Vehicle speed & how it affects dispatch

Speed is a real setting, not decoration

Each vehicle carries a speed — the working pace Snowmass uses to estimate how long it takes that machine to travel between properties. The swarm combines this with real road distances (from the OpenRouteService matrix, never straight-line guesses) to work out travel time, and travel time is half of every dispatch score.

How it changes decisions

When the swarm decides a machine's next property, it weighs how far the work is for that machine. A faster unit's reach is wider, so it's willing to take a slightly farther high-value property; a slower sidewalk machine is kept on nearby work. Set speeds wrong and the whole fleet's sense of distance skews:

• Speed set too high — the swarm thinks a machine can cover more ground than it can, hands it far-flung properties, and ETAs come back optimistic.
• Speed set too low — the machine is kept unnaturally close to the depot and the fleet under-uses it.

Set it honestly

1. Open the vehicle and set speed to its realistic working pace — the average speed it actually makes between properties in a storm, not its road top speed.
2. A big lot tractor and a nimble pickup rig should not carry the same number.
3. Re-check after a storm: if a machine's ETAs were consistently early or late, nudge its speed and the swarm's distance sense corrects with it.

Getting speeds roughly right matters more than getting them perfect — but a fleet where every machine is left on one default speed is a fleet whose ETAs you can't fully trust.