Yeah sorry I should have included a whole treatise on responsible concealed carry to preempt the nitpickers. Anyway, I am aware of the distinction between shooting in defense of ones life and ones property.
I would never even reveal I had a gun unless I was about to use it and then only in defense of my life. As for someone who asks me to give them my property, I just tell them to "fuck off." However, most robbers usually pull a weapon and then make their demands, so that leaves you back at square one, protecting your life.
Anyway, I'm not likely to encounter such problems anytime soon since carjacking has pretty much died off in Florida (concealed carry to the rescue) and I dont travel on public transportation at this time. Pretty much burglars are my only concern and not much of one at that.
I dont own any guns that lend themselves to high survival rates. The weakest pistol round I shoot (.40 SW) is more than strong enough to incapacitate someone with a single shot. If I shot him with a softnosed rifle bullet, it would probably go through him, but whatever percent of 3000+ ftlbs of kinetic energy it leaves in his torso will still be way more than enough to throw him into shock and probably kill him.
Consequently, the burglar will not be suing for lost wages because he will be entirely deceased, like that parrot that john cleese bought.
I would personally never want to have to shoot a burglar or anyone else, but if someone is sneaking around in the dark in my house they have already crossed the line. In florida you dont break into a house without expecting to catch a bullet, so I would expect anyone doing so to be fairly desperate or dangerous.
But it's almost unnecessary since muggings are nearly unheard of in florida anymore, since 90 percent of the populace can get a concealed carry permit and many CC regularly.
Ironically, the places with the most muggings are the places with the strictest anti-handgun laws. NY, DC, LA, Chicago, Detroit and with SF catching up fast. Oh, oh oh oh and I almost forgot one.... London.
"Shall issue" concealed carry laws are the BEST THING to happen to crime in this country within recent memory. The complete disarmament of law-abiding citizens in the UK is a terrible shame.
Every apartment I lived in before buying a house had reasons to frequently enter your apartment: smoke alarms, pest control, safety inspection, maintenance, etc.
Anything suspicious (god forbid you leave a bag of weed on the kitchen table) will get reported to the apartment owners and then to the police/fbi/gestapo/etc and you will get the third degree until they clear you or take you away.
Most of this is due to drug confiscation laws forcing landlords to be more proactive in ensuring that their tenants arent selling or using narcotics. Part of this is legal CYA but it is based off of a very real fear of heavy handed anti-drug law enforcement. The war on terror is more of the same, only more invasive, less well defined and more heavy handed.
The war on drugs/terror/kazaa/the next big thing is really a war against non-conformist or anticapitalist behavior in the working class. Once you live on your own property, a lot of these privacy issues suddenly tilt way into your favor unless you are a loudmouth and draw attention to yourself.
The tire is not a perfect cylinder, nor is it solid. It is usually deformed to one degree or another. This is especially true with slicks that rely on air pressure to maintain sidewall rigidity. A heavier car will require more air pressure to maintain the appropriate shape in a corner (too much deformation and the tire rolls over onto the sidewall or rim, which have no grip). This has the unfortunate side effect of giving it less grip since it now has a smaller contact patch and reduced flexibility between the rim and the contact patch.
The tire is not parallel to the road (camber) nor is it rotating in a direction parallel to the direction of the car (toe). When turning, the front wheels will gain additional camber as the wheel is turned. All of these details are designed to sacrifice straight line grip for cornering grip. All of these angles will affect the coefficient of friction of the tire.
The real proof that increased downforce kills off CF is weight transfer during cornering. The more weight that transfers from one side of the car to the other, the more download is put on the outside tires. However, since the CF keeps decreasing, the increase in grip on the outside is less than the decrease on the inside. And the car loses grip. This is also why stiffening the front shocks of my miata allowed me to brake harder- less weight was transferred off the rear wheels and onto the front, increasing the overall grip of the car. See, not linear downforce vs grip.
If you really care about this stuff in anal retentive detail (as I obviously do), I suggest the "Going Faster" book that skip barber sells. Very good racing technique book that also has details on suspension and tire stuff. That and a couple of long track days really helped my driving a lot.
The reason VW doesnt make SUVs in large numbers yet is because the MK4 golf and jetta already weigh 4000 lbs lol garbage scow.
If they were to make SUVs, they would probably 8000 lbs and have great dashboards but poor reliability and lackluster performance lol redundant in a VW.
VW probably doesnt have enough steel yet to go ahead with their SUV plan. They could probably subtitute lead, but that just wouldnt be in keeping with the fuhrers vision.
Do the math yourself. A lotus street car made from steel is VERY VERY different from an open wheeled race car made from composites. An fully fueled exige weighs about 1700 lbs [b]without[/b] driver. We will assume a small driver of 150 lbs, for a grand total of 1850 race weight.
A formula one car is regulated to a minimum of 1287 lbs race weight (including driver and fuel) and can generate 1287 lbs of downforce at 100mph. This is far less than the cars are capable of- the rules limit them to this by forbidding certain underbody designs. At 200 mph the car will generate over 5000 lbs of aerodynamic downforce. Speed doubles, downforce quadruples.
Lets see, that will give the car over 6000 lbs of weigh pushing down on the tires, which are extremely sticky dry weather tires. Such tires on lesser cars could easily generate 2g of skidpad. Furthermore, the vehicle itself only weighs the aforementioned 1287 lbs, so you can imagine how easily the car could generate 5gs of lateral force under the right circumstances.
Wait, I just did the math. Would you like a cold glass of shut the fuck up?
Have you ever seen the cars that people bring to compete in A MOD? A formula one car would demolish the entire field at most autocrosses. 1000 lbs, 900 hp and slicks go a long way towards victory. Even the most stripped miata is still going to be about 1800 lbs with driver. And that assumes no rollcage for autox use only.
And yes, obviously a formula one car will not generate 5g of skidpad at 30 mph, but you shouldnt write off a car just because it generates only 1.5 or 2 g of skidpad at low speeds. Still worlds faster than any car I have seen at an autocross.
They are either lying or incompetent if getting 400 lbs of downforce is such a big deal, especially at 250mph. With underbody work and a smallish wing, I have seen miatas generate nearly that much at 120mph , as measured by a suspension poteniometer (measure the compression of a known rate spring at each mph). At 250mph the downforce should be measured in thousands of lbs.
Then again, maybe they are measuring downforce in some relative way and not telling us what the baseline figure means. Its like the people who are buying veyrons know the first thing about cars anyway, so they could have said it made 3325235 trillion newton meters of downforce or something and people would have been just as amazed. Omg lol metric lol advanced lol fast.
Top down the car accelerates like a turtle above 130. When I talk top speed in a miata, it is either top up or (better yet) with a hardtop installed.
The 6spd miatas arent any faster than the 5 speeds- they are actually shorter geared. 300 at the wheels, non-stock rear gears (you can buy longer ring and pinions from the mazda factory motorsports program) should be good for 170 mph with a long enough straight and the top up. Others have done it.
For a camaro, the physics work out to 377 whp to allow it to maintain 200mph, so hitting only 180 with mid-low 400s at the wheel on a h/c car should easily be possible on a highway.
Well, near-factory it is possible to get about 400whp out of the late model camaros with a cam and bolt ons, which lets them hit near 200mph speeds without too much drama. The newer mustangs are easily capable of such top speeds with very minor mods (03 cobra + chip + pulley + exhaust).
The problem with most cars hitting 250mph is gearing. With the exception of the large V8s with the crazy long highway cruising gears, most modern cars seem to top out around 150. My miata has the power to hit 170-180, but I never see more than 140mph because I run out of gears. Not factory power tho.
Tire grip increases with weight, but it is a log curve- the more you increase weight, the smaller the increases in traction are. Since each increase in weight also increases the mass, the tires have to do more work to change the direction of the car. Thus, heavy cars tend to develop less and less traction than lighter cars.
Adding downforce increases the car's "weight" for purposes of calculating the grip of the tires on the road, but doesnt increase the mass of the car that they have to change the direction of.
This is why the "ideal" race car is a stick figure formula 1 type car with a giant engine and huge wings. The downforce keeps the car stuck on the road with the force of many times its weight, but since the car is so light it can change direction with mind boggling speed. This is why formula one cars can develop over 5gs of sideways acceleration. The powerful engine helps to generate speed which in turn increases downforce. The cars actually grip more the faster they go.
There are tons of kit cars and one off race cars that are capable of such feats but you never hear about them because gearheads dont have billion dollar marketing budgets to get news stories written about their flagship image cars.
250 mph top speed is retarded because the only places you can really reach such a speed are on a banked oval track. Overlooking the fact that the veyron is a heavy barge of a car and has mediocre street tires... Even the fastest of close wheeled race cars (many of which have comparable horsepower, much stickier tires, far less weight and better aerodynamics) are hard pressed to break 200mph even on tracks with enormous straight sections. Mostly they keep to speeds below 150 because of having to constantly brake for curves. It would be a much lower speed if they had street tires instead of racing tires. 250mph is a useless speed until tire compounds and braking systems have advanced a VERY long way. The trick is less in getting to 250mph than it is in avoiding things going slower.
As for aerodynamics, it isnt very hard to keep the car planted, even without fancy computer desgined undercar tunnels. There are tons of books on desgning and testing over and underbody aerodymics- much of this knowledge has been floating around for decades.
As for 1000+ hp, there are a ton of big block v8s making that power all over this country. Some making significantly more. A few even do it on pump gas.
Dude, this isnt like GIJoe where when you punch one twin the other gets wounded.
Except in programming (where you might copy pointers to a single object), when you copy something, the copy has its own separate state from the copied object.
I personally see no reason why we couldnt copy people with desireable traits if it were possible to exactly copy them. The problem is that the world is 90 percent full of undesireable people, all of whom will want a clone that will likely find them unattractive. Worse still, most of these ugly/stupid/shitheaded people are unaware of this and would probably want themselves copied for the betterment of humanity. All we need is 3000000 Larry Ellisons. And he is a borderline case, someone who is arguably of above average value.
However, sound files do not have any of these complications associated with them, so I will continue to download them. If musicians want to get paid, then they should perform music for a fee. Until the 20th century, this was the customary way of getting paid for it. I have even heard there are some musicians who still perform in "concerts" arranged at various geographical locations in what I call a "tour". Just a thought.
The VWs have so much interior room because they are FWD and have torsion bar rear suspensions. This is a straight up trading of handling prowess for packaging. Additionally, every recent generation VW I have ever ridden in the back of was extremely cramped, with my head hitting the ceiling. Great room in the front seats, torture chamber in the back. I personally think that honda and toyota do the best job of engineering interior space. At least those have equal room front and rear.
The current selling point of VWs right now is that they appear well constructed and have lots of features. They are poor performers with weak reliability at best. The MK4 VWs (even the hatches) weigh about the same as a fully equipped v8 camaro. Even the super duper performance r32 model was a giant 3500 lb pig with an anemic engine. Compared to the STI, SRT4 and the Lancer, it is at the bottom of the high end performance sport compact market right now.
The pop on the rally car is NOT from the car running rich, it is from the anti-lag retarding timing when they release the throttle. The ECU chooses to reduce power by retarding timing rather than by closing the throttle- this keeps the turbo spooled up. The popping and banging is because the fuel air mixture isnt entirely burned in the combustion chamber and instead inside the exhaust/behind the car.
My car has a bunch of retard dialed into the high rpm vacuum zones so my car makes the same rumble-bang-bang-pop sound that the rally cars do when I let off the gas at high rpms.
My car has a turbo, a tubular no-cat exhaust and a programmable ECU.
Actually the WG is still controlled by air pressure- the solenoid controls how much is bled off to atmosphere. By controlling what the WG flapper sees, the ecu can indirectly control boost.
Thats how it is on my miata and how it is on every other electronic boost control car I have ever seen.
The VW 1.8T is a great engine except the turbo and intercooler are too damn small. Its a high 13s capable setup with the right supporting mods, drag radials and maybe a little spray. With a bigger turbo from the factory it would probably be a bunch faster. Look at the SRT4.
First off, the big wing civics are 99.9999 percent slowasses who jumped on the badwagon. Of the very very small percent of civics that are genuinely fast, most of them have the cars set up as sleepers (no big wings, no big exhaust, everything quiet and stock looking). There is a local guy here with a traction controlled (the ignition retard variety) civic turbo that looks completely normal but runs mid 11s at 135mph on street tires. He runs an electronic cutout with a stock drinking straw exhaust for apperance's sake.
If it has loud v8 rumble it isnt a sleeper. Has your friend considered getting a quiet exhaust and running electronic cutouts under the car? It would be mild mannered quiet car 99 percent of the time and then you open the cutouts and the car makes full power. Just an idea.
Another great way to make a v8 sleeper is with turbocharging. In addition to the ridiculous power, the exhaust will be almost completely quiet. You can take a 2.3N/A fox body and put a twin turbo r302 block under the hood and it will sound the same despite having over 600whp (you could probably shoot for twice that if you wanted). The only downside to this approch is cost, which is pretty high.
Actually the funniest sleeper would be a riced out car that was actually fast. Never seen one of those before.
An ultra high capacity muffler is retarded on most small econoboxes because they are still running restrictive stock exhaust manifolds and the engine itself is usually an anemic pile with mild cams and small exhaust ports. Even a completely high strung motor isnt going to get huge gains from just running open headers. There just isnt that much pwoer to be gained once the intake and exhaust are letting through enough air to keep the cams happy. You are basically just removing very slight pumping losses vs actually uncorking the engine's airflow.
Turbo cars benefit greatly from running no exhaust because the whole efficiency of the system goes up the less restriction you have after the turbo. Fortunatley the turbo itself acts as a very effective muffler, so noise pollution is actually quite low in this situation. Boost builds more quickly and falls off far more slowly.
Have genuinely fast cars that look slow and like to humiliate the little pricks every chance they get. (heh we like to humilate cocky guys in fast cars too)
Nothing like schooling a ricer who thinks his glasspack muffler gave him an extra 50 hp, especially when the car to utterly destroy him is a model that all his friends tell him is slow.
Or schooling someone who sees a miata as an easy mark and something to pick on for a quick ego boost.
I love when people confuse trap speed with top speed.
Yeah, a lot of domestic performance guys were really pissed off when GM killed the fbody (camaro/transam). Now GM makes the corvette and a bunch of weak FWD piles like the malibu and the crapalier. The ecotec 2.0L looks to be decently well constructed but GM still hasnt remembered how to send power to the rear wheels so it looks like Ford is the only one carrying the performance torch for a while, at least in regards to having a V8 and RWD.
Still the mustang is a RWD V8 and one of the more powerful ones as well, so I would say that detroit is still producing decent rwd cars (assuming that you just count the big 3, even if they are making all their cars in mexico and canada or elsewhere).
Speaking as a 4 banger import guy, I think a lot of people have lost touch with what the old muscle cars were capable of. Without the burdens of unibody construction, safety and smog BS, it was once a lot easier to construct genuinely badassed cars and sell them off the showroom. There was once a day when the cars that competed in NASCAR really were "stock" cars in the normal colloquial sense of the word.
Although I personally think the crescent shaped hemi combustion chamber was a dim idea, there were versions of the hemi that came from the factory making 600 hp. You could get that in a 2100 lb car and run 10s at 130+mph STOCK.
Bone stock. (thats 200 lbs less than a 1.8L miata btw, nothing that light made today except the elise).
As the owner of a 300whp turbo miata that can give most v8 cars a run for their money in a straight line, I take exception to this remark.
The cars are different, the engines are different and even the power adders are different but the goals, the mentality and the outlook on life is the same. We hate the same posers with their slow, loud, FWD shitboxes and we respect a good engineering accomplishment when we see it.
Yeah, you can't imitate the sound of a V8 with a 4 banger, that is true. But the quickly building tea-kettle sound of a turbo spinning up is great and the feeling that goes with it is like no other. In the space of half a second the car goes from feeling sort of sluggish to feeling like it has a cam with lobes the size of mount everest. The exhaust note completely disappears and is replaced with a loud whoosh. The rear tucks in and the car explodes forward with genuinely frightening speed.
Give it a try before you knock it, and dont let the riceboys get you down with their stupidity. 120 decible 4 bangers making 90 hp arent hotrods and they arent fast.
It is entirely possible to survive in many companies as a bad programmer who nonetheless manages to be productive and produce seemingly non-buggy code. They may even appear to be especially hardworking and motivated because of the poor design that they have to spend extra time working around as they add features.
The forces that allow this phenomenon to self-perpetuate are: =Lack of people who know how to manage engineers properly, know how to recognize good ones and bad ones and how to motivate the ones you have to be productive. =Lack of good project management skills that inevitably leads to crunched schedules and poor quality code, also lack of perception on the part of management as to why software is having problems with performance, bugs or schedule to complete =Lack of desire to retain good engineers or cultivate improvement in the junior ones =Lack of communication between engineering and whomever is giving them work, especially regarding desired features and schedule =Lack of quality control, lack of oversight, lack of checkpoints in project progress
It doesnt help that the concept of "good engineering" is so hard to measure- a few things are "obviously bad" but most things are not. Even if someone is being completely wrong headed about one particular concept, it is entirely possible that they are exceptionally strong in many other areas within that field. It eventually boils down to "the proof being in the pudding" with the pudding being exceptionally complex to make and subject to the whims of the royal pudding tasters when done.
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Yeah sorry I should have included a whole treatise on responsible concealed carry to preempt the nitpickers. Anyway, I am aware of the distinction between shooting in defense of ones life and ones property.
I would never even reveal I had a gun unless I was about to use it and then only in defense of my life. As for someone who asks me to give them my property, I just tell them to "fuck off." However, most robbers usually pull a weapon and then make their demands, so that leaves you back at square one, protecting your life.
Anyway, I'm not likely to encounter such problems anytime soon since carjacking has pretty much died off in Florida (concealed carry to the rescue) and I dont travel on public transportation at this time. Pretty much burglars are my only concern and not much of one at that.
I dont own any guns that lend themselves to high survival rates. The weakest pistol round I shoot (.40 SW) is more than strong enough to incapacitate someone with a single shot. If I shot him with a softnosed rifle bullet, it would probably go through him, but whatever percent of 3000+ ftlbs of kinetic energy it leaves in his torso will still be way more than enough to throw him into shock and probably kill him.
Consequently, the burglar will not be suing for lost wages because he will be entirely deceased, like that parrot that john cleese bought.
I would personally never want to have to shoot a burglar or anyone else, but if someone is sneaking around in the dark in my house they have already crossed the line. In florida you dont break into a house without expecting to catch a bullet, so I would expect anyone doing so to be fairly desperate or dangerous.
But it's almost unnecessary since muggings are nearly unheard of in florida anymore, since 90 percent of the populace can get a concealed carry permit and many CC regularly.
Ironically, the places with the most muggings are the places with the strictest anti-handgun laws. NY, DC, LA, Chicago, Detroit and with SF catching up fast. Oh, oh oh oh and I almost forgot one.... London.
"Shall issue" concealed carry laws are the BEST THING to happen to crime in this country within recent memory. The complete disarmament of law-abiding citizens in the UK is a terrible shame.
DONT LIVE IN AN APARTMENT.
Every apartment I lived in before buying a house had reasons to frequently enter your apartment: smoke alarms, pest control, safety inspection, maintenance, etc.
Anything suspicious (god forbid you leave a bag of weed on the kitchen table) will get reported to the apartment owners and then to the police/fbi/gestapo/etc and you will get the third degree until they clear you or take you away.
Most of this is due to drug confiscation laws forcing landlords to be more proactive in ensuring that their tenants arent selling or using narcotics. Part of this is legal CYA but it is based off of a very real fear of heavy handed anti-drug law enforcement. The war on terror is more of the same, only more invasive, less well defined and more heavy handed.
The war on drugs/terror/kazaa/the next big thing is really a war against non-conformist or anticapitalist behavior in the working class. Once you live on your own property, a lot of these privacy issues suddenly tilt way into your favor unless you are a loudmouth and draw attention to yourself.
killing people is useful sometimes
maybe they dont have violent criminals in japan
In theory yes, in practice no.
The tire is not a perfect cylinder, nor is it solid. It is usually deformed to one degree or another. This is especially true with slicks that rely on air pressure to maintain sidewall rigidity. A heavier car will require more air pressure to maintain the appropriate shape in a corner (too much deformation and the tire rolls over onto the sidewall or rim, which have no grip). This has the unfortunate side effect of giving it less grip since it now has a smaller contact patch and reduced flexibility between the rim and the contact patch.
The tire is not parallel to the road (camber) nor is it rotating in a direction parallel to the direction of the car (toe). When turning, the front wheels will gain additional camber as the wheel is turned. All of these details are designed to sacrifice straight line grip for cornering grip. All of these angles will affect the coefficient of friction of the tire.
The real proof that increased downforce kills off CF is weight transfer during cornering. The more weight that transfers from one side of the car to the other, the more download is put on the outside tires. However, since the CF keeps decreasing, the increase in grip on the outside is less than the decrease on the inside. And the car loses grip. This is also why stiffening the front shocks of my miata allowed me to brake harder- less weight was transferred off the rear wheels and onto the front, increasing the overall grip of the car. See, not linear downforce vs grip.
If you really care about this stuff in anal retentive detail (as I obviously do), I suggest the "Going Faster" book that skip barber sells. Very good racing technique book that also has details on suspension and tire stuff. That and a couple of long track days really helped my driving a lot.
The reason VW doesnt make SUVs in large numbers yet is because the MK4 golf and jetta already weigh 4000 lbs lol garbage scow.
If they were to make SUVs, they would probably 8000 lbs and have great dashboards but poor reliability and lackluster performance lol redundant in a VW.
VW probably doesnt have enough steel yet to go ahead with their SUV plan. They could probably subtitute lead, but that just wouldnt be in keeping with the fuhrers vision.
Do the math yourself. A lotus street car made from steel is VERY VERY different from an open wheeled race car made from composites. An fully fueled exige weighs about 1700 lbs [b]without[/b] driver. We will assume a small driver of 150 lbs, for a grand total of 1850 race weight.
A formula one car is regulated to a minimum of 1287 lbs race weight (including driver and fuel) and can generate 1287 lbs of downforce at 100mph. This is far less than the cars are capable of- the rules limit them to this by forbidding certain underbody designs. At 200 mph the car will generate over 5000 lbs of aerodynamic downforce. Speed doubles, downforce quadruples.
Lets see, that will give the car over 6000 lbs of weigh pushing down on the tires, which are extremely sticky dry weather tires. Such tires on lesser cars could easily generate 2g of skidpad. Furthermore, the vehicle itself only weighs the aforementioned 1287 lbs, so you can imagine how easily the car could generate 5gs of lateral force under the right circumstances.
Wait, I just did the math. Would you like a cold glass of shut the fuck up?
Have you ever seen the cars that people bring to compete in A MOD? A formula one car would demolish the entire field at most autocrosses. 1000 lbs, 900 hp and slicks go a long way towards victory. Even the most stripped miata is still going to be about 1800 lbs with driver. And that assumes no rollcage for autox use only.
And yes, obviously a formula one car will not generate 5g of skidpad at 30 mph, but you shouldnt write off a car just because it generates only 1.5 or 2 g of skidpad at low speeds. Still worlds faster than any car I have seen at an autocross.
They are either lying or incompetent if getting 400 lbs of downforce is such a big deal, especially at 250mph. With underbody work and a smallish wing, I have seen miatas generate nearly that much at 120mph , as measured by a suspension poteniometer (measure the compression of a known rate spring at each mph). At 250mph the downforce should be measured in thousands of lbs.
Then again, maybe they are measuring downforce in some relative way and not telling us what the baseline figure means. Its like the people who are buying veyrons know the first thing about cars anyway, so they could have said it made 3325235 trillion newton meters of downforce or something and people would have been just as amazed. Omg lol metric lol advanced lol fast.
Top down the car accelerates like a turtle above 130. When I talk top speed in a miata, it is either top up or (better yet) with a hardtop installed.
The 6spd miatas arent any faster than the 5 speeds- they are actually shorter geared. 300 at the wheels, non-stock rear gears (you can buy longer ring and pinions from the mazda factory motorsports program) should be good for 170 mph with a long enough straight and the top up. Others have done it.
For a camaro, the physics work out to 377 whp to allow it to maintain 200mph, so hitting only 180 with mid-low 400s at the wheel on a h/c car should easily be possible on a highway.
Well, near-factory it is possible to get about 400whp out of the late model camaros with a cam and bolt ons, which lets them hit near 200mph speeds without too much drama. The newer mustangs are easily capable of such top speeds with very minor mods (03 cobra + chip + pulley + exhaust).
The problem with most cars hitting 250mph is gearing. With the exception of the large V8s with the crazy long highway cruising gears, most modern cars seem to top out around 150. My miata has the power to hit 170-180, but I never see more than 140mph because I run out of gears. Not factory power tho.
Tire grip increases with weight, but it is a log curve- the more you increase weight, the smaller the increases in traction are. Since each increase in weight also increases the mass, the tires have to do more work to change the direction of the car. Thus, heavy cars tend to develop less and less traction than lighter cars.
Adding downforce increases the car's "weight" for purposes of calculating the grip of the tires on the road, but doesnt increase the mass of the car that they have to change the direction of.
This is why the "ideal" race car is a stick figure formula 1 type car with a giant engine and huge wings. The downforce keeps the car stuck on the road with the force of many times its weight, but since the car is so light it can change direction with mind boggling speed. This is why formula one cars can develop over 5gs of sideways acceleration. The powerful engine helps to generate speed which in turn increases downforce. The cars actually grip more the faster they go.
There are tons of kit cars and one off race cars that are capable of such feats but you never hear about them because gearheads dont have billion dollar marketing budgets to get news stories written about their flagship image cars.
250 mph top speed is retarded because the only places you can really reach such a speed are on a banked oval track. Overlooking the fact that the veyron is a heavy barge of a car and has mediocre street tires... Even the fastest of close wheeled race cars (many of which have comparable horsepower, much stickier tires, far less weight and better aerodynamics) are hard pressed to break 200mph even on tracks with enormous straight sections. Mostly they keep to speeds below 150 because of having to constantly brake for curves. It would be a much lower speed if they had street tires instead of racing tires. 250mph is a useless speed until tire compounds and braking systems have advanced a VERY long way. The trick is less in getting to 250mph than it is in avoiding things going slower.
As for aerodynamics, it isnt very hard to keep the car planted, even without fancy computer desgined undercar tunnels. There are tons of books on desgning and testing over and underbody aerodymics- much of this knowledge has been floating around for decades.
As for 1000+ hp, there are a ton of big block v8s making that power all over this country. Some making significantly more. A few even do it on pump gas.
Dude, this isnt like GIJoe where when you punch one twin the other gets wounded.
Except in programming (where you might copy pointers to a single object), when you copy something, the copy has its own separate state from the copied object.
I personally see no reason why we couldnt copy people with desireable traits if it were possible to exactly copy them. The problem is that the world is 90 percent full of undesireable people, all of whom will want a clone that will likely find them unattractive. Worse still, most of these ugly/stupid/shitheaded people are unaware of this and would probably want themselves copied for the betterment of humanity. All we need is 3000000 Larry Ellisons. And he is a borderline case, someone who is arguably of above average value.
However, sound files do not have any of these complications associated with them, so I will continue to download them. If musicians want to get paid, then they should perform music for a fee. Until the 20th century, this was the customary way of getting paid for it. I have even heard there are some musicians who still perform in "concerts" arranged at various geographical locations in what I call a "tour". Just a thought.
Is this a troll?
The VWs have so much interior room because they are FWD and have torsion bar rear suspensions. This is a straight up trading of handling prowess for packaging. Additionally, every recent generation VW I have ever ridden in the back of was extremely cramped, with my head hitting the ceiling. Great room in the front seats, torture chamber in the back. I personally think that honda and toyota do the best job of engineering interior space. At least those have equal room front and rear.
The current selling point of VWs right now is that they appear well constructed and have lots of features. They are poor performers with weak reliability at best. The MK4 VWs (even the hatches) weigh about the same as a fully equipped v8 camaro. Even the super duper performance r32 model was a giant 3500 lb pig with an anemic engine. Compared to the STI, SRT4 and the Lancer, it is at the bottom of the high end performance sport compact market right now.
Not all cars have MAF sensors.
The pop on the rally car is NOT from the car running rich, it is from the anti-lag retarding timing when they release the throttle. The ECU chooses to reduce power by retarding timing rather than by closing the throttle- this keeps the turbo spooled up. The popping and banging is because the fuel air mixture isnt entirely burned in the combustion chamber and instead inside the exhaust/behind the car.
My car has a bunch of retard dialed into the high rpm vacuum zones so my car makes the same rumble-bang-bang-pop sound that the rally cars do when I let off the gas at high rpms.
My car has a turbo, a tubular no-cat exhaust and a programmable ECU.
Actually the WG is still controlled by air pressure- the solenoid controls how much is bled off to atmosphere. By controlling what the WG flapper sees, the ecu can indirectly control boost.
Thats how it is on my miata and how it is on every other electronic boost control car I have ever seen.
The VW 1.8T is a great engine except the turbo and intercooler are too damn small. Its a high 13s capable setup with the right supporting mods, drag radials and maybe a little spray. With a bigger turbo from the factory it would probably be a bunch faster. Look at the SRT4.
First off, the big wing civics are 99.9999 percent slowasses who jumped on the badwagon. Of the very very small percent of civics that are genuinely fast, most of them have the cars set up as sleepers (no big wings, no big exhaust, everything quiet and stock looking). There is a local guy here with a traction controlled (the ignition retard variety) civic turbo that looks completely normal but runs mid 11s at 135mph on street tires. He runs an electronic cutout with a stock drinking straw exhaust for apperance's sake.
If it has loud v8 rumble it isnt a sleeper. Has your friend considered getting a quiet exhaust and running electronic cutouts under the car? It would be mild mannered quiet car 99 percent of the time and then you open the cutouts and the car makes full power. Just an idea.
Another great way to make a v8 sleeper is with turbocharging. In addition to the ridiculous power, the exhaust will be almost completely quiet. You can take a 2.3N/A fox body and put a twin turbo r302 block under the hood and it will sound the same despite having over 600whp (you could probably shoot for twice that if you wanted). The only downside to this approch is cost, which is pretty high.
Actually the funniest sleeper would be a riced out car that was actually fast. Never seen one of those before.
An ultra high capacity muffler is retarded on most small econoboxes because they are still running restrictive stock exhaust manifolds and the engine itself is usually an anemic pile with mild cams and small exhaust ports. Even a completely high strung motor isnt going to get huge gains from just running open headers. There just isnt that much pwoer to be gained once the intake and exhaust are letting through enough air to keep the cams happy. You are basically just removing very slight pumping losses vs actually uncorking the engine's airflow.
Turbo cars benefit greatly from running no exhaust because the whole efficiency of the system goes up the less restriction you have after the turbo. Fortunatley the turbo itself acts as a very effective muffler, so noise pollution is actually quite low in this situation. Boost builds more quickly and falls off far more slowly.
There is a sub-set of hot-rodders who....
Have genuinely fast cars that look slow and like to humiliate the little pricks every chance they get. (heh we like to humilate cocky guys in fast cars too)
Nothing like schooling a ricer who thinks his glasspack muffler gave him an extra 50 hp, especially when the car to utterly destroy him is a model that all his friends tell him is slow.
Or schooling someone who sees a miata as an easy mark and something to pick on for a quick ego boost.
I love when people confuse trap speed with top speed.
Yeah, a lot of domestic performance guys were really pissed off when GM killed the fbody (camaro/transam). Now GM makes the corvette and a bunch of weak FWD piles like the malibu and the crapalier. The ecotec 2.0L looks to be decently well constructed but GM still hasnt remembered how to send power to the rear wheels so it looks like Ford is the only one carrying the performance torch for a while, at least in regards to having a V8 and RWD.
Still the mustang is a RWD V8 and one of the more powerful ones as well, so I would say that detroit is still producing decent rwd cars (assuming that you just count the big 3, even if they are making all their cars in mexico and canada or elsewhere).
Speaking as a 4 banger import guy, I think a lot of people have lost touch with what the old muscle cars were capable of. Without the burdens of unibody construction, safety and smog BS, it was once a lot easier to construct genuinely badassed cars and sell them off the showroom. There was once a day when the cars that competed in NASCAR really were "stock" cars in the normal colloquial sense of the word.
Although I personally think the crescent shaped hemi combustion chamber was a dim idea, there were versions of the hemi that came from the factory making 600 hp. You could get that in a 2100 lb car and run 10s at 130+mph STOCK.
Bone stock. (thats 200 lbs less than a 1.8L miata btw, nothing that light made today except the elise).
As the owner of a 300whp turbo miata that can give most v8 cars a run for their money in a straight line, I take exception to this remark.
The cars are different, the engines are different and even the power adders are different but the goals, the mentality and the outlook on life is the same. We hate the same posers with their slow, loud, FWD shitboxes and we respect a good engineering accomplishment when we see it.
Yeah, you can't imitate the sound of a V8 with a 4 banger, that is true. But the quickly building tea-kettle sound of a turbo spinning up is great and the feeling that goes with it is like no other. In the space of half a second the car goes from feeling sort of sluggish to feeling like it has a cam with lobes the size of mount everest. The exhaust note completely disappears and is replaced with a loud whoosh. The rear tucks in and the car explodes forward with genuinely frightening speed.
Give it a try before you knock it, and dont let the riceboys get you down with their stupidity. 120 decible 4 bangers making 90 hp arent hotrods and they arent fast.
It is entirely possible to survive in many companies as a bad programmer who nonetheless manages to be productive and produce seemingly non-buggy code. They may even appear to be especially hardworking and motivated because of the poor design that they have to spend extra time working around as they add features.
The forces that allow this phenomenon to self-perpetuate are:
=Lack of people who know how to manage engineers properly, know how to recognize good ones and bad ones and how to motivate the ones you have to be productive.
=Lack of good project management skills that inevitably leads to crunched schedules and poor quality code, also lack of perception on the part of management as to why software is having problems with performance, bugs or schedule to complete
=Lack of desire to retain good engineers or cultivate improvement in the junior ones
=Lack of communication between engineering and whomever is giving them work, especially regarding desired features and schedule
=Lack of quality control, lack of oversight, lack of checkpoints in project progress
It doesnt help that the concept of "good engineering" is so hard to measure- a few things are "obviously bad" but most things are not. Even if someone is being completely wrong headed about one particular concept, it is entirely possible that they are exceptionally strong in many other areas within that field. It eventually boils down to "the proof being in the pudding" with the pudding being exceptionally complex to make and subject to the whims of the royal pudding tasters when done.