A graphing calculator with the ability to find values at y-intercepts cuts down on the
time quite a bit. It only really took me 2-3 hours of plug-and-chug after I had the
equations worked out.

Not a complicated math but great pile of work.

"Are the requirements for speedcap/ship published or commonly guessed? "

Pretty much commonly guessed. If you follow Adalbert's guide, it tells you how much
"natural overheat" each ship has when you combine its overheat ratio with that of its
engine. Since every BB out there pretty much has only one good engine combination (the
biggest Heavy engine that will fit that has the most SHP), the effective ratios (which I
do list in my BB guide) are pretty well known. I just subtracted those from the 70% cap
and used Adalbert's formula to calculate how much true ability is needed to reach that
ratio, and divided that through 2-4 engys of various performance levels.

-e-

Let's take a simple example. The Penn43 has an overheat ratio of 50%, and its best engine
has a ratio of 120%. Multiplying the two together gives you 60%, so you only need 10% to
reach the 70% cap. Then, using Adalbert's formula, I calculated that 1.8 million true
Engine ability is needed for that. To reach that, you need:

1 Engy with 1.8 million ability
2 Engys with 1272793 ability each
3 Engys with 1039231 ability each
4 Engys with 900000 ability each

Then, I just plotted out the ability curves for the different classes and found the level
at which they hit that ability. It's mostly scratch work, not a whole lot of complicated math.

Lot of leveling to do for me to hit cap on my sodak

Great info

Thanks LK

You calculated total stacked ability of specific numbers of engineers. Are the
requirements for speedcap/ship published or commonly guessed?

By the way, just curious, is anybody interested in seeing the math that I put behind doing
the calculations? It's not exactly straightforward, but for those who are skeptical, it
shows the logic and reasoning that I used for computing the levels.

Also, since this may not be obvious to everybody right off the bat, just because you can't
hit the speed cap on a ship doesn't mean that you're doomed to be slow forever. A SoDak
that doesn't hit the speed cap is still capable of going faster than a speed-capped BB4,
it all really depends on the base speeds that the ships are capable of.

So with my lazy early-retail US BB crew, I can hit Sodak cap but nothing more. >.<

My Montana tops at 37 knots at the moment, with 2 +11 engies lvl 113.

Skyvengeance: Unless you like to spend crazy money H44 hits speed cap with 5 (5!!!@@)
engineers lvl 110+, standard BVE. ^^ H39 hits it earlier (similar to Bismarck, OII). The rest
are much easier to hit.

Oh, only 10 more levels until I hit Iowa/Monty speedcap. \o/




:<

hmm where do my +12 eng boosted go? 80 vets..
3 of em :P

Nice, easy, simple.

At least I know I'm not going to hit speedcap on any better BB with 11 base, boosted and
120+ vet engineers since I don't intend to go much over 98.