Thunder Up By's!

So thanks to Kyle I now have my own copy of Car Wars! So I figured this was a good time to start up a Car Wars category for R2N to discuss what we would like get out of a Car Wars game.

We have basically arrived at the degenerate American dystopia predicted by the game so I would use that but at in modern touches like Trump, the Standing Rock protests, Fort McMurray fire, the predominance of the internet.

The one change I'd make is backing away from the 'bad-ass mercenaries' trope that domiantes all early rpgs. 'Cab Wars' would be an obvious choice - as battles between cab companies (now add Uber, free-lancers, leasers, ect..) are already pretty aggressive affairs.

'Ambulance wars' is another good choice. Our battle-ambulance could represent the free health-care sector but the private corps have passed a bill that makes the first ambulance on the scene the authorized health-care provider.

Make the comedy dark but don't blur the morality until it is just muck. The world is a black joke but good guys are still worth cheering for. I'll play the bad-guys if needed, I've been swimming through so much right-wing garbage in looking at Trump's administration that I'd gladly puke out as the villains - as they fishtail into a concrete pillar as an ambulance with a bumper-trigger plows into them....

I was watching some extremes of auto racing to get a feel for crazy Cars. I think everyone would like to see spectacular wrecks and I think we would like to survive spectacular wrecks. So the veggies we have should come standard with a roll cage. I want my tires melted off with a flamethrowe, lose control of the car, hit a wall, and roll with pieces of the car coming off in all directions.after the car has rolled 5 times, I'd still like to be alive.

Whatever we play, we are professionals and not just slapping a flamethrower onto a car from Bob's Used Bargains. The cars we have should have a roll cage standard in them.

Greetings from my servers. I am not much or a car guy, so I will have to ponder the car to firepower ratio for a while. But the big league Trump Hotels will be my sponser, and my tires shall be made of recycled toupees, silicone and the tears of cheated students.

The countdown begins?

Trump Trucks!

https://youtu.be/xgIVimEMuR0?t=5m58s

https://youtu.be/uKE-h2kjn9I?t=4m2s


Both Cab Wars and Ambulance Wars always sound tempting!

If we did ambulance wars we should have to use non lethal weaponry as much as possible. This maybe crazy but it might be cool to have it set a little more rural. I think a high speed gravel highway chase/fight would be pretty intense.

"the veggies should come standard with a roll cage."


"If we did ambulance wars we should have to use non lethal weaponry as much as possible."
Not necessarily against the evil (and heavily armoured) private ambulances. If they get to the patient first, that person will be enmeshed in a web of fees and insurance battles that could be as lethal as their wounds...

"Trump Hotels will be my sponser"
So much dystopian Trump potential.  We can easily move into flashy, corporate RollerBall/Running Man territory and have race tracks set up on the 22nd - 27th floors of the Trump Casio - add some weird traps and colorful villains. Or just do demolition derbies out in the boonies against a Yukon with TRUMP sprayed-painted in orange across the hood.

Speaking of roll cages! I read this in Mary Roach's 'Packing for Mars'.
Sorry it is so long but it's worth the read:

Touching down on water rather than earth makes for a gentler landing. The trade-off is that oceans are unpredictable. What if a cresting wave slams into the capsule as it’s coming down? Now the occupants need restraints that protect them not only against the forces of being dropped straight down, but also against a sideways or upside-down landing impact.

To be sure Orion’s occupants are unhurt no matter what wild card the seas present, crash test dummies and, lately, cadavers have been taking rides in an Orion seat mock-up here at the Transportation Research Center. The landing simulations are a collaboration involving the Center, NASA, and Ohio State University’s Injury Biomechanics Research Laboratory.

F will be taking a hit on his lateral axis. Picture a foosball figurine—the little wooden soccer player with the skewer run sideways through his rib cage. That skewer is the body’s lateral axis. Say the foosball man goes for a drive, and another car T-bones his car at an intersection. His body and organs, if he had any, would be accelerated to the left or right along that skewer. In a head-on crash or a rear-ender, they’d be accelerated along the transverse axis: from front to back, or vice versa. The third axis that researchers consider is the longitudinal—along the spine. Here the foosball player is operating a helicopter. It stalls and drops straight down to the ground. Foosball man’s heart stretches down on its aorta like a bungee jumper. Should have stuck to sports.

Because astronauts are reclining on their backs during touchdown, a space capsule hitting the ocean in calm conditions creates a force on the transverse axis—front to back—by far the body’s most durable. (Lying on their backs, fully supported and restrained, they can tolerate three to four times as much G force—a tenth of a second of up to 45 G’s—as they could seated or standing, wherein the more vulnerable longitudinal axis takes the strain.)

Crashes often involve forces along not just one axis, but two or three of them. (Though simulations study just one at a time.) Add high seas to the capsule touchdown equation, and now you have to consider forces along multiple axes. A useful model for the kind of impact NASA must plan for—multiaxis and unpredictable—is the race-car crash. The week I visited Ohio, NASCAR’s Carl Edwards, traveling at close to 200 miles per hour, slammed another car, launching his own high into the air, where it spun like a flipped quarter before slamming down into the wall. Whereupon Edwards casually got out and jogged away from the wreckage. How is this possible? To quote a recent Stapp Car Crash Journal paper, “a very supportive and tight-fitting cockpit seating package.” Note the word choice: package. Safeguarding a human for a multiaxis crash is not all that different from packing a vase for shipping. Since you don’t know which side the UPS guy’s going to drop it on, you need to stabilize it all around. Race-car drivers are strapped tightly into custom-fitted seats with a lap belt, two shoulder belts and a crotch strap to keep them from sliding down under the lap belt. A HANS (Head and Neck Support) device keeps the head from snapping forward, and vertical bolsters along the sides of the seat keep the head and spine from whipping left or right.

Dustin Gohmert, a NASA crew survivability expert, has spent a lot of time talking to the people who design restraint systems for race cars. He and two colleagues have traveled from the Johnson Space Center to oversee the simulations this week. Gohmert has agreed to answer some questions while Kang and three other students finish instrumenting F. Gohmert has blue eyes and black hair and a lively Texas wit that he mostly sets aside while speaking into a tape recorder. He sits straight-backed and motionless while answering my questions, as though merely talking about upper torso restraints is holding him still in his chair.

Early on, NASA had dismissed race-car seats as models for Orion. For one thing, race-car drivers are sitting up, not reclining. Bad idea for astronauts who’ve been in space for a while. Lying down is not only safer (provided you don’t have to steer); it keeps astronauts from fainting. Veins in the leg muscles normally constrict when we stand, to help keep blood from pooling in our feet. After weeks without gravity, this feature stops bothering to work. Compounding the problem is the fact that the body’s blood volume sensors are in the upper half of the body. Where, without gravity, more of the body’s blood tends to pool; the sensors misinterpret this as a surplus of blood, and word goes out to cut back on production. Astronauts in space make do with 10 to 15 percent less blood than they have on Earth. The combination of low blood volume and lazy veins makes astronauts lightheaded when they return to gravity after a long stay in space. It’s called orthostatic hypotension, and it can be embarrassing. Astronauts have been known to faint during postmission press conferences.

There is a problem with lying on your back in a spacesuit in a very safe seat: “We threw a racing seat on its back, put a guy in it, and said, ‘Can you get out?’” recalls Gohmert. “It was like putting a turtle on its back.” Some months back, I watched a horizontal egress (getting out of the capsule) test of a suit prototype at Johnson Space Center. The verb “to turtle,” as in “I’m kind of turtling out,” was in fact used.

Getting out fast is mainly a concern when something goes wrong: The capsule is sinking, say, or it’s on fire. The last time things went wrong aboard a space capsule, it was the Soyuz capsule, returning to Earth with members of the ISS Expedition 16 and 17 crews, in September 2008. (NASA has been paying the Russian Federal Space Agency to fly ISS crews home when no space shuttle is available.) The Soyuz module entered the atmosphere out of position—as it had with Boris Volynov aboard in 1969. This interfered with the aerodynamic lift that normally helps flatten its course and gentle its reentry and landing. Reentry subjected the crew to a full minute of 8 G’s—rather than the customary peak of 4 G’s—and a landing bump of 10 G’s. The capsule landed far afield of its targeted landing site, in an empty field on the Kazakh Steppe, where sparks from the impact started a grass fire.

The Soyuz seats, like race-car seats, have side restraints along the head and the length of the torso. Which makes them safer, unless you need to get out in a hurry. “I had it all planned out,” Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson told me in a phone interview. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to unstrap and brace my hand here, and then lower my feet,’ and of course none of that worked out. I just fell to the bottom with my head and shoulders in So-yeon’s seat and my legs up and across the hatch.” Gravity was not helping. “After six months, you forget how heavy things are. Like, yourself.” You also, after months of weightlessness, forget how to use your legs. “Your muscles don’t remember what to do.” And astronauts have no pit crew to rush over and help them free of the wreckage.* Fortunately, the wind was blowing away from them and the grass fire soon burned itself out.

Worried that NASCAR-style shoulder bolsters might dangerously extend the time it takes an astronaut to get out of the capsule, Gohmert and his colleagues ran some simulations with head bolsters only. For these they used crash test dummies—or “mannequins,” as Gohmert calls them, causing me to picture them taking their hits in department store outfits. It was a bad business. Gohmert described the slow-motion video footage to me. “The head stayed stationary and the body kept moving. We were actually concerned about the mannequin being okay.” As a compromise scenario, the shoulder bolsters are still there but have been scaled down.

NASCAR seats are fitted to each driver, but that’s too expensive to do for each astronaut. The Soyuz seats employ a compromise: a molded seat insert fit to each cosmonaut’s body. But the mold still has to fit inside the seat, which ultimately limits the size of the cosmonaut. “The Russians have a much narrower range of crew sizes,” Gohmert says wistfully. At the time we spoke, seats (and suits) were required to fit bodies that fall anywhere between 1st percentile female to 99th percentile male. That’s 4 feet 9 to 6 feet 6, though standing height is the least of it. A seat system that supports and restrains the entire seated body has to fit buttock-knee lengths from 1st to 99th percentile, and ditto seated chest heights, foot lengths, hip breadths, and seventeen other anatomical parameters.

This wasn’t always the case. Apollo astronauts had to be between 5 feet 5 and 5 feet 10. It was a simple, inflexible cutoff, the governmental version of the sign by the amusement park ride: MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE. That meant that a lot of otherwise qualified candidates were kept out of the space program because of their stature. To today’s PC-sensitized mind, that smacks of discrimination.

To Dustin Gohmert, it smacks of common sense. As things stand, NASA has to spend millions of dollars and man-hours making seats lavishly adjustable. And the more adjustable the seat, generally speaking, the weaker and heavier it is.

A further complication for the astronaut, as opposed to the race-car driver: He’s got vacuum cleaner parts attached to his suit—hoses, nozzles, couplings, switches. To be sure the hard parts of a suit don’t injure the soft parts of an astronaut in a rough landing, F will be wearing a suit simulator: a set of rings duct-taped in place around his neck, shoulders, and thighs. The rings are facsimiles of the mobility bearings, or joints, of a spacesuit. (Tomorrow’s cadaver, presently thawing,† will be wearing a vest with “umbilicals”—life support hoses and couplings—mounted on it.) One specific concern today is whether, on a sideways touchdown, a mobility bearing might collide with the seat’s shoulder bolster and be driven into the astronaut’s arm with enough force to break a bone.

The piston is off to F’s right; he’ll be impacted along his lateral axis. “Lateral crashes are very deadly because…” Gohmert stops. “I shouldn’t say crash.” “Landing pulse” is the preferred NASA phrasing. (NASCAR is partial to “contact.”) “NASA must train these guys,” Bolte marveled at one point. “You ask them a question and you see them pause and think through their answer.” Bolte isn’t like that. My favorite line of the day so far has been Bolte’s: “Is he leaking badly from anything major?”

What’s so deadly about lateral “pulses”? Diffuse axonal injury. When an unsecured head whips from side to side, the brain gets slammed back and forth against the sides of the skull. The brain is a smushable thing. It alternately compresses and stretches out as this happens. In a lateral impact, as opposed to a head-on, the stretching pulls on the long neuron extensions, called axons, that connect the brain’s circuits across the two lobes. The axons swell, and if they swell too much, you may go into a coma and die.

A similar thing happens to the heart. A heart, when it’s full of blood, can weigh a good three-quarters of a pound. In a side impact, as opposed to a head-on, there’s more room for it to whip back and forth on the aorta. If the aorta stretches far enough and the heart is heavy with blood at that moment, the two may part ways. “Aortal severation,” as Gohmert put it. This happens less often in a head-on collision, because the chest is relatively flat in that direction; the heart is more sandwiched in place. Hearts also come off their stalk in longitudinal impacts, like those that happen in helicopter drops, because there’s lots of room for them to pull downward and exceed the limits of the aorta’s stretch.

The arm appears to have an auxiliary joint, bending where arms shouldn’t bend. “That can’t be good,” says someone. This has been a recurring problem. As Gohmert puts it: “Gaps in the seat tend to get filled in by body parts.” (The arm will turn out not to be broken.)
F endured a peak impact of 12 to 15 G’s—right on the cusp of injury. Gohmert explains that the extent of an accident victim’s injuries will depend not only on how many G’s of force there were, but on how long it takes the vehicle to come to rest. If a car stops short the instant it hits a wall, say, the driver may endure a split-second peak load of 100 G’s. If the car has a collapsing hood—a common safety feature these days—the energy of those same 100 G’s is released more gradually, reducing the peak force to maybe 10 G’s—highly survivable.

The longer it takes the car to stop moving, the better—with one dangerous exception. To understand it, you need to understand what is happening to a body during a crash. Different types of tissue accelerate more quickly or slowly, depending on their mass. Bone accelerates faster than flesh. Your skull, in a lateral impact, leaves your cheeks and the tip of your nose behind. You can see this in a freeze-frame of a boxer’s face* as he’s punched in the side of the head. In a head-on, your frame gets moving first. It’s hurled forward until it’s stopped—by the shoulder belt or by the steering wheel—and then it rebounds backward. A fraction of a second later than your frame began moving forward, your heart and other organs depart. This means that as the heart is launched forward, it collides with the ribcage on its journey back the other way. Everything’s moving forward and back at different rates, colliding with the chest walls and rebounding. And all of this is happening within a few milliseconds. So fast that bouncing and rebounding are the wrong words. Things are vibrating in there.

The big danger, Gohmert explains, is if one or more of those organs starts vibrating at its resonant frequency. This will serve to amplify the vibrations. When a singer hits a note that matches the resonant frequency of a wine glass, the glass starts to vibrate more and more energetically. If the note is sung loud enough and sustained for a long enough time, the glass will shake itself apart. Recall, if you are old like me, the Memorex ads with Ella Fitzgerald and the exploding wine glass. The same sort of thing can happen to an organ that hits its resonant frequency in a crash. It can shake itself off its moorings. And worse. “Essentially,” said Gohmert, after repeated wheedling for specifics, “you’re churned to death.”