Thank you Kung, guess i messed up my DP... sorry for that
You are right, i tried to use as few as possible bullettraces for groundaligning and coldetection. The UN-vehicle mod for example uses like 20 traces (per single vehicle and each tenth of a second!), so i decided to use only 3 traces for the aligning stuff (since only 3 points of a vehicle are touching the ground on an uneven floor) and 2 crossed, direction and speed based traces for collision detection. I didnt found a better/faster way of achieving 'realistic' vehicle behaviour in cod2 yet.
FYI in cod players bounding volumes are represented as cylinders (thats why you can 'stay in the air' a certain distance on walledges) and the function physicsTrace() will check this volume as kind of a volumetrace. Maybe you can do something with it