Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake
Maybe. Maybe not. I think the jury is out unless/until we talk to someone who has crawled through all the trade-offs (including buyers' psychologies) in the real world.
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If we presume there are bumpers on the sides, then we can presume an impact will spread pretty evenly across the outer edge vertical face. If that were rounded, the force of the impact would be more concentrated.
I forget the VA/NC team who usually does carbon fiber. They've been next to us in the pits a few times, so I got to talk to them. IIRC, a lot of their super structure was rounded tubing. The edges of the drive train frame were filleted with a small (0.25"-0.5") radius but otherwise the faces were straight.
On the plus side, this stuff is so lightweight you can disassemble the vast majority of the superstructure into COTS parts and the carbon fiber frame while still being under the withholding limit. The downside to that is that you're spending all day on Thursday re-assembling...