Sat May 09, 2015 12:25 pm by VicVictory
If y'all have been paying attention, they're based on Zabhawkin's original "Best car" formula, which uses a lot of square roots. It's very similar to his current "Adapt or die".
Because of all them square roots, plus the fact that I weight things with multipliers, "simply" posting the formula at the beginning of the competition is actually a bit of a nightmare. But also because the scale between different stats (ex: comfort, practicality, and economy) are all different, a "normal" weight on one stat may carry more or less weight than another. For instance, a "normal" weight on practicality, whose scale is 2-3 times higher than comfort, makes it worth more than a "heavy" weight on Comfort.
You can be rest assured that there IS a mathematical formula before I ever post, the SAME mathematical formula is applied to all cars in a given competition, and that I don't fudge anything based on how much I like/dislike a specific design. You can also be assured that I have designed at a minimum 3 different vehicles in a balancing exercise to make sure that different approaches will yield similar results. Yes, not testing the not-Defender body this time around (because I had forgotten about its existence) was an oversight on my part. If I were to find a similar disparity in the future, I would either handicap or ban the specific body beforehand.
If that's not enough for you all, I suppose I COULD post the individual competition-specific spreadsheet in the original post, going forward. But... IMO that takes away some of the "magic" of engineering a solution through a relatively quick design process, and turns the thing into a slugfest of who has the most time to devote to tweaking their individual car for every single bloody point.
One of the things I've heard repeatedly as a good point of this series that I've been running is how quick and fun it is. I DON'T want to mire it down by making the individual designers focus so much on mathematics that they forget about or ignore the design element, or take hours on end tweaking it. That would not be personally fun for me if I were an entrant in a competition (and, for the record, when I created my car's for Zab's Adapt or Die... I only made sure the fleet made the minimum fuel standards, as well as the individual stat minimums for each demographic. I didn't create a spreadsheet with every calculation that he posted, obsessively tweaking and redesigning. My entire fleet of five cars took an hour to design.)
As I said, if you guys REALLY REALLY want, I'll start posting the calculation spreadsheet in the OP of new challenges going forward. But I'm against it because of what it will then do to the challenge. And remember:
Consistent math, determined before the opening of the competition. Pre-balanced with a minimum of 3 designs. No favoritism.
The American automotive press, even in the 80's, wasn't super tolerant of foreign cars.
