1.1 wheels:

[amankd]

the wheels are really annoying, yes its nice to have all the stuff but the whole wheelblocked:yes thing is a pain in the poophole, and im sure i remember them saying that we would be able to turn up the torque so you could have faster wheels, and they over stress too easilly and indestructible parts does not apply to over stressing, i feel as if quite alot of the fun of the wheels has been lost

[Geschosskopf]

I feel your pain.  Now calm down and let's try to discuss things in proper sentences with punctuation, capital letters, and other such refinements.

I have noticed the following things:

1.  Traction Control
This should always be set to zero.  If you leave it at the default of 1.0, rovers can't climb hills more than about 10^.  OTOH, with it set to zero, you can climb hills like you could since the beginning of time.  I have yet to discover any downside to reducing this setting to zero and see no reason at all to increase it above default.  Perhaps it might be useful for a sportscar on a flat track but otherwise, it's bad.

2.  Suspension Lock
This seems to help with, and occasionally cure, many ills, such as:

• Tires popping when turning at low speed, such as orienting to drive off the side of the the runway as soon as the vehicle spawns.
• Tires popping from crossing minor terrain irregularities such as driving off the side of the runway.
• Other tires popping from the whole rover twitching when you repair the 1st flat tire.
• Docking base modules on slightly uneven ground with varying vehicle weights.

OTOH, locking the suspension is more likely to blow tires when doing high-speed, reasonably high jumps.  It will also make negotiating very irregular ground much harder because fewer of your wheels will be on the ground providing push.

3.  All-Wheel Drive
In rough terrain, you need this.  On flat terrain, it depends on how fast you want to go and how much EC/sec you're willing to provide.  In 1.1, the EC/sec required for wheels increased by about 5x so limiting how many wheels suck power might be important.  But  OTOH, the fewer the driving wheels, the lower the top speed.  But in any case, you pretty much need a large fuelcell array to move a rover of any useful size.

4.  All-Wheel Steering
You need this for maneuvering in tight spaces or docking base modules.  If you try turning at high speed, however, there's a good chance you'll flip.  Nothing's really changed there.  I personally prefer to have all-wheel steering and use torque for fine-tuning my course while driving at high speed, which seems to have zero chance of flipping the rover.  This requires assigning the rover keys to something other than the default WASD.  I use KP 8 and KP 4-6.

5.  Wheels are Poison to Kerbals
Do not, repeat DO NOT, let a Kerbal come in contact with a wheel.  The slightest touch makes the Kerbal go ragdoll.  If he falls where he's still touching a wheel, he'll stay ragdolled until he or the rover moves to separate them.  And if you have a couple of wheels close together, it's possible for a Kerbal to pachinko between them until he's eventually flung away at high speed.  This is often horizontally and no harm done, but it's possible for the Kerbal to go upwards over 100m and die when he hits the ground.  

Fortunately, Kerbals don't have to get anywhere close to wheels to fix flats, but be careful with hatch and ladder placement relative to wheels.

6.  Repairing 1 Wheel Flattens Another or Repaired Wheels Instantly Reflatten
Rovers jump when you fix flats, which is no change (expect be sure to stand as far away as possible so it doesn't jump into your Kerbal).  Fortunately, you can repair wheels from several meters away, and you can now repair multiple wheels in very quick succession thanks to the draggable right-click menus.  Position the Kerbal so he's in repair range of all your flat tires, then bring up all their right-click menus.  Group these menus adjacent to each other and quickly hit all the "Repair wheel" buttons as fast as you can.  Often, but not always, you can get several wheels repaired before physics wants to pop one of them, and thus repair wheels you sometimes can't individually.

Edited April 26, 2016 by Geschosskopf

[Caligari]

I've noticed this too, and honestly, even turning up the stressTolerance in the wheel file (Kerbal Space Program/GameData/Squad/Parts/Wheel) by 100 points makes them breakable but much more rugged.  (Just noticed that the TR-2L Ruggedized wheels have a stress tolerance of 300 while the regular M1 wheel has one of 560? Makes me think something was overlooked? I dunno...)

The wheel blocked issue is just something we have to live with for the time being, it seems, but at least we can tweak the breakability of the wheels until it gets patched. Just comment the old values out with // like so:

        stressTolerance = 400//300

So you can revert to the stock values when the wheel fix comes through.

[Geschosskopf]

After a bit more messing around, I think the inability to climb hills is due to an incorrect interpretation of wheel slip by the Traction Control system.  I really think Traction Control in KSP means the same thing as in real life.  That is, the system reduces power to the wheel when it detects wheel slip/spin.  Problem is, hills give this system a false positive.

Let's say you're roaring along full speed on flat ground with the "go forward" key held down.  The system thus has a benchmark for the expected speed (ie, the max) due to the "go forward" key being held down for such a period of time.  Then you start up a hill.  Due to physics and gravity, your speed drops.  Thus, we have expected speed > actual speed, which Traction Control appears to interpret as wheel spin so decreases power.  This then becomes a self-reinforcing cycle because you've still got "go forward" held down but now actual speed is even less than expected speed due both to the hill and the less wheel power.  So Traction Control sees even more wheel spin and further reduces power, and pretty soon the rover comes to a halt with the "Motor" value for all wheels (apparently analogous to the Thrust Limiter of engines) at zero.

[Znath]

Stop treating the wheel BUG like it's a normal part of the game...  If you have to go through a 10 stage process to make wheels barely workable... it's likely a bug.

They're working on a fix.  It's just horrible and broken right now.  It should be obvious when wheels with 50m/s (over 100mph) impact ratings fall apart under 10m/s.  Or repairing one causes the vehicle to go nuts and break.  Or the insane lack of any friction side to side. 

If you're desperate to cope with the bug, sure try what you want.  I'll wait til 1.1.1

[Geschosskopf]

3 hours ago, Znath said:

Stop treating the wheel BUG like it's a normal part of the game...  If you have to go through a 10 stage process to make wheels barely workable... it's likely a bug.

Well sure, it's a bug.  In fact there are many separate bugs.  The trick is to figure out specifically what they are so they can be fixed.  Which is what I'm trying to do here.  If you're willing to let others do the heavy lifting for you, so you can enjoy the benefits, that's fine.,  Just don't slap people who are, in fact, trying to help you get what you want eventually.

And besides all that, wheels now have a bunch of sliders and values they didn't have before.  Do you know what any of them actually mean or do?  If so, please enlighten us all so we can stop wasting time trying to deduce their meanings from trial and error.  If not, then  you should take an interest in them because regardless of what fixes are coming eventually, I suspect those items are here to stay.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

1.1.1 will probably fix most (some) of  this. 

[Chemp]

On 25.4.2016 at 11:53 PM, Geschosskopf said:

I have noticed the following things:

I've started a new career, so I'm still early in the tech tree. Another thing I've noticed on landing gear, is that the side-to-side swing is reduced greatly if wheel traction is increased to max on the rear wheels, while reducing it on the front. That seems to contradict your findings, maybe because your talking about powered wheels there. Got to do some more testing...

[Geschosskopf]

2 hours ago, Chemp said:

I've started a new career, so I'm still early in the tech tree. Another thing I've noticed on landing gear, is that the side-to-side swing is reduced greatly if wheel traction is increased to max on the rear wheels, while reducing it on the front. That seems to contradict your findings, maybe because your talking about powered wheels there. Got to do some more testing...

There is no "Traction" slider, there's a "Traction Control" slider, which is a different thing (at least in colloquial English).  There is a "Friction" slider which is what actually affects how much grip the wheels have, but "Traction Control" is in effect a dynamic Thrust Limiter.

I'm not sure what you mean by "side-to-side swing".  Do you mean the tendency of the rear end to rotate outboard (and thus ,make the rover to drift) during turns?  If so, then this is expected behavior from a "thrust-limiting" Traction Control system set up the way you describe.  What's happening is that during a turn, the Traction Control is turning an all-wheel-drive rover into a front-wheel-drive rover. Rear-end swing is a result of rear-end thrust so by eliminating that, you minimize drifting.  The downside to this, however, is that the apparent false-positive wheel slip when climbing hills means you'll be limited to flat terrain.

As I see it, the new wheel settings work as follows:

Friction:
Seemingly intended to help with driving on low-gravity worlds.  Friction is pretty much a function of weight (mass * gravity) so the less gravity, the less friction.  Increasing this slider gives you more friction (and thus "traction") than you'd have naturally, so it's easier to drive light rovers on Minmus without needing a downforce engine.  I'm sure it also increases tire stress, but probably also as a function of weight, so no problem on low-gravity worlds, but probably a bad thing in high gravity.  As wheels seem to grip Kerbin's ground just fine without moving this slider, it's probably best not to use this there.

Traction Control:
Seemingly the same idea as in the real world, reducing power to wheels when they seem to be slipping, thereby improving control, stability, and safety.   But the bottom lines is reduced total wheel power while Traction Control is operating, which means lower speeds.  And an apparent false-positive slip signal when climbing hills pretty much nerfs any rovers using this.

Motor:
Not a user control but a informational display.  It shows the instantaneous fraction of the wheel's total potential motive force that's being applied to the rover.  It increases with user inputs for going forwards or backwards (or steering in the case of the mondo wheels) and decreases with both a lack of user input and the operation of the Traction Control system.  It is analogous to the dynamic textual thrust display of jet engines that show varying thrust at different speeds and altitudes.

Wheel Stress:
Another informational display, showing how close a wheel is to going flat.  Seems to increase, as you'd expect, when accelerating, drifting, jumping, and climbing hills. 

 

 

[OSUNightfall]

I have noticed that there is a downside to having friction set to 0 on Kerbin. Your brakes will be far less effective. I generally set friction to 0 for takeoff and turn it back up as I'm braking on landing.

[Broco]

32 minutes ago, OSUNightfall said:

I have noticed that there is a downside to having friction set to 0 on Kerbin. Your brakes will be far less effective. I generally set friction to 0 for takeoff and turn it back up as I'm braking on landing.

Yes, that seems to be the only way to have control about your craft. Those landing gears tend to turn like crazy when you have friction control on auto and reach ~20 m/s but with it being off I think saying that your brakes are less effective is one way to put it. I would say the runway has to be 10x as long :D.

[Geschosskopf]

29 minutes ago, OSUNightfall said:

I have noticed that there is a downside to having friction set to 0 on Kerbin. Your brakes will be far less effective. I generally set friction to 0 for takeoff and turn it back up as I'm braking on landing.

Yeah, airplane landing gear is a totally different situation than rover wheels.  Personally, I haven't yet found a need to tweak the wheel settings for planes at all.

[OSUNightfall]

2 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Yeah, airplane landing gear is a totally different situation than rover wheels.  Personally, I haven't yet found a need to tweak the wheel settings for planes at all.

I said the same thing when all I had used was the medium and larger landing gear, but the first two types of landing gear tend to make planes immediately flip over at 10m/s for no reason at all, killing everyone aboard. Setting friction to 0, suspension to off, and giving them a slight inward camber seems to make them at least useable.

[Geschosskopf]

2 hours ago, OSUNightfall said:

I said the same thing when all I had used was the medium and larger landing gear, but the first two types of landing gear tend to make planes immediately flip over at 10m/s for no reason at all, killing everyone aboard. Setting friction to 0, suspension to off, and giving them a slight inward camber seems to make them at least useable.

Yeah, those starter fixed landing gear (the long-legged kind, not the steerable kind) have always had problems since they were introduced well before 1.1.  I actually consider them better now than they used to be.  Prior to 1.1, when you spawned a plane, it would settle to the ground when physics loaded but on contact it would catapult back into the air, nearly doing a backflip, then bouncing around repeatedly until the oscillations finally died out.  But after that, they worked OK unless you landed with a sink rate greater than about 1m/s, then they bounced badly again.  Now in 1.1, the initial spasms are much reduced and the performance as rover wheels on level ground is flawless.  But they're rather less fond of being driven over bumpy ground than before, a feature that makes the bumpy 1st Tier runway pretty much unusable.  Oh well.

[regex]

3 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

But they're rather less fond of being driven over bumpy ground than before, a feature that makes the bumpy 1st Tier runway pretty much unusable.  Oh well.

Tier 1 runway + LY-01/LY-05 work plenty fine for me in 1.1.  Have to wonder what everyone else is doing with these wheels that makes that runway so unbearable...  Of course, I now operate off the knowledge that all wheels and gear have impact and mass tolerances to cope with, so maybe everyone else just needs to adjust to that information?

[Geschosskopf]

2 minutes ago, regex said:

Tier 1 runway + LY-01/LY-05 work plenty fine for me in 1.1.  Have to wonder what everyone else is doing with these wheels that makes that runway so unbearable...  Of course, I now operate off the knowledge that all wheels and gear have impact and mass tolerances to cope with, so maybe everyone else just needs to adjust to that information?

My problem with the T1 runway has always been more about dragging a wingtip and breaking the wing off than flipping the plane.  The extra bounciness of the fixed gear nowadays just makes this more likely to happen in 1.1 than before.

[regex]

9 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

My problem with the T1 runway has always been more about dragging a wingtip and breaking the wing off than flipping the plane.  The extra bounciness of the fixed gear nowadays just makes this more likely to happen in 1.1 than before.

Ah, so more of a pilot thing than a "GAEM IS BROKN" thing, gotcha.

[NikkyD]

4 wheel drive together with 4 wheel steering is a recipe for desaster (unless you drive granny style)

[Alshain]

28 minutes ago, regex said:

Tier 1 runway + LY-01/LY-05 work plenty fine for me in 1.1.  Have to wonder what everyone else is doing with these wheels that makes that runway so unbearable...  Of course, I now operate off the knowledge that all wheels and gear have impact and mass tolerances to cope with, so maybe everyone else just needs to adjust to that information?

Asside from the colliders being a little off on the LY-01 so you have to have the inward camber, the LY-05 needs about 500-1000 more on the stress tolerance.  That much would still put it well below the next up landing gear.  I've had that wheel blow up on a 30 m/s touchdown with a 4ton aircraft, and that is a little extreme.

Also, all of the steerable wheels need an authority limiter.  It's too easy to roll your plane when using steering (and that's without reaction wheel or yaw!)

Edited April 27, 2016 by Alshain

[NikkyD]

not sure what an " authority limiter" is but they would need reduced steering depending on the speed, like only 10% steering at 90% Vmax, this would avoid the full 30deg left turn with full speed causing a nice turnover

[OSUNightfall]

1 hour ago, Alshain said:

Asside from the colliders being a little off on the LY-01 so you have to have the inward camber, the LY-05 needs about 500-1000 more on the stress tolerance.  That much would still put it well below the next up landing gear.  I've had that wheel blow up on a 30 m/s touchdown with a 4ton aircraft, and that is a little extreme.

Also, all of the steerable wheels need an authority limiter.  It's too easy to roll your plane when using steering (and that's without reaction wheel or yaw!)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a 30m/s descent in any plane is incredibly, dangerously fast. That's almost 100 feet per second. I'd expect any gear to fail in that situation and the plane to explode besides. Even 10m/s is on the fast side depending on size of plane.

1 hour ago, regex said:

Tier 1 runway + LY-01/LY-05 work plenty fine for me in 1.1.  Have to wonder what everyone else is doing with these wheels that makes that runway so unbearable...  Of course, I now operate off the knowledge that all wheels and gear have impact and mass tolerances to cope with, so maybe everyone else just needs to adjust to that information?

Yeah, you're right. It's probably everyone else that is stupid. Nothing to see here folks.

[NikkyD]

I think he meant 30 m/s horizontal speed

[regex]

12 minutes ago, OSUNightfall said:

Yeah, you're right. It's probably everyone else that is stupid. Nothing to see here folks.

I'm literally, seriously wondering why everyone else is having all these issues.  I find the tier 1 runway neither game-breaking, unplayable, nor unusable.  The same goes for the LY-01 and LY-05 gear.  I find both eminently usable now that I understand and respect the fact that they have mass and impact tolerances you have to play to.  They will blow up/get damaged if you pass those limits, and I highly doubt that is going to change, although some of the limits might change a bit.

@Alshain is about the only person around here who gives detailed information about the issues they're having, everyone else is all "HURR GAEM BROKN".  I have nothing to say to Alshain's issues, and in fact agree that some tolerances should be increased, other than that I don't have to camber in the LY-05 wheels.

[Alshain]

18 minutes ago, OSUNightfall said:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a 30m/s descent in any plane is incredibly, dangerously fast. That's almost 100 feet per second. I'd expect any gear to fail in that situation and the plane to explode besides. Even 10m/s is on the fast side depending on size of plane.

Yeah, you're right. It's probably everyone else that is stupid. Nothing to see here folks.

That would be surface speed, I'm not building an Osprey.

[Renegrade]

3 hours ago, Alshain said:

That would be surface speed, I'm not building an Osprey.

Well, that would be a solution to the runway as well - VTOL

3 hours ago, regex said:

 I find the tier 1 runway neither game-breaking, unplayable, nor unusable

No, it's just ridiculous that it's not as good as a) it's own shoulders AND b) the terrain around the runway.  Not game breaking, just silly.  Very silly.  Makes me face palm when I see it, and sidle on over to the right a bit and touch down on the shoulder, and hope that the runway police don't give me a ticket for driving on it..

I actually like the idea of a bumpy dirt runway, just not.. THAT bumpy.  In my own head canon (EOS is love, EOS is life..), I assume that my launches on that runway are unauthorized and that it's actually not finished~