Yes most street cars have a clutch interlock.
Race cars, not so much. I've seen in real life more than one car make it back to the pits with the starter.
Race cars, not so much. I've seen in real life more than one car make it back to the pits with the starter.
That ITR weighs what, 800lbs less than an rx8?
Uh huh.
So what don't you get? RSX/Celica certainly are nowhere near the weight of a Miata, and also have inferior suspension designs.
Also, last I checked, the RWD cars are faster if you can drive them. The fastest hotlops may be faster for the XFG, but those are all on exploited setups.
Last edited by skiingman, .
I feel really bad for your synchros. Learn how to shift.
As for it being "effective" in racing, its only useful in some situations.
-Your brakes aren't up to snuff and are fading/unable to max out the tires.
-You are attempting to make a change to the brake bias without actually having a bias adjustment. As in, you are trying to add braking to the front or rear.
LFS does indeed simulate the additional engine braking effect of downshifting.
Most driver schools scold students for downshifting too aggressively and early while braking. Its a bad thing for smoothness and threshold braking.
It happens.
You probably don't know too many people who have been bumping others while braking hard in 2nd or 4th...
I only know about it because I've read about it in a couple places. The shifter and shiftknob have mass, and the detent provides only so much resistance. If the detent was to big, shifting would be notchy and imprecise. If its too small, slamming the brakes on and hitting something (or tapping a kerb) can knock the thing out of gear.I just read the thread and it doesn't seem to simulate the important forces that should be simulated.
Namely, you shouldn't be able to shift from 5th to 4th without resistance unless you have properly declutched and blipped the throttle. You should be able to snick through the gears on the acceleration side easily if you match the rpms, but the shifter should shake and fight you if you try to push it into a gear without the clutch in and/or with the rpms all wrong.
The road cars should behave differently than the race cars. Lift throttle clutchless upshifts should be possible in the race cars, thats how Hewland suggests you do it. It should be much harder to do in the road cars, and therefore encourage good clutch technique.
Finally, hitting a car ahead of you while decelerating and with the shifter in the back side of the gate (2nd, 4th, 6th) should bump you into neutral. Thats the way it works in real life.
The formula cars should probably have a sequential shifter, and the MRT definitely does. Not sure about the FZR et. al, depends on your point of view.
Yeah...that really sucks. I have a friend in upstate NY thats run into the same issue.
I'm all for the LFS-on-snow! Never been to Santa Fe Ski Basin, just went to Taos last weekend for some early season turns.
Curious, I just moved to NM (I'm at UNM) and got the Comcast cable modem. Throughput isn't all that great, but it beats DSL and the pings are excellent. Costs me 120 bucks a semester...fairly cheap. I've had a bunch of ISPs over the years, and I'd say there uptime is typical. One period it was down for three days, but it wasn't their fault (Uni wouldn't give them access to the dorm to fix a problem)
Why are you going to go with DSL?
Its as random as random can get, and a lot more random than pseudorandom generators.
Thermal noise is used in natural ways to create natural noise in hardware which is then translated into random numbers. This is the only way to do real random with a computer that I've seen used.
http://www.newscientist.com/ar ... ?id=dn6289&lpos=home2
Someday those chips will come down to, say, the price of a cheap audio chip, and it will become a common feature in computers.
LOL, that sounds like the kind of thing that happens to you only when you are among the few that KNOW it can happen...funny how life is.
<off topic>
I think the most fascinating bit is how (assuming no corrosion/fretting/etc) time doesn't effect it. You can bend it back and forth 20 times and break it today, or you can do so once a week for twenty weeks and it will still break after about the same number of cycles.
This kind of simple behavior has interesting consequences. Small plane owners measure life of components in hours of use, which is if dubious value. Transport category aircraft usually measure component life in cycles. The maintenance schedules are designed so that impending fatigue failures will be detectable by dye-penetrant/whatever testing at least one maintenance interval before the fatigue crack will cause catastrophic failure. Very, very rarely do they get this wrong. Amazing how good the science is in practice even though the science is still by no means perfect.
Materials engineering, neat.
Would it be fair to say that when designing a force feedback wheel, you should design it so that the largest forces anticipated from either users or the motors will not stress/strain the materials past the endurance limit? The wheel is subject to reversed stress as well, not something I'd want to ignore in design.
Probably very true for sim-wheels. I don't know, but I imagine the bearings in automotive wheel columns are designed to cope with people using the wheel as a grab handle to prevent slipping in corners and to enter and exit the vehicle. I have a vehicle with 250k miles and the column is still quite tight and lash free. For that application, I can't imagine resting a 10lb load on it for a short period doing much harm.
Most of the mass produced sim wheels look super cheesy.
This is the danger of taking what your physics prof says about a CONCEPT and applying it to the real world.
In real life, it doesn't work the way you just assumed it does. More area will always be better because the forces involved aren't as simple as ideal friction.
How ironic is it that his handle is "boy racer"...
I agree that it isn't realistic, but unfortunately with a realistic field of view its very difficult to ever see the right two mirrors. I don't have fancy key-bindings or special views, maybe I should make one that has me directly look at the mirror.
Its a lot easier in real life, because you get more context clues in your vision about what's happening on the mirror, and a mere flick of the eyes lets you look directly at the mirror.
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Long, but not long enough for top speed in any reasonably fast vehicle. Thus all the European top speed efforts flying the gear to this side of the pond (or Africa, or some other places) to test. Thrust SSC comes to mind, although thats an extreme case.
Tristan that works brilliantly, thank you.
Head turns the "wrong" way
I searched quite a bit but I apologize if this has been discussed and I missed the thread.
For those of us driving on the left side of the car, the head still automatically turns to the left when hitting "look rear" or whatever. This is a problem in some of the vehicles. The solution is to first look right then back, but that requires more coordination than I apparently have.
Is there some fix to this that I don't know about? It makes looking behind in cars like the FZR really hard.
For those of us driving on the left side of the car, the head still automatically turns to the left when hitting "look rear" or whatever. This is a problem in some of the vehicles. The solution is to first look right then back, but that requires more coordination than I apparently have.
Is there some fix to this that I don't know about? It makes looking behind in cars like the FZR really hard.
No, I mean that the LFS default settings seem to provide a reasonable time, but the "real world" claim seems very slow. 12.70 is reasonable for the LFS setup, the real life setup doing 14s seems rather slow. I would think low 13's would be possible with any reasonable suspension/tire combo on the real life example.
Assuming one doesn't then set the car up properly re: springs/damping I guess that's true...and I guess its true across vastly different masses of vehicle.
Lighter vehicles will always be faster, they will always corner faster and they will always accelerate faster.
I think if you actually did the math, you would find that on most reasonably turny tracks the deleterious effects of the greater weight on cornering speed are at least as large as the effects on acceleration on the straights.
Particularly in relatively draggy/low power cars, where the influence of frontal area and drag is predominant above fairly low speeds. I believe you'll find that 5% extra mass will not effect time down the Blackwood straight in the XF GTI as much as 5% less drag would. I haven't done the calculations to prove that, but I'm fairly sure its true.
The accelerations are so small for good portions of the straights in the GTI that the weight is close to irrelevant.
However, since the traction available at the tire increases with an exponent of less than one applied to the normal force, you will always see lower cornering speeds with more mass on board. This effects your speed through most of the track, excepting the latter portions of straightaways. Higher cornering speed lets you brake later, begin straightaways at a higher speed, and obviously carry more speed through the turns.
In the more powerful/lighter vehicles, I think you'll find it makes a bigger difference. Maybe its just me, but I'm at least a second or two slower on BLGP in FV8 with a full load.
I've got no idea what the stock tires/suspension setup on a raceabout is, but that 1/4 mile time is awful for that power to weight.
I've seen cars get similar times with similar power and hundreds of kilos more weight.
Agreed. There would be some very scary loads there.
I drive mouse at the moment, and I'm not good at morse code throttle.
Line: 3. I usually get the "line" pretty good, but in the powerful cars I usually roll way past the apex before picking up the throttle, or I'm way too slow at the apex because I had to brake excessively before turn in because light trailbraking is awfully difficult with the mouse.
Consistancy: 3. If I'm familiar with the combo, I usually don't drive off the track, but every 10 or 20 laps my optical mouse wigs out and swings my steering to the lock. Ouch! I also am not particularly good at keeping the LX6 and other vehicles setup with softish tires going straight. Feel like I'm driving a shopping trolley in reverse.
Racecraft: 5. If I'm faster than someone, I usually don't have a problem getting by cleanly. I'm awfully bad at protecting my position, I tend to just stay on line and leave things wide open.
Overall: 3.33 Can't wait to get a good wheel/pedals and see if I can improve from there. Honestly at this point I think the pedals will make the biggest difference.
Line: 3. I usually get the "line" pretty good, but in the powerful cars I usually roll way past the apex before picking up the throttle, or I'm way too slow at the apex because I had to brake excessively before turn in because light trailbraking is awfully difficult with the mouse.
Consistancy: 3. If I'm familiar with the combo, I usually don't drive off the track, but every 10 or 20 laps my optical mouse wigs out and swings my steering to the lock. Ouch! I also am not particularly good at keeping the LX6 and other vehicles setup with softish tires going straight. Feel like I'm driving a shopping trolley in reverse.
Racecraft: 5. If I'm faster than someone, I usually don't have a problem getting by cleanly. I'm awfully bad at protecting my position, I tend to just stay on line and leave things wide open.
Overall: 3.33 Can't wait to get a good wheel/pedals and see if I can improve from there. Honestly at this point I think the pedals will make the biggest difference.
I don't know the exact rationale, but it probably had something to do with the governing bodies being able to more easily check the safety of the wing-mounts, as well as desire to reduce the benefit provided by the wings. Wing mounted to back of body is a little easier to inspect for safety than a wing mounted through the body directly to the suspension uprights I would suppose.
Think about how great that would be today though....you can set the car up for nearly optimum mechanical grip, and the thousands of pounds of downforce you create are fed directly into the tires, not through the springs and dampers.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG