Knight Rider Turbo Boost Stunt: Redesigning K.I.T.T.

[Whitestar]

I've been a Knight Rider fan since I was a kid. One of the coolest features of K.I.T.T. was its ability to turbo boost over obstacles. Now, the kid in me says, "Cool", but the adult in me says, "I very doubt that would work in real life". Years ago, I bought a die-cast model of K.I.T.T. equipped with a working red light scanner. I pretended to turbo boost it in a gentle way to see that the front fender would have been utterly destroyed if it came into contact with the ground (Hey, what can I say, I'm a big kid, so sue me! LOL!). It didn't take me long to come to the conclusion that it is impossible to turbo boost K.I.T.T. (or any kind of car for that matter) without redesigning it. I would think that a 4x4 would be better suited for the task.

Check out the following link below on the Knight Rider Turbo Boost Bloopers vid, it's hilarious!

Anyway, what would it take to redesign K.I.T.T. in order for it to perform jump stunts without compromising its hull integrity?

 

[.Scott]

Dropping a car from 25+ feet and expecting the suspension to handle it is probably too much.
Also, many of those tricks are at speeds below 60mph, so you should expect too much from aerodynamics.
That leaves rocket boosters - to make sure the car lands evenly with no more vertical velocity than can be handled by the suspension.

 

[hmmm27]

Anyway, what would it take to redesign K.I.T.T. in order for it to perform jump stunts without compromising its hull integrity?

The beginning of the jump can be reduced to a simple calculation and very little gnashing of teeth by using a one litre gas tank and a lockable suspension, and not AWD. That limits the vehicle to being a non-wobbling solid mass as it heads up and off the ramp.

The landing, you'd want the shock absorbers to be oleos, rated specifically for the drop height.

Might want to beef the frame up a bit (a lot).

Real life ? I volunteer to watch from a safe distance. Do pulse-jets need a warmup period ?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Dropping a car from 25+ feet and expecting the suspension to handle it is probably too much.

Only if you want to re-use the vehicle.

 

[jrmichler]

For those that remember the show The Dukes of Hazzard, there was an opening shot of the car landing after a jump. If you watched carefully, the left front fender buckled on landing.

A much smaller jump, barely enough to bottom the front suspension, forced me to get a front end alignment on my old 1997 Dodge Dakota. Twice.

 

[sysprog]

In the early '80s my girlfriend had a black Mazda RX7 that she let me drive -- sometimes in a safe enough situation I would as a joke say take over KITT and let go of the steering wheel and step on the pedal for a second -- the fantasy is becoming a reality now, but I don't trust anything to be operating vehicles on the public highway road that doesn't have a life that it could lose.

 

[member 656954]

Check out the following link below on the Knight Rider Turbo Boost Bloopers vid, it's hilarious!

It is hilarious, @Whitestar, but OMG, how many cars must they have gone through? In terms of stunt jumping cars, this is a nice description of the process by someone who knows, Travis Pastrana.

 

[essenmein]

Can you say spinal compression?

Vehicle that can maybe handle it?

These might come close:

In this video there are some brutal landings to flat where even 3ft of suspension travel does naught:

 

[member 656954]

Wow, jumping cars is one thing, jumping them over woman sitting on stairs, that's a whole other level of insanity!

 

[essenmein]

Wow, jumping cars is one thing, jumping them over woman sitting on stairs, that's a whole other level of insanity!

Yeah don't know why they have to do that, completely irrelevant to the video, which should just be awesome driving.

 

[essenmein]

That landing though, what's that 10ft maybe? Bottoms everything out hard, pretty sure he would have felt that in his spine.

 

[member 656954]

Bottoms everything out hard, pretty sure he would have felt that in his spine.

Absolutely! I read some years ago there was one of those TV weatherman / entertainers on an Australian morning show who jumped cars in a monster truck and ended up with fractured vertebrae. Ouch

 

[Whitestar]

Can you say spinal compression?

Vehicle that can maybe handle it?

These might come close:
View attachment 258883

In this video there are some brutal landings to flat where even 3ft of suspension travel does naught:

Yes, I'd figured it would be something like those vehicles.

Or perhaps something like this:

 

[member 656954]

Or perhaps something like this:

It looks like some kind of automotive hedgehog, @Whitestar Though I wonder if it would survive a jump, there seems to be zero ground clearance.

 

[essenmein]

Yes, I'd figured it would be something like those vehicles.

Or perhaps something like this:

View attachment 259141

heh is that a homemade bat mobile?

Scifi likes a lot of crazy articulated vehicles:

We build them in real life too, its just that the forces on those long levers are obnoxious for bearings etc, so they tend to be slow crawling like vehicles:

https://www.throttlextreme.com/extreme-oddity-chainlink-4x4-will-take-rock-crawlers-cannot-go/

 

[Whipley Snidelash]

The problem with jumps is that when the front wheels are off the jump ramp the front end of the car immediately starts to drop at about the acceleration of gravity. This is why Cars generally don’t land on all four wheels when they land from a jump but instead crashing the nose of the car into the ground. This is one reason why they generally use a landing ramp it’s at an angle so that the car lands on all four wheels.

Might want to check out how many cars they destroy that are duplicates of the real one in shows that show a particular Car doing jumps.

PS I am getting sick of correcting the random capital letters that iOS inserts everywhere, sorry