Printable View
alright, so i have a car's mass, its velocity, and the time it took the car to come to a complete stop.
ex: a car 1200 kg going 30 m/s takes 30 seconds to come to a stop (i'm not sure if thats realistic but just bear with me)
OBJECTIVE: calculate the impulse.
i know its just a simple calculation. I know impulse equals the force (newtons) times the change in time. But All I have is the above information, I don't know how many newtons it is.
Would I just do grams x time? I dunno...you know?
This page will help you
You have the mass, m, the change in velocity, delta v, and the change in time, delta t. So it's just a case of sticking in the numbers and turning the handle (As it happens you don't even need all the info you have been given, which is always a nice position to be in :) ).
think about it this way....newtons is a unit of force, and force = mass*acceleration ...everything else is just plugging in numbers
And to add my 2 cents this is a very common physics problem many of us encounter in game programming. Very useful - most of physics is when it comes to games.
So jot the formula down somewhere because you'll probably use it again if you ever want to code some type of collision response in C.