56 years old. Still driving a sport bike (2001 Suzuki Hayabusa).
I've had to make some adjustments when playing computer games though, such as wearing headphones to block out the noise of my creaking joints when making controller inputs.
What is the source of the feedback for this 5% slip at the rear tires in the case of LFS?
It was a generic statement. Tire heat / wear is an issue in all but the shortest of races, even without pit stops.
Depth perception? It's a flat 2 dimensional image, there is no depth perception. Depending on surface details, and depth scaling, every racing game gives off a difference sense of distance between the virtual driver's view and some point ahead on the track, and this also affects speed perception.
Turn off the sound and view a replay, and it's difficult to tell when the tires are at the limits during the replay.
Does any game give you the same perception of speed that you get in the real life Reynard? Even an on board video of from a real race car won't give you much sense of speed at a track with little surface detail (like asphalt), and few or no track side objects without the sound.
In my opinion, what missing with any simulation is the lack of feedback of what is happening at the rear end of a rear wheel drive car. There's no real sense of when the rear tires are at the limits of traction due to a combination of cornering and throttle pressure. For most racing games, optimizing steering and throttle inputs for what is happening at the rear end of a car seems to be more of an issue of memorizing control inputs as opposed to getting a true sense of what is really going on.
In real life, first a driver has to get a sense of how much throttle can be applied while exiting corners depending on the line and apex speed that driver takes on each corner. This also involve memorization, but there's also a great deal of feedback that can be used to make adjustements. Then there's the issue of dealing with tire wear over the course of a run (between pit stops) and making adjustments to make optimal usage of the changes in a car's behavior over time.
The other issue is the visual difference between looking at a flat screen with a limited picture as opposed to real world view from the cockpit of a car, even if the real world view is somewhat restricted as well. You get a better sense of speed due to the real world detail of the track and track side objects.
It's a fine day - Miss Jane, similar to Underwater, there are a lot of different mixes. This isn't my favorite mix or video, but it's the only one I found with any version of this song.
Regarding you-tube improvment in quality, it seems the main difference is a big increase in the streaming rate (number of bits of data output per second).
1280x720 hi-def of John Force funny car crash (he had a broken ankle, wrist, and fingers but is back racing for this season again).
If you monitor is 1280x960 or 1280x1024, you'll need to view it full screen. At 1600x1200, it will play normally.
I've done some 1920x1080i stuff, but few people have monitors that can handle that resolution (descent CRT monitors go up to 2048x1536, and only cost about $400(USA), but few people buy these).
If anyone is curious, HDV (tape) camcorders record at 1440x1080i, then stretch the 1440 by 1.3333 to end up with a 1920x1080i image. AVCHD camcorders record a true 1920x1080i image, but compress into the same data stream rate as HDV, and generally HDV looks better if there's significant movment in the video. I'm not sure why AVCHD didn't use a higher stream rate, unless the few camcorder that record to memory cards instead of hard drives drove this limitation. Cable TV uses a 38mb/s stream rate for it's HDTV, and uses either 1280x720p or 1920x1080i internally.
Not my video, just one of my favorites, and a bit better than the typical you tube quality. I've been looking for a higher res version posted soon after the video was released, but haven't been able to find it and was hoping that someone would mention in response to my posting of the smaller video I've been linking to. The last time I posted about the heli here was in a assists thread here and I thought it deserved it's own thread, since it's really off topic and not related to LFS assists. The reason I recalled this video is because of a recent thread at http://www.physicsforums.com. I'm mostly active in the general physics, classical physics, and programming sections there.
Personally I don't own a RC helicopter, but may get one someday, especially since it's about $200(USA) for a ready to fly electic semi-areobatic (they can fly inverted) rc helicopter. I fly radio control gliders. I do have 2 electic motorized models, but I quit flying those.
One of my favorite radio control aerobatic helicopter videos. The action starts 25 seconds into the video. If you've never seen an aerobatic RC heli in action, it is pretty impressive.
Either play some other games, or stop playing PC games altogether. The thrill is gone and you're basically burnt out. So are a lot of other racing game players that date back to GPL (1999), or even arcade players like NFS. I'm seeing pretty much a lack of interest in gaming in general. I wonder if wow attendance is also starting to taper off by now.
I'm recovering from a bad cold right now, and it's been a while since I played any games. The last 3 I played were non-racers, Crysis, Half Life - Episode 2 (since it leaves you hanging, I recommend waiting for Episode 3 which will complete the series and be mostly likely bundled with Half-Life and Episodes 1-2), and Tomb Raider Anniversary.
The last two racing games I played were Race 07, and NFS - ProStreet (which gets boring fast because the closed online play - no way to see who playing so the better players can match up, no way to change cars while with a group of players, and restricted to track / events at a single location).
I also played LFS offline and online a bit right after patch Y came out. As usual, other than ovals where luck and bumping play a factor, my only wins on tracks like Blackwood with the FOX occurred when the clearly faster players spun out and/or crashed. I played a couple of nights and lost interest, mostly because I'm currently simply not movitated enough to spend the time to improve my skills with any game.
I don't think this has anything to do with content of LFS. S3 could be released today, there'd would be some initial interest, but the burnout factor from playing racing games for years now is an issue for many.
Not nuclear powered cars, but nuclear power could be the energy source used to produce the energy source for cars, be it hydrogen, or a truly emmision free source like compressed air.
Also are there radioactive waste products from fusion? Is there a way to recycle more of the waste in fission reactors to reduce or eliminate the hazardous wasted?
Currently the cheapest way to get hydrogen is from petroleum, not exactly environmentally friendly.
The USA is using corn to produce alcohol, but it takes more energy from other sources to produce the alcohol than the energy contained in the alcohol. Sugar cane works much better, but the USA abandoned sugar can production years ago when it became cheaper to import, and there's limited areas in the USA where sugar cane was growable.
Regarding other forms of energy, such as solar to electric, how long is the time before the return on investment, energy wise, pays off (if ever), after taking into accout maintainance and distribution costs?
My own theory, is that once a country's population has the basic needs met, food, shelter, clothing, transportation, ... then it's all "play" money after that.
The issue is that in economies, like the USA, most of the working population have jobs that don't fulfill any basic needs of society, and their jobs depend on the whims of what people want and are willing to pay for as opposed to what they need. This leaves the economy very suceptible to the whims of society. For example, if the people in the USA suddenly come to the conclusion that spending $4 for a cup of coffee is stupid, Starbucks and it's employees goes out of business, and those employees cut back on their purchases of other consumer goods, like televisions.
Economists refer to this as the multiplier effect, for every person that loses a job, x more people will eventually lose a job as a result, where x is the "multiplier". Generally speaking the effect is worse in bad times than in good times. Once people get out of the mode of consumer spending, they are likely to get more conservative and never end up spending as much as they did before.
Complicating matters in the USA is the current situation with medical care. It's not just a case of better equipment and drugs that cost more. Doctor salaries have increase by significant multiples of inflation, which is partially due to increased liability insurance cost due to malpractice suits, but still the end result is doctors make more than they did before, and they spend less time with patients than before. Hospital profits have also increased greatly over the last few decades.
Another issue is baby boomers (like me) are approaching retirement age, and social security and medicare costs will be a burden on the working generation, because of the sheer number of baby boomers and increased life expectancy.
Getting back to the "play" money theme. What would happen if the goverment just started printing money and created goverment jobs (for example research related) and paying for these jobs with the money it printed? If this was a relatively small part of the economy, would there really be any significant inflation? Currently the USA government sells very long term bonds in order to generate money to pump into the economy, and sometimes repays the debt on those bonds by selling even more bonds with an ever increasing interest rate. Which is worse, the effect of inflation due to printing money, or the ever increasing interest rates that have to be paid on these long term bonds to get investors to buy them (money the investors might have spent on consumer goods instead)?
I can't read German, and there are multiple aircraft being discussed, not just the one in the video. The wings of the aircraft in the video remain straight at the tips after the aborted landing, and neither tip is bent up as shown in the photo from that web site.
Looking at the video, the pilot makes a last few seconds correction to the right to keep the aircraft following the runway, with some right roll, then corrects with left roll, but the plane over corrects (a combination of momentum and the crosswind) to the left, and nearly plants the left wing into the runway, but the left wing appears undamaged after the plane takes off in the aborted landing. The right wing clearly doesn't hit the runway, but the left wing may have scraped the runway. The wings have some flex in them so the tips can handle some amount of force without anything breaking from such contact. The wings on that aircraft have both dihedral (they are angled upwards) and swept back, and the result is that rudder (yaw) inputs will cause the aircraft to respond on the roll axis, yaw to roll coupling. Normally, yaw to roll coupling improves stability during flight, but it makes severe crosswind landings more difficult, combined with the fact that it's something a pilot rarely experiences after initial training.
Proper Wiki links below. Note that these extreme crosswind landings are mostly "crab landings", with the wings level and the aircraft in normal flight, the only angle is that of the aircraft to the runway, and not between the aircraft's heading and air flow. If a slip is used, it's only used just before touchdown, and the slip angle can't be much or else a wingtip could touch the ground before the landing gear.
A slip while turning is similar to understeer, an uncoordinated turn with insufficient rudder. However a slip is usually done while flying in a straight line and is used to decrease lift and increase drag, to allow for a steeper descent without a huge gain in airspeed. This is useful, such as when having to clear an obstacle that is in front of the runway (not an issue at commercial airports), or because if an aircraft loses power, there's only one chance for a landing, and the goal is to have excessive energy and use the slip to scrub off the excess energy. The wiki article mentions that lift is reduced because the wings are no longer perpendicular to the aircrafts heading relative to the air, in other words, the aircraft is yawed with respect to the air flow. In addition, when the aircraft is yawed, the aircrafts body, being sideways to the airflow creates a lot of drag, so you have the combination of decreased lift and increased drag. The wiki article leaves out the part about increased drag.
Although deflecting the rudder and cross controlling with ailerons to keep the wings level, results in "sideways" flight, which will decrease lift and increase drag, holding the wings at an angle will result in an even more "sideways" form of flight that decreases lift and increases drag even more.
A slip turn is any rudder only turn. Normally used for aerobatics, such as knife edge flight (an aicraft flying with the wings vertical, using the aircraft's body as a wing, and the rudder as an elevator. Most non-aerobatic aircraft have a roll response when yawed and require some counter aileron input to keep the wings from rolling when the rudder is yawed. Some aircraft, such as the flying wing, B-52, and some model aircraft, don't have true ailerons (or in the case of models, no ailerons at all), relying on the plane to respond to yaw inputs (spoilers and/or rudder) to indirectly cause an aircraft to roll (for models these are called rudder - elevator models, since they don't have ailerons).
update - I added another post with proper wiki links and better explantion.
These crosswind landings are done with normal control inputs. Aircraft fly relative to the air, not to the ground. The pilots adjust the amount of yaw through normal controls to compensate for the crosswind, but once sufficient yaw is established, the ailerons and rudder are centered, until touchdown, when the rudder is used to yaw the aircraft into the direction of the runway.
As noted, the main landing gear on some aircraft, like a B52, can be steered, so the B52 can remain yawed after touchdown. A B52 is difficult to fly because it uses spolierons instead of true ailerons. The spoilerons invoke a yaw, and air speed differential on the wings, combined with swept back wings (dihedral works also) cause the plane to roll indirectly in response to the yaw inputs.
The purpose of cross control or "slip" landing approaches is to decrease lift and to increase drag, which reduces altititude without gaining much air speed, on aircraft that don't have enough drag inducing components, such as large flaps, spoilers, or air brakes. The main purpose is when the angle to a runway is forced to be steep, such as clearing some obstacle that is near the runway, or in the case of lost power, where there's only one chance to land, and for safetry reasons, the landing approach is done with a steeper approach to guarantee excess energy which can be scrubbed off via a slip.
Another usage of cross control is done on gliders during a thermal turn. Air speed is slow, so the inside wing has a tendency to drop down, so some counter (outward) aileron input is required to keep the wings at a constant level, at the same time, some inwards rudder is required to maintain a coordinated turn, because the yaw rate versus airspeed causes the tail of a glider to have a significant cross wind component.
One one of the many occasions when my wife wanted to complain to me about some chore she wanted me to do, she did so while I was watching a TV commercial. I wasn't paying attention to her and she asked "are you going to listen to me or watch some stupid commercial?", then she looked at the TV and saw it was a Victoria's Secret commerical. I didn't have to say anything. She ended up lauging.
Two gay men (Jimmy Kimmel and Ben Affleck?) see a dog licking itself. One of them states "I wish I could do that", but the other cautions, "I think you should pet the dog first".
Back when Bill Clinton was President, Dennis Rodman visited the white house and Bill asked Dennis what his secret was that acctracted so many women. Dennis said he just whip it out and bang the bedpost to impress the women. That night Bill tried the same thing and Hillary exclaimed, "oooh, is that you Dennis?".
On GunSmoke (an old Western TV show), Festus walks in to town naked. The sheriff asks Festus what are you doing?
Festus replied, that "Kitty told me to do it." He continued:
"I saw Kitty lying down in field and though she was hurt, but she was just drunk from trying out a new drink for her bar. She must have had trouble breathing because she ask me to undress her, which I did. Next she told me to get undressed and go to town, and here I am".
I live in the USA, about 50 miles SE of Los Angeles, and here street racing almost always means drag racing. I don't know how popular street racing is these days in my area. The last I heard of street racing other than news shows was near where my wife used to work, back in the 1980's in a manufacturing district that was virtually deserted at night. The only street racing I ever witnessed occured in the late 1960's. It was a large group, and occasionally at around 2:00 am, they would setup road blocks (the kind with the yellow flashers) at both ends of a somewhat long straight stretch (about 1 mile) of road with no side roads near the LA airport, completely blocking it off from any traffic (either the cops ignored this or it was just dumb luck the guys never got busted). Sometimes they setup a timing tree. The 1/4 mile point was also marked off, and there was 3/4 miles to slow down before hitting the road blocks (the road continued straight for several more miles though). It generally lasted about an hour and occasionally some real drag racers would bring out alcohol dragsters to these events. I doubt underground street racing was ever that organized again.
I've seen a lot of videos of 2 or more drivers doing rolling speed pulls on open sections of freeway, and yet I can't recall any new reports relating accidents to these. It seems the plannned runs rarely result in accidents.
Almost all of the accidents I do see reported are due to impromptu drag or speed runs on streets where the combination of adrenaline and testosterone kick in. For example, a Porsche driver decided to drag race against a motorcyle, and continued increasing speed in an futile effort to catch up, lost control on a turn, and ran into one of the trees that are used in the divider on this road. I personally saw the aftermath from a distance. These are small oak trees, but apparently very strong. The car was split into multiple pieces, I could see pieces of the red 911 scattered (body was already removed by this time), and the windsheild stuck up high in a tree. The motorcyclist was long gone and never caught, but I'm sure he has trouble sleeping over this.
This pales when compared to the 10 or so fatilites that have occurred over the last 24 years at an intersection close to my home. The main issue is that the approach from the south and west are uphill at a slight grade, so somewhat limited visibility, combined with the fact that it's near a senior community, and configuration changes that occurred over the years. Originally the north and south bound left turns lanes were awkwardly placed, making it easy to assume an approaching car was in a left turn lane when it wasn't. This was fixed early on, but accidents continued to happen (probably the visibility issue). Even after the intersection was "fixed", had controlled left turn signals, there were still a couple of accidents, but involving seniors. One was a case where a senior turned left onto the 55mph northbound road, but in the southbound lanes, and the road immediately turns to the west where he had a head on collision with another car.
Personally, I will speed up a bit when oppurtunity presents itself, such as a large section of open freeway (no traffic) appears, or a "rabbit" passes by in open section, meaning that if I let the "rabbit" continue to gain on me, there's little chance of trouble or a ticket (my last ticket was for 65mph towards the end of the Carter mandated 55mph speed limit on previously 70mph roads, back in 1984). Otherwise, I just go with the flow. Morning commuters seem to be the fastest local drivers, speed limit is 65mph here, but most are going around 70mph to 80mph (slow lane to fast lane) on a local freeway in the morning. In the evenings, there's too much traffic (shoppers added in to the mix), so it's pretty slow going.
The highest speeds occur on roads where it's known that the highway patrol most tolerates the speeds. There are isolated sections of interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco where it's not uncommon to see traffic doing 85 to 90mph. On the other hand, the speeds from Los Angeles south to San Diego, or north east to Las Vegas are slower (more tickets issued).
My last comment for this post is about Nordschleife. Why do they let motorcycles run there? This is basically a pay to play on a complicated race track, 13 mile, 70+ turns, and there are a lot of accidents, and many of the motorcycle accidents are fatal, due to having armco instead of run off areas, even for very experienced riders like Joerund Seim.