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theboss
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Date: Tuesday, 2023.01.17, 17:54 | Message # 1
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What is car damage?
In real life your car can get damaged in three ways. One is that you hit an object and get mechanical damage. The second is that you overuse the car, ie. overrev the engine or shift gears without enough finesse. The third is that there is something wrong with the parts, and it won't be able to take the stress and breaks sooner or later. Manufacturing and designing errors are good examples of this. Quite similar to this is the normal wear of the parts. Even if there are no errors in the part, it still won't last forever. The best and only example of this in LFS are the tires.
While LFS is very realistic in terms of tire physics and suspension simulation, the car damage has got less attention in the last updates, if not got tweaked down a little bit. LFS does simulate deformation of suspension parts effecting to the geometry (= tires get bent into interesting angles) but the whole system is still wip (Work In Progress). The wip part shows in that the suspension parts can't simply break in to two; generally, the parts just get shorter, even the carbon fibre ones. LFS has also engine damage modelled so one needs to be careful not to damage the engine by misuse. The effect of engine damage is quite minimal, however, and in some cars you can shift quite recklessly without any visible or audible damage to the engine or transmission. Currently the transmission can't break at all, but engine damage is there. Cars are fitted with rev limited so it is harder to damage the engine with a bad upshift.
Car damage in LFS
I have attached some pictures to this post to show what kind of damage you can get and what it means and how LFS shows it. These pictures are attached below the text and can be enlarged by clicking on them. You should pay special attention towards these pictures while they are discussed below. There are information in the pictures that otherwise may not get noticed or is hard to explain in plain text
Let's start with engine damage.
This is quite easy as currently a broken engine in LFS means that the engine simply loses power. A broken engine can be heard from the peculiar sound it makes, it sounds a bit like "popcorn". This is the most recognizable way of how engine damage is implemented in LFS. You can check this by yourself by accelerating the to higher speed and the quickly shifting back to lower gear. As a result you have a car with damaged engine. The engine can't be totally killed with this method, even if the said method is quite a dramatic one. The engine state doesn't deteriorate after there is some damage if you stay below the safe rev ranges, so you can still drive the car without fear of DNF.
Losing power may not be an issue on short pickup races but when the races get longer, with the possible driver changes, it gets more attention. The main reason for this is that you are driving longer stints which, in turn, means that even small amounts of engine damage can have noticeable effect on you total race time because the small time penalty gets multiplied over large number of laps. Engine damage can not be fixed on a pitstop. This probably the single most biggest improvement from Y patch. Before Y the engine damage was repaired immediatelly while in pits.
The most probable situations where engine damage can occur when you are shifting down quickly while braking and when accelerating out from the corners - things you do all the time in LFS. When accelerating and upshifting it is important that you lift the throttle to prevent the revs getting too high. On some cars this kind of overrevving will cause engine damage, on some cars it won't (as much or at all). Keeping the throttle on while upshifting has, however, a performance bonus in turbo engine cars and this can be seen as some kind of trade-off between speed gain in short term and consistency in long term. There is no fatal race-ending damage so sometimes a risk is more than worth it. Especially when you are not paying for the damages in real life cash.
Boss
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