Does anyone know just quite what spring strength and damper actually do?

[Archgeek]

I'd assumed spring was obvious and damper was like a dashpot, controlling movement attenuation, but that's clearly not the case as zero spring and max damper causes this little thing (here attempting minimum speed flight) to leap violently into the air in a backflip and explode:

Spoiler

 

Since all manner of other craft use the suspension sub-system now, I would know just what the two values actually do, as I would expect weak a spring high damper configuration to bottom out and sit there pathetically, rather than do an acrobatic pirouette right off the handle.

[bewing]

Heh. I hope someone knowledgeable answers your question -- but one thing I did notice is that "damper" is not a coefficient (the way it should be if you are going to do a Force = x * spring coefficient - dx * damping coefficient calculation) -- it's listed as a "damper ratio." How could they possibly make a ratio out of it? I duuno. But the slider does move, and when it moves, stuff happens. So that's better than nothing.

[Stargate525]

I don't know the math. From my limited experimentation, spring strength increases the height your wheels rest on the suspension the farther the bar is to the right. Damper stiffens the suspension traverse when you move it to the LEFT, with the unfortunate side-effect that the far-right setting seems to violently attempt to restore to the default height.

[nli2work]

springRatio increases the mass the wheel can support. damperRatio counters bounciness from spring decompressing. The tweakble sliders, range 0.05~2, most likely are multipliers to the values in the config file. Unfortunately there's dynamic adjustments going on in the suspension module and it's very hard to get any predictable behaviour out of them. I have no idea why the lower tier stock wheels are configured as they are. 

You don't want to set suspension all the way down, there are extra colliders in the wheels to prevent them from clipping into the terrain when the wheel is on its side. When you reduce suspension all the way down, you increase the chance the extra collider rubbing against the ground and popping the wheel up.

you might want to give GoSlash's stock landing gear fix a try.

Edited May 5, 2016 by nli2work

[Temeter]

To my general understanding, it's like this:

Spring is how hard the suspension pushes against the crafts weight (=light crafts need less, you see the effect already when standing on the airstrip). Like a spring. :^)

Damper is how easily the spring is moved into any direction. Higher settings make the spring more sluggish to react, which diminishes the effect of small impacts or oscillations and keeping the craft stable. Too high, and the suspension can't effectively balance out heavier impacts, tho, like during landing.

 

What you want depends on how heavy your craft is, how stable it is, and how hard the impacts are that you want to deal with.

Edited May 5, 2016 by Temeter