Hot Water posted:Why does it have to "coast" anyway?
As SJC says, if you remove track power (by pressing the DIRECTION button) the engine locks up coming to a violent halt and potentially de-railing cars. It has been pointed out that the same engine, same motor, same flywheel, but different electronics/software (PS2 vs. PS3) behaves differently. Hence it's not that MTH is replacing or trying to replace the flywheel with software. Instead it seems the PS3 electronics/software is behaving in a manner which demotes the coasting potential of the flywheel. As discussed the consensus is dynamic braking (something which the software can apparently control) is stealing this coasting energy from the spinning flywheel for whatever reason. In the case of a hybrid-electric vehicle, dynamic braking is used to charge the battery. I wouldn't expect to see any published analysis of if/how/why MTH changed the flywheel dynamics going from PS2 to PS3. For that reason I don't think there would be substantial gain to simply increasing the size of the flywheel.
