Ok, the engine damage is fairly accurate, I tried this out myself and the cars which incurred little to no damage rather than just over cooking the engine actually lost grip with the road. The reason being the engine had the power/weight to overcome the friction coefficient between the tyre and the road. The fact that these are RWD cars merely adds to the effect as the weight is transferred to the front wheels as it slows. The UF1, FXO and XFG which seem to take the most damage are relatively low power to weight ratio vehicles and are FWD, meaning the tyres not only grip the road far more than the stopping power of the engine, but as the car slows down the grip factor increases.
A couple of factors I would like to see make it into LFS (although possibly not for a while) is clutch wear, especially on the heavier engined cars, and coolant overheating.
1) the control arms cannon stretch, they can only be shortened.
2) flatspots do change the radius of the tire at the point of the flatspot (been discussed before, along with how LFS's way of handling this is a bit "odd" as a result of it only being possible for one of the 48 segments to be on the ground at a given point in time, so the tire jumps up and down sharply or just skips that segment entirely), however, as stated, this usually does not cause any damage to the suspension (although I think if there's a big enough jump it could)
Does anyone know what the safe range for the engine is, where zero damage will be done? Is it the rev limiter or the end of the red range?
Also, are the shift lights on the FBM power based or rpm based?
EDIT: Just checked the second question myself: 1 red light is 8500 rpm, 3 red lights are 9000 rpm, 4 is the limiter (9200ish) and five is about 100 rpm more. The special power based shift light on the rpm overlay doesn't activate. So if you're a proper nerd you need to calculate and memorize the optimum shift points for every gear for the FBM.
I haven't tested where the limit is when the engine starts taking damage but I'd guess that it is past the rev limiter. Like under braking when shifting too early the revs go too high. I think you can leave the engine running against the rev limiter for ages without any damage, but haven't tested so it is just an assumption... That's the way it was before the patch and iirc all that was changed is the addition of rev limiters...
now that the REV limiter is on all car, and for cruising during 2 hour at the rev limiter I can say that engine DO NOT TAKE damage if you hit the rev limiter, anything beyond the rev limiter will damage it.
so you can from now on shift without raising your feet and it will be okay!
Function keys F9 and F10 will give you info on the tyres and the suspension respectively. The clutch bar is displayed in both of them in the bottom left corner.
with regard to the body damage, I have never known fully how to interperate the information available to know if the actual chassis can be damaged or not, but i know it can bend the wheels and reduce the whole visual width of the car, and makes the car handle and behave in such a way that you would think the chassis is trashed, making the car "crab" or tip over completely,i once got hit over the rear wheel so hard in an xfg that the distance between the rear wheels was no more than about a foot (300mm) or so and making it tip over every corner. i will add some pictures/replays of what happens on the banger racing servers and how it affects the car.
I hope the original sterter of this thread doesnt mind me adding to this thread, as i hope to be helpful!
Ok, i have done some screenshots of damage that i have incurred in an XFG, i thought it would be easier to just put the images up, rather than people having to trawl through multiple replays with 15 odd cars to find the relavent bits.
I have labelled the files as follows,
body damage stage1 = cosmetic damage; a few scuffs and dented bodywork, doesnt affect the handling of the car at all.
body damage stage2 = worse body damage, together with damage to one or more wheels, causing the car to bounce when under power or when steering, and/or causing the car to "crab" ie. requiring the driver (you!) to steer slightly in one direction to keep the car in a straight line. This is hard at speed, as when you ease off the power or brake the crabbing effect will nearly always change, throwing the car in a different direction. This can cause your car to snake as its so easy to over correct in this uncertian situation and once the snaking starts, it is very difficult to gain control again. Personally, If i havent regained control after 2 snakes then i tend to brake and pray that i am still on my wheels when i come to a standstill! This is because the damage has altered the geomatry of the car, causing the wheels to be pointing in interesting directions. It will be possible to limp to the pits in this situation but as mentioned above, the car will be significantly harder to control at higher speeds and going fast will almost certianly cause snaking and a big crash!!
body damage stage3 = seriously damaged car, Bodywork wrecked, wheels at hideous angles, it is not good! In the top 2 images you can see that the rear wheels are very close together indeed. I took a corner at 20mph and rolled myself over because the car geometry is seriously altered in this situation. I did no less than 3 rollovers in this race, one on each corner as i luckily landed on my wheels due to my low speed, until i clipped a barrier on the 4th attempt and spent the rest of the race on my roof, as you can see!
In the bottom images all 4 wheels were not where they should have been and the car was literally disabled, all i could do was sit on the spot and wheelspin forever. both front wheels were simply bouncing up and down and the rear ones were wrecked as well. Luckily, someone hepfully tipped me over before i died of old age trying to move!
I hope i have added a helpul insight and once again, sorry for hijacking this thread, although i believe it is on topic.
Actually I think there's tons of space in F11 to give a short summary on what grade of alteration the chassis-geometry has reached. Maybe together with a user-friendly "box-assist advice" like "better come in soon" OR "you can keep on battling, not too serious" OR "Not even a real scratch, keep your eyes on the road!"
... or something like that. Wouldn't take too much of coding, I guess
To add, real life engines are quite hardy. There are many professional drivers who frequently abuse their engine. The most common form of abuse being downshifting just before they actually start braking. This can usually put 10 or 11k on the engine meant for 9.5k. Most of them do this every few laps, many do it every lap, some do it more than once per lap. If LFS is accurate, a little bit of over-revving shouldn't hurt anything if done somewhat infrequently.
Personally, I always power shift on starts into 1st (from neutral) and 2nd gear and maybe 3rd if I feel like I'm going too slow. A power shift is simply holding the accelerator while shifting gears in a normal H-pattern gearbox. It adds flywheel torque to your launch, evident by the tire noise that results. I can get away with it without burning the clutch too bad because I didn't start the race by duck-walking in 1st, I started from neutral. If I duck-walked the clutch and accelerator, I'd definitely be too hot to do it on a good launch, and I'd only use it when I get a really bad start.