Quote from Lautsprecher[NOR] :

What's that tune playing in the "Trailers"? Sounds quite good from the little i can hear of it

If you mean the theme music from Top Gear, it's taken from 'Jessica' by The Allman Brothers Band. Good track

Well, it turns out that gamma for N2O is 1.3, so I make it -177°C but yeah, you get the idea

Quote from wheel4hummer :

I just wanted to know how to calculate the temperature, like some sort of equation.

Go here: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/isentrop.html
You need equation 4. Here come the maths...

p1/p2 = (T1/T2)^(γ/(γ-1))

(p1/p2)^((γ-1)/γ) = T1/T2

T2 = T1/(p1/p2)^((γ-1)/γ)

T2 = T1 * (p2/p1)^((γ-1)/γ)

'γ' is supposed to be 'gamma' but the Verdana font makes it look like a 'Y' dropped below the line of the text. γ = 1.4 for air...no idea what it is for N2O.

Suppose you have a can of compressed air at a gauge pressure of 1 atmosphere. That is 2 atmospheres in absolute pressure, or 101325*2 = 202650 Pascals. Let's assume you've cooled it to room temperature, about 20°C. That is 20+273.15 = 293.15 Kelvin. You're now going to allow it to expand isentropically (ie reversibly, with no losses) to atmospheric pressure.

p1 = 202650 Pa
p2 = 101325 Pa
T1 = 293.15 K
T2 is unknown
γ = 1.4

T2 = 293.15 * (101325/202650)^((1.4-1)/1.4)
T2 = 240.48 K

...or -32.7°C.

Incidentally, this is why you should NEVER hold onto the horn of a CO2 fire extinguisher when you use it. The ice formations are quite impressive if you let the whole bottle out in one go

Quote from MadCatX :

Accoring to this I assume that SH3 doesn't use StarForce, or it uses VERY old SF version like 1.x. Why? Because PE-Container of every EXE protected by SF is encrypted, which means undisassemblable(huh, spelling course). When making a crack, you must disassemble or decompile source. SF successfully prevents you doing this because of EXE encryption. So how was that no-DVD crack made?

I have no idea how the crack was made. http://www.boycottstarforce.net lists SH3 as having Starforce v3.4.71.19, so it doesn't look like it's an old version. The game was released in March 2005.

Quote :

This won't work on any newer games protected by SF. When SF RMPS check(that crappy window sying "Whait while SF checks CD") passes, it decrypts EXE PE and launches application. SF also controls all disk I/O operations of the EXE which uses SF API to access CD-ROM and so. So if you uninstall SF, you can't play protected game because it's not able to read from CD and so.

I guess they un-encrypted the EXE then, because I don't get any message about 'checking CD'. I used to get it before I patched the game, but not anymore.

I've found that Starforce is pretty easy to defeat. I bought Silent Hunter III a while back and installed it as usual. I couldn't play it though, because my DVD drive wasn't compatible with Starforce. I bought a new drive (good excuse to buy a DVD-RW ) but found a way of removing SF.

I found that SHIII didn't install SF until you first run the game. Install game, install latest patch, run no-DVD crack and you're Starforce free

I would like to point out that, although I had to visit some...erm...'questionable' sites to find the no-DVD crack, I legally own all my software. No-CD/DVD cracks are just a convenience, and there was no way I was going to allow Starforce to remain on my PC.

Right, sorry it's taken so long but I've had a busy time since getting home!
I'm not entirely happy with the skin...I'm sure there's more I could do with it but I quite like the purity of the pre-sponsorship cars and I didn't want to ruin it by getting too fancy.
If there's anything else you'd like me to do to the skin then let me know, I've still got the layered file.

Quote from jtw62074 :

The confusion here in the thread seems to be because some are talking about slip angle in the car's reference frame, while others are speaking of it in the tire's.

Ah, that makes sense. I was assuming the longitudinal/lateral directions were relative to the car, not the tyre. Thanks for putting me right!

Quote from tristancliffe :

Why can't that tyre generate friction (and therefore force) at 90°

Surely at 90° slip angle the tyre cannot produce any lateral force because it's being pushed sideways! Any forces applied laterally would just cause the tyre to rotate around its axis, wouldn't it?

Quote from racer hero :

will that work?

I have no idea, but if you already have it installed, why don't you just try it?

I use the GIMP (another free image editor) and it opens *.PSD files. It does use a lot of RAM if you open one of the Master Skinnerz templates, but save it straightaway as a *.XCF file (GIMP format) and it seems to use less RAM.

I'll give it a go for you but you'll have to wait until the weekend as I'm away from home at the moment. I've got the logos ready from a previous project involving the AAR Eagle, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

Quote from mr_x :

Charlie Cox is awesome. I'll never forgot BTCC at Knockhill 1998 when Craig Baird was leading the race for Ford in the wet, Charlie just comes out with "Ford is an agronym for Floats on Race Day!" Also things like: "he's just chucked it at the scenery"

My all-time favourite Charlie Cox moment was his response to someone ramming another driver off the road (can't remember who or where unfortunately). "He needed that like a third armpit!"
Class...

1) Have you ever bought a product on the strength of an advert alone and why?

No.

2) Have you ever bought a product because it had an aspirational advert that appealed to you and what was it? (eg Lynx ads show the product making someone a hit with the ladies)

Absolutely not.

3) Do the production values of adverts affect your view of the product? (eg Marks & Spencers vs Iceland)

The more money a company spends on advertising, the more their customers pay to finance said advertising. If anything a flashy advert puts me off.

4) Skoda cars are made by VW yet more people buy the more expensive VWs over the cheaper Skodas because of Skoda's past image. Do you buy products based on brand name alone?

There are some brands to which I am drawn when I think about what to buy, but that's based on previous experience of the brand, not advertising. If there's an alternative which looks better and/or cheaper, bye-bye brand name

Quote from Gentlefoot :

ECUs don't know what gear you are in.

Not true.

Quote :

The map is the same in gear or not.

This is probably true, though not necessarily. I am aware of ECU software which is capable of changing the throttle mapping depending on the current gear but I don't know if the functions are actually used.

Quote from Greboth :

AFAIK with FI the mass air flow sensor - amazingly for the name senses the mass of air flowing into your engine - then the ecu will calculate how much fuel needs to be injected for the engine load conditions. so if you lift off then very little fuel will be injected causing no backfire. Also with todays exhaust systems and legislation about cats and silencers etc cars dont backfire.

Fuel injected petrol-engined cars use tables to predict the correct volume of fuel to inject for a given mass air flow (MAF). There is also a lambda sensor (also known as a heated exhaust gas oxygen sensor, or HEGO) in the exhaust manifold which is used for trimming the fuel. These sensors exhibit a very sharp change in voltage output as the exhaust mixture passes through stoichiometric (lambda = 1). The fuel injection system uses a process called limit cycling whereby the fuel will be increased until the HEGO voltage switches (rich mixture) and then decreased until the HEGO voltage switches again (lean mixture), the whole process being repeated a few times per second. Using the tables (feed-forward) and HEGO sensor (feed-back) the engine operates very close to a stoichiometric mixture at all times, which is essential for the proper performance of a catalytic converter.

As for the original question, I'm not sure what you mean by 'there is always smoke coming out'. I've not noticed this unless the car is knackered or it's a cold morning. A well-tuned petrol engine should not produce any visible smoke. Diesels, on the other hand...

Quote from ZORER :

The green bar is not the throttle applied to the engine. It is the amount of pressure on your pedal.

I'm not sure I agree. If you take your foot off the pedal in neutral a small amount of throttle is added in automatically to keep the engine idling.

Quote :

There is always gas burnt in the engine even if you don't touch the throttle while it is running.So it can keep the valves and things running.And that makes the smoke coming out of the exhaust.

This might be true in older, carburetted, cars but not any more. An engine with fuel injection (diesel or petrol) will cut the fuel completely on a motored deceleration (foot off the pedal but coasting with the car in gear). I could imagine that racing engines might keep some injection going without spark to cool the pistons but I have no evidence for this, it's just a (slightly) educated guess.

Quote from Tweaker :

Squashing the width by 20% would be ok, but actually on almost all of the skins, you need to squash logos/shapes by 30-35% (65-70% width). I always draw a square on the side of the car and check it in the viewer, and then see how much width needs to be squashed until it looks to be an almost perfect square.

This is the way I do it too, as different areas of the same car can use different amounts of stretching. I draw a square on the part of the car I want to measure, then take a screenshot of it in the viewer and use Paint to measure the dimensions of the resulting rectangle. That gives me a very precise scaling factor to apply to my decals. It takes some time, but once you've done the numbers for one car you don't have to re-do them.

I've located what I think are all the major circuits in the world. Having said that, I'm sure someone's going to tell me that I've missed an obvious one.
I've tried to mark the pit lane of each track. For some of the older, less well-known circuits it can help with orientation.

Enjoy the attached zipped KMZ file (for use with Google Earth)...corrections/additions are appreciated!

Quote from Bob Smith :

There are more pieces of information if you think about it.

Peak power and peak torque is only really 2 points of the torque curve, but you know some other properties from which you can generate other points and make a more precise torque curve.

i.e. torque curve gradient must be 0 at peak torque, must be positive up until peak torque, must be negative after peak torque, must be negative enough around peak power so that power does indeed drop off after peak power rpm and must be flat enough before hand so that power isn't higher before peak power rpm.

Yeah, that's exactly how I got my 4 pieces of information. You have torque values at two engine speeds (once you've worked backwards from peak power) and you can also differentiate torque with respect to revs and set those to zero (zero gradient at the peak). That only gives you four boundary conditions, hence the limit for an exact polynomial solution is a cubic.

Quote :

That's the basis for how torque curves in GRC work anyway, though I'm currently only using linear+cubic dual equation thingy, will up to quadratic+quartic when I feel like hurting my brain.

But how are you going to gain any extra information about the torque curve? Saying that "the gradient must be positive before the peak" doesn't fix a boundary condition, it just limits the possible solutions to a narrower 'corridor'.

Quote from CSU1 :

Yes , I agree we need some data on torque, I have little/ no knowledge on this topic but if the dev's where to publish a "torque data sheet" would that reading not be only for that gearbox setting?...I mean any data produced would only be relevent to that .set ie: what gear ratios where used in the testing.
So what I can imagine to be more useful would be a data sheet with the info on each car's engine on the most efficient settings eg: ratio 1.258 @ 6.5k to 8k so on...
Maybe if Bob could clear some of this up for us we're a bit lost(I am) it seems.

No, what I would like the devs to provide is the torque developed by the engine (at wide-open-throttle) through a range of engine speeds. Have a look at this example from a Google search:

http://www.netcar.co.il/img2/m ... _torque%20curve%2016V.jpg

The blue curve shows the torque produced by the engine over a range of speeds. To obtain the torque output at the wheels you just scale the speed/torque using the drive ratios and account for drivetrain losses.

The torque curves in LFS seem to be calculated by some high-order polynomial. I got a very good fit to my experimental data using quartic regression but the curves couldn't quite match the LFS data.
I've also tried solving various orders of polynomials using data from the LFS engines but without any real success. The problem I had was that we can only get 4 pieces of information from the max torque and max power figures, so the highest order polynomial that can be fitted is a cubic. I've tried assuming various other boundary conditions to allow a higher order polynomial but that didn't work either.

Quote from CSU1 :

+1 for it would give an idea to the perfect ger changes at what points through the power band, but -1 thats only as the crow fly's and every track has its different gear changing points so its noot going to able to substatute good ol' trial and error when setting your car up, so a bit pointless I'd say because Bob's "Gear Ration Spankulator" does just that!

As far as I know Bob's program uses estimates of the torque curves, so the results aren't that accurate. I've done some work on calculating the torque curves based on straightline acceleration tests but it's very difficult to work back to the engine torque and get it to agree with the published data on LFS cars. I really wish the devs would post some torque curves, ideally in a spreadsheet so we have the raw numbers as well as the pretty curves.

Edit: I have got some nice curves for the XF GTi but it took a lot of work and I still can't get both the peak power and peak torque to line up. The curve I got looks quite different to the ones in Bob's program.

Quote from George Kuyumji :

While were at Gear Ratios...

I would like to be able to increase the Gear Ratios at a faster rate. Now you can set up the Gear Ratio with clicking on plus 1 or minus 1. To set it up with the Mouse is not precise. It would be good to have another button for increasements of 5 at one click.

Right-clicking the arrow should increment the number by a larger step. You can also right-click on the number and enter a new number.

-1 to having separate setups for chassis and drivetrain, +1 to having a 'Copy drivetrain from...' button

Quote from JTbo :

It would be great if men could be a men, but really men have to act like polite little girl now days

So real men have to swear, do they?

Quote from mr grady :

I hope that massa puts in a complaint about the BMW blocking him, or it will prove that the incident at monza was nothing but bad sportmanship and ferrari's attempt at trying to win the titles by cheating.

I do believe that the complaint at Monza was motivated by nothing other than a desire to cause Alonso as much trouble as they could, and the penalty awarded to Alonso was a travesty. However, the FIA have 'clarified' the blocking rule so that only deliberate blocking will be considered in future. Hence Ferrari have no valid complaint this time.

Quote from AndroidXP :

The famous quote

Way off topic, and sorry to pick on you, AndroidXP, but the word is 'quotation'! I've read it at least three times in this thread and I've finally snapped! 'Quote' is the verb, 'quotation' is the noun!

Quote from Hoellsen :

Right. First Engine failure in 6 years and maybe 2 or 3 other technical related retirements in that period. He must really destroy his cars. NOT.

You may need to read the thread on the Chinese GP to realise that my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I wrote that