wouldn't it be great if you could get a wind tunnel, and add flour/power and see the wind goign past your car, then you could make adjustment, could be an in pit thing, or a track, your thought?
Seems needlessly complicated to me. If you want to see some cars or other objects in wind tunnels with trails round them take a look on YouTube. The adjustments we have available to us are pretty minimal (front/rear wing) and we can see the effect of those adjustments with the lift/drag figures in the garage screen.
first we need much better aero Phsysics, and then... this is totaly nonsence (my opinion sry) because we dont design the Cars. We only play with the Wings. But a ingame setup guide would be nice. (sometime ...when its done)
I really like this idea. It would be great if the drag was highlighted as a color like red, It would make the setup a touch easier and quicker if we could visually see the air flow and highlight the amount of drag
I just think it could be a visual aid to help us have a better understanding of what combination of forces are being applied to the vehicle and there relationships with each other, the more information the better, numerical, visual, whatever. It's no different from the visualization of the suspension geometry that shows you live changes as you make adjustments to camber,toe,castor,ackerman,ride height etc. Since all settings are linked and you can't change one without effecting another it would be valuable to see them all working together. Imagine being able to see all the forces that are in action as a vehicle is put through a simulation of a lap where every force can be seen and while thats happening you can make live changes to any setting and see what effects it has on other areas of the car, like the relationship between downforce and suspension and how it effects the pitch and balance of the chassis, as a side effect ride height changes would be important to look at as the ride height can cause air pressure changes under the car effecting the ground effect/down force. of course the presentation of such a analysis system would be important, it would have to be bold and simple enough to read and this is where the visualisation of downforce and drag and there relationships to other things is better than just numbers alone. ok maybe it's not an absolute necessity and I don't know that much about aero or chassis but i suspect the wind tunnel could be useful in some way for those that know more than me.
It would also require Scawen to spend the next 50 years working solely on the Windtunnel aspect of the game. Some people seem to think progress is slow as it is, so I think it would be a poor use of time.
The real deal about this would be a goddamn fast computer able to do this enormous amount of calculations in real time. And by goddamn fast I don't mean some vapochilled Core i7. Look and the Virgin F1 car which has been using CFD exclusively and it still sucks in terms of aerodynamics.
But all of the most important points have already been stated. You don't need a wind tunnel because you see how many Newtons of downforce your aero pack will produce in the garage menu. You don't need a wind tunnel to set the car up, it's designers who need it. And last but not least, you don't need a wind tunnel because LFS uses much more approximated aero model now, so the results you'd get would be meaningless...
[QUOTE=amp88;1423616]A wind tunnel wouldn't show all forces acting on the car.
I wasn't talking about showing something as useless as just air flowing over the body on it's own but instead an all in one live visualization of all forces including downforce/drag, live suspension geometry and whatever else can be thrown in to the mix like g forces, in a single visualization of the vehicle as a simulation is run so we can observe in real time the relationships between these things and how they effect each other, so for example you can actually see the suspension being pushed down by the d/force and thus anticipate how to setup each individual part of the car and make changes as the simulation plays out, because yes downforce does effect how you setup suspension, tyre pressures and maybe as a side effect other things i'm missing. I think it is feasible to run a simulation like this in the garage because the physics engine is running this simulation when you drive anyway, the numbers are all there, is it that hard to add some extra graphics to it? the extra forces could be added to the existing graphic that shows the vehicle in front and side view and next to it the suspension geometry. Don't take it personal guys I'm just playing devils advocate here because this idea was written off a little to quickly in my opinion without exploring and debating what it could be useful for, but admittedly i'm not that clued up on the subject to defend this wind tunnel idea or a variation of it. The phrase wind tunnel is only a starting point ,would be nice if anybody else could throw in some ideas to the mix. But hey if the majority think this idea is useless or not feasible then let that be the end of it... sorry to ramble on ..hehe