Matrix Aran

The only thing I have to add to what has already been said is that in one test case, I had a pair of NERV engines attached to radial attachment nodes. Every time I cloned the nodes and placed them nearby, the DV calculation would increase. This was to try to work around clustering on an engine plate.

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Launch clamps were causing it for me.

This just sounds like priviliged ranting, along with the other "Oh god KSP2 is a disaster release" threads floating around. This is in a far better place this early in the dev cycle than KSP 1 ever was at this point, and if this is the starting point, I expect it to grow far better than KSP1 did. So look forward to the future!

Partially. Theres a monoprop tank burried in there, which follows after it, a bicoupler and two intercoolers. Again, its not clipped in more than 50% of its volume, but it does have to be clipped in to smooth out the contours of the hull (and I'm still not happy with it yet.)

Here's what I have in mind for Laythe. Most of my designs play a little fast and loose with tank clipping. I'd say they're never clipped in more than 50% of their volume, and only really ever for aesthetics

We all have our own ideas of fun I see it as an engineering challenge, and I agree it probably can't be done, simply because I doubt there's a hard limit where there's no way to squeeze a bit more out of the engineering.

The main reason is that I've been far (far) too lazy to rebind the default rover controls from WASD, so when its in SAS only mode, the WASD keys work as normal. If I go so airborne that I can swap it over to pilot mode, I'll re orientate, but most of the time I'll only let myself get airborne if I think the launch angle will also land well. This also kinda factors back into why I'm so insistent on trying to tune a design to not be unstable in the first place. I want to go fast, but I don't want to get -too- cheesy with the SAS wheels. Another factor in asking this question is that I keep figuring that there must be a better way to design a rover that can go fast. The engineering problems likely have cropped up in the real world, but I don't have that much automotive engineering experience to have any sort of intuition about how to further refine a design.

I'm curious, is the part clipping rule still in effect for fueltanks and such if they're being used to enhance the asthetic characteristics of the craft? Seems to be a common thing in most modern kerbal craft designs and I'm curious to know if the rule has evolved over the years.

Thats correct. When you play with GLOC enabled, your Kerbal's role and experience play a part in their G tolerance. Tourists also have (somewhat lower) tolerances and contracts can fail (or succeed) if you cause them to pass out. That said, at the default tollerances you have to make some exceptionally extreme maneuvers to cause even a level 1 kerbal to pass out, so its still mostly for flavor.

Its not a really intuitive concept to teach is the problem. As for things done in my kerbal today, I've been playing around with high speed rovers. Ive been trying to tune one for offroad travel without using too much cheese, which has involved alot of experiments with suspension settings and friction settings. Still haven't found what causes some wheels to lock up when landing after a small bit of airtime, so I'm trying to avoid that all together.

I am interested in using wheel friction to tune a rover to understeer at speed and avoid flips, but I'd rather not induce any other sillyness/instability. Ridiculously strong structural parts and engine CoM sillyness aren't quite satisfying, as they somewhat trivialize the engineering of a rover, though I do appreciate them being mentioned as I'm sure other readers of this thread may find a use for them.

So what you've laid out is the basis of most of my current rover designs. Low CoM, wide wheelbase, with an SAS only reaction wheel. The problem is I don't find that good enough, and I still have more questions. What pris and cons are there to more than four wheels on the rover? Can the suspension be tuned so that small dips in the terrain don't launch the rover into the air? Any way to keep the wheels from locking up on landing? I'm looking for the details that could offer better than just the baseline.

So, as the title suggests, my question is about the physics of building and tuning a rover to manage to reach the highest posssible speeds over a variety of terrain. After doing some searching I managed to find a few of the old racing challenge threads but many were before the latest changes to rover wheels and few posts went into any of the details or logic of their designs, at least not at the level of detail I'm interested in. I've also gone searching for high speed rover tutorials but I've not found many. It's all well and good that a rover can reach its maximum speed on a flat runway, but I'd like to be able to tune my rover to achive the greatest possible speed over terrain, while manuvering. I realise, much like with real world racing, that there's a limit to how fast you can turn a wheeled vehicle and how bumpy the terrain can be, but I'd like to get my designs as close to that limit as I can, and I'm hoping you kind folks can help me do that. As for the body where the rover will be, I'd Ideally like three design strategies. One for bodies that have a very low surface gravity, such as minmus, another for bodies with more modest gravity, such as Duna, and a third for the Eve/Tylo classes of planet. Given that rovers usually cross one biome to the next, they'd have to deal with hill climbing/descents, and obstacle avoidance of the new surface features.

Funny enough, I've had them flop about with cubic struts node attached. I've had them also create all sorts of weird phantom force behavior when stationary on the ground. They seem to only work reliably if under no outside forces at all, which somewhat seems to defeat their purpose.

I've had them flop even on orbit. I've had them start causing phantom forces. I've had them start of at arbitrary angles. All sorts of wierd behaviour.

So, I'm trying to figure out what exactly causes hinges to be floppy. I've noticed that even locking them, they sometimes sag on my craft. Other times I'll reload a quicksave of a craft only to find that one of the hinges has completely moved out of position. So the purpose of this thread is more than anything to ask, what are some of the best practices to use the new robotics parts so that they will endure on a craft beyond just one mission?

Yes.

I've found plenty of colideable rocks much like the one in the kspedia screenshot for collectable features, hoever none of them allow me to pick them up.

@Bottle Rocketeer 500 Not a worry. A lot of times it takes modeling out a piece before you really get a sense of how the shape is actually formed in real life. The moment I flattened in the windows like that in that screenshot, I realized they were probably not designed to be flat, as evidenced by the odd spacing between the frame and the fuselage. If I may offer some free advice though. Whenever you plan to punch holes into a cylindrical shape, it pays to keep a copy of the untouched mesh around. You've probably already noticed the pinching artifacts that have crept up around the centerline near the window cutouts. When you start If you keep a copy of the untouched mesh around, you can use it as a target for the shrinkwrap modifier and get back your perfect curvature, while still being able to throw in plenty of new loop cuts.

I don't see any reference images in the file, but I take it you want something that looks somewhat like this? Where the window panes are perfectly flat sheets of glass? http://prntscr.com/kle9ur

Very awesome and good to hear. This is exactly what I was looking for in the original post but couldn't find, and it makes me very excited to get home and start to work with it.

So just to be clear, if I were to build an IVA with MAS and ASET props, I would not need to have RPM as a dependancy? The original post isn't quite clear on how MAS departs from RPM and I'm curious what improvements you've made over RPM.

Well the key question is, what part of the process do you want to start with? Do you need to know about modeling the parts? Texturing? Animating? Programming? Its important because things like modeling I can help with. But I know nothing about working with config files that would be helpful to any of your questions. In general, if you're starting from scratch, you probably want to make a really simple 3d model that you can use to prototype your decoupler or fairing and see what pieces and sizes you need. You can then go back and model them with confidence that you won't need to have to make painful fixes to your art after the fact.

Yes. Some screenshots and reference for where you are and what you want to achieve would be helpful.