The making of the Shocker (Patreon)

Typically when creating an original vehicle for beam, I start  with an existing car from in the game and modify it heavily to be a new vehicle. The vics are based off of the grand marshal, as are the olds 98s. If you've been around long enough, you remember how long the dev process was on the Crown Vics. The original deformation testing phase was a 6 month long process, mostly catering to small details of how the cars bend and finding the appropriate overall strength. A lot of it was also making the cars less "sticky" and this carried work over to the Olds, which helped me develop that car in a much shorter time period. 

Moving onto the sub framed shockers, I had two options. Drastically overhaul the suspension and frame used in the crown vics, or repeat the process from the Grand Marshal with a different car. Beam doesn't really have a good candidate as the base of a sub framed car, so I looked to the Gavril Gladiator, a beam-rebadged version of the 68-71 Coronet by modder Stoat Muldoon. This entirely original unofficial car was, in my opinion, above the quality of official cars for its time, and surprisingly good deformation. The biggest problem was the Coronet is a unibody car. 

This cars production has been helped tremendously by the work of Luke Shofner, from deformation feedback to car measurements. With his help, I modeled the car entirely by hand, as no laser-scans of this body exist to my knowledge. The version that everyone has  right now has since been completely overhauled to look better and fit proper dimensions better. Once modeled, the car had to be converted to subframe, the firewall forward section of the frame was torn out and the mounting section created from scratch, and we moved onto deformation.

I had 2 major issues once I got to this step. The first was suspension had to be overhauled to overcome problems it was experiencing, and the second was how springy the car was. The original mod, as great as it is, has much springier beam values than official beam vehicles. This meant that on impact, the frame would flex up, and spring back, punching cars back. This in itself was a bit of work to overcome which involved a lot of weight changes all around the vehicle. 

I typically break car deformation testing into 2 phases, being major bend points and minor details. The first goal of the car was to get  the stock trunk to whale tail. Once achieved, I can  worry about finer details such as the way  pillars, roof, and quarter panel behave. 

I've noticed a lot of people are less than impressed with the shocker at the moment. I imagine those of you weren't around for the early versions of the Vic to see how big of a jump they make, but by the time I'm finished with the shocker I'm hoping at least a few new fans of these cars will pop up in competition! I currently have a list of things that need to be  finished  over the next month or so, and once the shocker is at the level of finish that the olds is at, the next 2 vehicles will begin production.