Any plans on an update?

Hopefully this gets updates again

Hey Fenix; Yes, both the RDC-1 and RDC-4 are designed to function merely as self-propelled (or multiple-unit) railcars and not designed to pull additional unpowered equipment. While there's technically nothing stopping you from coupling up additional cars--and it was occasionally attempted in reality--it was definitely not intended and would probably void Budd's manufacturer warranty

https://ibb.org.ru/1/fHYvy6

Hi! I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but the RDC-1 locomotive has a traction capacity of only 68 tons, this is very little and it can't even pull 1 stainless coach.

(1/2) Thanks for giving additional clarity to this. I do understand the desire to maintain realism, though I do not think that it should come at the cost of balance. I am not opposed to Iron Ore Hoppers carrying less than their Coal Ore companions, but I do not believe that the units of things like Iron and Coal are indicitave of their actual weight. However, I do understand if that is the interpretation you have on the game's units. It is good that you have plans for more balanced rail cars late-game, but it shouldn't come at the expense of using base game equipment early-game.

(2/2) I want to be able to use American-style equipment throughout the entire game, starting with the US-Style locomotives the game starts you with (speaking honestly about the first era I feel like you could add an Atlantic and Consolidation class to this era, as they were the most prevalent wheel arrangements that preceded the iconic Pacific and Mikados) and being able to end the game with C40-9s and ALC-42s carrying absurd quantities of goods. What you've done so far is wonderful, and I can't wait for the steam locomotives in the In Progress set to be added properly. I just think that if the base game offers a similar type of rail car, it should be balanced around you making that decision based on more nuance than the base game's car carrying double to triple the US Set.

(1/4)
Hey Thrillville, thanks for taking the time to scrutinize this. There are two reasons for what you've found: The first is that the 50 and 70-ton ore hoppers are so poor when evaluated against the vanilla cars because they were always intended to be a "last resort" choice within the mod; my ultimate goal was to also include dedicated ore jennies, which would be optimized for ore handling and offer similar capacities at much shorter lengths (since the conventional hoppers weigh out long before they cube out due to ore being much more dense than coal). I just recently finished development of a 70 and 100-ton ore jenny that once released should hopefully help to better balance the overall selection against the vanilla cars.

(2/4)
Another, deeper consideration is that unfortunately the vanilla game depicts ore as equal in density to coal (2t per unit capacity), despite ore in reality being significantly more dense. This poses a problem, because the game also appears to base "capacity" on cargo volume rather than weight. The result is that a realistically modeled ore car--let's say a 70-ton ore jenny--would simultaneously need to have a far lower in-game capacity than an equivalent 70-ton coal hopper (because it's physically much smaller), but also weigh far less because the vanilla game considers the two commodities equal in unit weight. Since they're both nominally 70-ton cars, however, they should actually weight more or less the same. All three can't be true, so something has to give.

(3/4)
The base game backs me into a corner on this one; either the weights or capacities of the mod cars make no sense relative to one another (why would a 70-ton ore car weight half of what a 70-ton coal hopper does?) or I sacrifice balance versus vanilla by assigning more realistic unit weights to coal and ore in order to keep logical relationships among the cars in the mod.

(4/4)
Hopefully that at least helps explain why the numbers currently are what they are, despite the balance implications. The upcoming ore jennies should also make the overall imbalance less dramatic; the late-game 100-ton car should have a similar length efficiency to the vanilla Faccs, but with the benefit of faster unloading.

I don't believe that the 50-ton and 70-ton ore hoppers are balanced very well against the Linz and Faccs. Both are smaller, carry more, and are overall cheaper. I feel like making the 50-ton at least on par with the Fischer and the 70-ton a little more than the Faccs could go a long way in fixing this.

Great Work !

Excellent!

Thanks for the heads up! Looks like the closing tags somehow got lost in the process of repackaging the original file into multiple separate mods. Just pushed an update that should fix the issue.