Ankylosaur Ring Defense: Gap & Tail-Club Impact Simulator (2D)

Herd

Herd size 16 animals

Predator aggression 55%

Ring discipline 70%

Run

Live readout

Ring closure

100%

Herd energy

100%

Breaches

Tail-club blocks

Ankylosaur, tail club facing outward Predator Widest gap — a breach risk

How the ring holds (or fails)

The 3D Ankylosaurus Armor Circle Lab shows a herd forming a tight cluster and tracks only aggregate spacing. This 2D companion turns that into an explicit ring of individually placed animals, each defending one angular slot, and asks the mechanical question the 3D view never resolves: what actually happens at the one gap a predator finds?

Ideal slot angle:      theta_i = 2*pi*i / N
Slot holding force:    a_i = -k(discipline) * offset_i - c * omega_i + noise(1 - discipline)
Gap size:              max over i of (theta_(i+1) - theta_i), sorted by current angle
Tail-club impact:      if gap_deg < breach_deg: predator reflected, v' = -e * v  (e ~ 0.6-0.9)
                        if gap_deg >= breach_deg: predator passes through — a breach

Herd size — more animals divide the same ring into narrower slots, so the same jitter produces smaller absolute gaps.
Predator aggression — how often the predator tests the current widest gap. It always targets the true weak point, not a random point on the ring.
Ring discipline — the spring stiffness pulling each animal back to its slot after being jostled. Low discipline lets slots drift, widening the worst gap until a charge breaches it; high discipline snaps gaps shut fast enough that most charges end in a tail-club impact instead.

A block is modelled as a real momentum reflection off the two flanking tails, not a scripted animation: the predator's incoming velocity is reversed and damped by a restitution factor, the same way an elastic collision would actually throw it back. A breach happens only when the gap is geometrically wide enough for the predator's body to fit through before the flanking animals can close it.

Open savanna Ankylosaur Predator

Top-down ring

Idle