Collective interactions in the preequilibrium quark matter and hadronic resonance gas stage of ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions are studied in the framework of the the transport theoretical approach RQMD. The paper reviews string fusion into color ropes and hadronic rescattering which serve as models for these interactions. Hadron production in central Pb(160AGeV) on Pb collisions has been calculated. The changes of the final flavor composition are more pronounced than in previous RQMD studies of light ion induced reactions at 200AGeV. The ratio of created quark pairs ss/(uū+dd) is enhanced by a factor of 2.4 in comparison to pp results. Color rope formation increases the initially produced antibaryons to 3 times the value in the 'NN mode', but only one quarter of the produced antibaryons survives because of subsequent strong absorption. The differences in the final particle composition for Pb on Pb collisions compared to S induced reactions are attributed to the hadronic resonance gas stage which is baryon-richer and lasts longer. *

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Elliptical energy flow patterns in non-central Au(11.7AGeV) on Au reactions have been studied employing the RQMD model. The strength of these azimuthal asymmetries is calculated comparing the results in two different modes of RQMD (mean field and cascade). It is found that the elliptical flow which is readily observable with current experimental detectors may help to distinguish different reasonable expansion scenarios for baryon-dense matter. The final asymmetries are very sensitive to the pressure at maximum compression, because they involve a partial cancelation between early squeeze-out and subsequent flow in the reaction plane. This cancelation can be expected to occur in a broad energy region covered by the current heavy ion fixed-target programs at BNL and at CERN.A primary goal of current heavy-ion physics utilizing beams at ultrarelativistic energies is the creation and observation of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a phase in which quarks and gluons are deconfined and chiral symmetry has been restored. The extraction of flow signatures from experimental data has found considerable interest recently amid present ambiguities concerning the QGP formation. Since collective flows are driven by pressure gradients, their measurement provides a diagnostic tool to study the transient pressure in these reactions. A first-order phase transition is generically associated with the presence of a 'softest point' in the equation of state. The tendency of matter to expand on account of its internal pressure is reduced