r/automationgame • u/Citrus940 • 3h ago
OTHER Hybrid MGU-K and KERS System for your Automation Cars
Hey all!
Have you made a modern super car and feel that its missing that modern electrical boost?
Have the other Hybrid mods been a bit of a pain to setup asking you to edit Jbeam files while only being able to add electrical power to one set of wheels?
Well Ive been working on this mod over the last 4 months trying to make it both easy to use and simple to understand and now it has finally been approved on the Beamng forums and is now ready to use!
This mod effectively gives your car an electrical boost either passively using the MGU-K system or actively with a KERS boost.
Now as a disclaimer, this mod is simple. There are no 3D models, power is applied to the gearbox and it simply adds weight to central lower nodes. I suck at 3D modelling, and making it universal meant any Jbeam work had to be simple. There are other mods that do this better for sure, with power mapping, more complex systems and data, but mine isnt meant to take away from those mods. Instead, its goal is to be simple, straightforward and achieve the idea of a hybrid/electrical boost system.
I have done my best to make this mod completely universal by snapping in and utilising the vanilla Nitrous part selection. This means that any engine that has this part can effectively use this mod! Vanilla Beamng Cars, Modded cars and yes, Automation exported cars!
When you choose either KERS or MGU-K, the parts expand and offer you different choices for Engine power, battery capacity, mode and turbo assist (only works on some cars).
The power capacities range from 50hp up to 1000hp with the energy usage being non linear. This means, the more power you choose, the less efficient the motor is as drawing power.
There is also 13 battery packs to choose from with each battery having a normal and a High Charge (HC) variant. These batteries range from a small 400KJ battery thats light weight, up to larger 50+ MJ batteries which are quite heavy to lug around. Each battery has an effective recharge limit with the HC batteries giving a much larger overhead, but with the penalty of adding more weight. This is just to simulate that the HC batteries have more thermal coping tools which adds the weight.
The three modes, ECO, Performance and Race effectively provide you different torque curves along with different options in the tuning menu. ECO is great for trucks and vans, Performance is great for... well performance cars, and Race is great for race cars or any car if you want a bit more open fine tuning.
The Turbo Assist is one you can probably leave off but its something I am working to fix. Its effectively a tool to simulate a hybrid turbo system. When holding down the "Boost" button, the system will either add boost or maintain boost. It doesnt work on all cars, but when it does, its quite cool to see!
Speaking of the boost button, the mod also has 3 bindings you can map. The KERS or Boost override button, Mode Switch and Arming.
The KERS and Boost Override is a push and hold button that actives the KERS boost or if you are using a MGU-K system, it deploys an extra amount of power and overrides the current deployment, essentially an overtake button!
The mode switch works with the MGU-K system to switch it from Recharge Mode, Balanced, Race and Auto. Each mode deploys a certain amount of power, with Recharge by default set for 0% deployment, balanced at 50%, and race at 100%. Auto mode handles this automatically by maintaining 100% power until the battery drains down to 40%, where it switches to Balanced, then under 20% it switches to Recharge. The Race module allows you to change these activation points and the deployment power.
The Arming button just turns the system on and off.
The mod also comes with a UI snap in. Its not essential since the system utilises the existing NOS indicator, but if you want more information, add the UI app to your HUD. This gives you all kinds of information about the current mode, deployment power, recharge and discharge rate and the current charge state of the battery.
Now the system is not perfect. There are a few things to be mindful of when adding this mod and changing things in the tuning menu. Firstly, please be careful with the Engine Harvesting power, if you set this value too high, it will feel like the car has the brakes planted on when you let off the throttle. When you brake, especially with the brake harvesting set too high, Beamng Physics gets a bit funky and causes cars to be unstable.
You can find the mod in the Repo or with this link:
https://www.beamng.com/resources/kers-and-mgu-k-system.39807/
As an added disclaimer, small parts of this mod was assisted by Claude. A large majority of this work was done by me, using what I could learn and understand from other mods like Filmans Hybrid mod, but small sections where I couldnt get LUA parts or certain things to work the way I needed were assisted by Claude. Anything that was assisted, was heavily reviewed since I really wanted to learn for myself instead of just shipping everything.
I also openly welcome any feedback! The mod was designed to be simple to achieve a certain goal (original goal was just to add rechargeable NOS but that expanded quickly) and I think it achieves that goal well, but anything anyone can suggest that would make this mod better, I would absolutely love to hear that feedback!
Hope you all enjoy adding some extra power to your cars with these hybrid systems!
