Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26251020-20150416160040/@comment-69.255.244.73-20150517194840

69.255.244.73 wrote: I would say that sliding into an obstacle or a wall and less likely to crash, even with the same velocity vector, is still somewhat realistic. A simple argument is that sliding provides the car with a sliding angle. When in situations that the sliding angle partially cancels the trajectory angle determind by the velocity vectory, the car will have a smaller geometry impact angle to the wall or obstacle. If we just consider simplemindedly uniform mass and flat rigid wall, under the same velocity vector, the smaller the geometry impact angle, the smaller the impact. An example to this is if you let a pole free fall from a certain height, releasing it vertically versus with a much flatter angle. if we neglect air resistence, and the dropping height is much greater then the length of the pole, then the impact velocity vector will be the same, but the former one will certainly leave a much stronger impact mark.