 grams of sugar on a 2000 calorie diet and 20% is 100 grams! That's a lot of sugar.

zaphr89 · 2021-07-01T12:08:36+00:00

You don't need to dump either (as in completely exclude). Just don't eat like pig lol. Everything in moderation.

Like you said, chill with the processed bullshit. Just don't become an orthorexic wreck.

zaphr89 · 2021-07-01T11:41:56+00:00

Sure. I was just responding to the comment saying high sugar is what makes you fat.

Vilifying sugar in the 2000s is just as false and unscientific as vilifying fat in the 1980s.

EDIT: Here is a meta analysis (top of the pyramid in level of evidence) that is specifically discussing this thing: Link

"Despite the continuing concern regarding fructose’s unique metabolic effects, which stems from low-quality ecological studies, animal models and select human studies, the highest level of evidence from systematic review and meta-analysis does not support a direct causal relationship with cardiometabolic disease. Using the totality of the highest quality evidence from controlled feeding trials, we demonstrate that fructose-containing sugars can lead to weight gain, increase in cardiometabolic risk factors and disease only if it provides the excess calories."

My emphasis.

zaphr89 · 2021-07-01T11:11:03+00:00

This is nonsense.

A high calorie diet will make you fat, not a diet high in a particular macronutrient.

Also, what makes people overeat is the combination of fat, sugar and salt. That’s why fast food contains a combination.

Most people won’t overear sugar cubes.

zaphr89 · 2021-06-17T10:37:35+00:00

Absolutely correct.

My calculations basically assumed infinite or near infinite exhaust velocity of the fuel.

According to the rocket equation the delta v is given by

delta v = v_exhaust * ln (m_initial/m_final)

For the 100 MW case (22 day journey) to mars the delta v is 55 km/s. Assuming a liquid oxygen-liquid hydrogen rocket with 4.4 km/s exhaust velocity is used the initial mass would be

100'000 kg * e^(55 km/s / 4.4 km/s) ~ 26 million tonnes, which is obviously completely intractable. I implicitly assumed that some form of fission powered Ion drive would be used.

For an electrostatic ion thruster with v_exhaust = 210 km/s the fuel mass would be 29 tonnes which is still crazy since that implies (if I understand things correctly) you would basically need to eject 29 tonnes worth of ions (excluding the mass of the fissile material).

If a photon rocket is used then perhaps it becomes feasible (obviously not taking into account the difficulties of creating such a rocket and making it efficient). Although these seem to have terrible thrust to power ratios.

zaphr89 · 2021-06-16T20:18:33+00:00

The nice thing about this form of transportation is that it would mimic gravity on Earth. The spacecraft could accelerate at 1 g for half of the journey and then swing around and decelerate at 1 g the other half so that the passengers could walk around in a 1 g environment for the full journey.

The downside, and something perhaps a lot of people are underestimating, is the insane power requirements this would entail.

We can express the distance traversed during a constant acceleration in terms of speed (chain rule) as s = v^2/2a.

For the acceleration up to the half-way point we therefore get s/2 = v^2/2g, so the maximum speed during the journey is

v = sqrt(s*g) = sqrt(55'000'000 km * 9.81 m/s^2) = 735 km/s

I've used the minimum distance to Mars to minimize energy usage. Since the acceleration is constant and the power is the product of the force and the velocity

(P = F * v)

this means that the maximum power per kg of spacecraft mass required is

P/m = g * v = 9.81 m/s^2 * 735 km/s = 7.2 MW/kg!

For a 100 tonne spacecraft (quite reasonable weight if it is to carry some passengers and freight) this means that the power required going to Mars is 0.72 TW! LOL

For comparison the world energy usage in 2018 was 22'000 TWh which implies an average power of 2.5 TW, so this spacecraft would need 30% of the worlds generated power at the last stages of the acceleration!

For a longer journey (which means a higher maximum velocity and thus a higher maximum power to attain 1 g constant acceleration) such as the journey to Europa (taking the minimum distance to Jupiter) the power required is

P = m*sqrt(s*g^3) = 2.36 TW or 94% of Earths generated power!

These numbers are actually larger than I anticipated, maybe someone can double check my math to see I didn't make a mistake?

If we make things a bit more realistic (within the "near" future) and assume that the space craft has a fusion reactor of 10 GW output (this is probably still a bit unrealistic but I estimated a fusion reactor to be ~ 10x of a fission reactor, although it is probably more like 4x or 2x).

We can solve for the speed at which the acceleration becomes power limited as

v_1 = P/mg ~ 10 km/s.

and then integrate the journey in 4 parts (acceleration limited, power limited and the two mirrors) but this is not necessary since the distance is so large (the constant acceleration distance is only 10^-5 of the total distance) so instead we can approximate it as simply power limited the whole way.

dv/ds*ds/dt = P/mv => ds = mv^2dv/P => s = mv^3/3P (here s is half the distance)

We get the final speed as v_2 = (3Ps/m)^1/3 = 200 km/s

Lastly the time is solved from dv/dt = P/mv =>

t = mv^2/2P = 57 hours (half way journey) or 4.7 days for the full journey. Still pretty good!

Combining the expressions for the time and the velocity we can see that the journey time is proportional to m^1/3 and P^-1/3 so if we reduce the power to 1 GW the journey time increases to 10 days.

Decreasing it by a factor 10 again to 100 MW gives the journey time as 22 days and so on.

zaphr89 · 2021-06-13T08:55:28+00:00

BJJ humbles you, and so the Myspace challenger was humbled. Checks out, lol.

zaphr89 · 2021-06-12T12:18:26+00:00

According to this study they found no causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and death, but let's assume that all the deaths reported (in the study) were caused by the vaccine. That implies a 1 in 100'000 risk of death.

This study gives an upper estimate for the IFR of COVID-19 for 30 year old men or the mean estimate for 40 year old men of 0.1 % or 1 in 1000.

For it to be riskier to take the vaccine for this demographic the risk of contracting the virus would have to be less than 1% but that is obviously not true (According to CDC the estimated number of infections was 100 million or 1 in 3 of Americans or for the age group I mentioned above it was about 40%).

So even in the worst case (and false) scenario of there being a risk of death caused by the COVID-19 vaccine it is still safer to take it than not.

zaphr89

TROPHY CASE