Car Wars 5th edition physics problem

[Magesmiley]

Originally Posted by Teclis

Hi,

I played Car Wars 5th edition for the first time on Saturday. The Three phase system has a problem with the physics in that a car moving at a high velocity can pass a car with a low velocity during its movement phase and then when the lower velocity car moves it can initiate a collision onto the rear of the car with the higher velocity.

In essence you have a slower moving vehicle colliding with a faster moving vehicle that is both in front of it at moving in the same direction, which is impossible.

This could not happen in the Deluxe edition because in each phase a car was only moving one or two inches.

I've been playing Car Wars since I was eight and in my opinion the re-release edition was the best one because it had the deluxe edition phase system with only six phases. The only thing I thought might be better with the 5th edition was the larger scale would be good for hobbyists who prefer building and painting models.

This is a problem with Classic Car Wars as well. It occurs less often there due to cars moving multiple times in a phase less often than in 5th edition. Higher speeds increase the likelihood of it occurring. However, even when cars only move once each phase, it is still possible if the slower car makes a turn into the rear of a car that just passed it.

It's ultimately an artifact of the vehicles alternating movement in time slices. The smaller the slices of time (and movement) the less likely you are to see this problem. Even in video games (which look real enough) the movement is off a tiny bit when a collision occurs - again due to dividing movement up into slices.

As to rules... just treat it as a 0 mph collision (no damage) and move on.

And if you like the size of the 5th edition, you can get the same effect by tripling the scale of the Classic (4th edition) rules.