This contribution addresses improvement of the optimization formulation of structural optimization for crash structures considering dynamic impact load cases and transient design measures. Crashworthiness is an important topic in the structural design process for automotive and transportation design. Increasing regulations as well as customer demand for transportation safety continuously pushes the requirements for crashworthiness in vehicles. Especially novel sustainable modes of transportation like electric vehicles and liquid hydrogen airplanes are highly dependent on lightweight solutions to fulfil these requirements to maintain their viability. This work aims to tackle the problem of crashworthiness optimization by applying the discrete transient adjoint method to incorporate transient design responses like displacements, velocities and accelerations into the crashworthiness optimization formulation. Furthermore, this work discusses secondary measures derived from these kinematic measures. These aim to improve the convergence of the transient objective function, prevent unwanted failure modes in the crash structure and tackle numerical phenomena resulting from the temporal discretization of the transient design response inferred by the discrete transient adjoint method. The developed methods are applied to both academic benchmarks as well as to optimize the crash structure of a liquid hydrogen aircraft fuel tank.