Temporarily stymied on the cup stacking front (awaiting arrival of official Speed Stacking equipment) and slightly bruised and frustrated from the Astrojax, the team was in serious danger of having to do some work when Jack was kind enough to suggest another amusement… Truck Dismount.
Truck Dismount is a physics simulator that allows you to finally answer nagging questions like “How much damage would a person take if he were riding on top of a truck when it went over a ramp and then slammed into a wall? (Answer: between 15000 and 45000 points.) You place the crash test dummy (on top of the truck, in the truck, in front of the bumper, etc.) and up to two ramps. You choose the truck speed and a couple other parameters. Then you press the big “Dismount” button and watch as the accident plays itself out.
My personal favorite is the catapault, where the guy starts out on top of the truck and completely clears the wall. It never scores very high, but there’s just something about those windmilling arms and legs that brings a smile to my face. Best viewed with the camera angle that is fixed on the guy, of course.
My personal best score is 56887. Several people at work have scored in the 56000-57000 range, but no one has been able to beat it. The posted high scores on the web site go above 200K. If anybody has suggestions for what sorts of arrangements produce such high scores, I’d be very interested to hear them.
The scoring is a little suspicious… rolling the truck over length-wise so that it falls directly on top of the dummy should really do more than 5000 or so points of damage. Also, I’d like to see some concept of style points. It’s so disappointing when you do something really nifty, like landing the guy on top of the wall, or balancing the truck on its nose, and the score isn’t very high. What you really want to hear is that the US and Canadian judges both rate it an 8, but the Russian judge only gives it a 6.
Addendum: I wrote this last week, when the collective high score was in the 56-57K range. When I came in this morning, I discovered that Jim had managed to get 137K by getting the dummy’s head stuck in the grill (where it was mashed between the truck and the wall). So the bar has been raised.