Why do my wheels keep exploding on take off?

[boolybooly]

I am trying to take off using three point LV-10 Small Landing Gear on a 24t space plane and the take off velocity is over 100 m/s. (64bit version)

They look right for this craft, the bigger ones look much too big and gawky plus they weigh 5x more.

When I try to lift off with this craft the wheels always explode.

I have tried upgrading the runway but it doesnt help. I tried strutting the wheels and while that was no easy matter because the wheel model doesn't accept struts very willingly that also didnt help.

So what is going on here, is there a bug related to lift off triggering a crash event? Is what it looks like. Is it a known thing or is there something I am missing?

Edited May 31, 2016 by boolybooly

[Combatsmithen]

1 hour ago, boolybooly said:

I am trying to take off using three point LV-10 Small Landing Gear on a 24t space plane and the take off velocity is over 100 m/s. (64bit version)

They look right for this craft, the bigger ones look much too big and gawky plus they weigh 5x more.

When I try to lift off with this craft the wheels always explode.

I have tried upgrading the runway but it doesnt help. I tried strutting the wheels and while that was no easy matter because the wheel model doesn't accept struts very willingly that also didnt help.

So what is going on here, is there a bug related to lift off triggering a crash event? Is what it looks like. Is it a known thing or is there something I am missing?

 

 

Wheels are a mess, stay away from wheels. They are unusable now

Edited May 31, 2016 by Combatsmithen

[severedsolo]

It's known, the first tier wheels in particular are a bit... twitchy. There are a few things you can do:

1) If you don't mind mods, you can try Goslash27's fix here (will also need module manager) it's not perfect, but it helps.

2) I have found that hanging on "S" is a good way to get your wheels to blow up, wait until you are up to speed, then try taking off.

3) Try moving the wheels. I've found that moving the wheels closer to the COM seems to help.

[Snark]

Put bigger gear on the plane.

Loading 24 tons on three of the small gear is really overloading them. They're not designed to take that much weight. Size matters; bigger gear can handle more stress. Gear aren't magically indestructible, the way they were pre-1.1.

Yes, this means you have to spend a more significant amount of weight on gear than you're used to.

Yes, it means you have to take physics into account when putting gear on your planes, which you never had to do before.

[Stoney3K]

6 minutes ago, Snark said:

Put bigger gear on the plane.

Alternatively, if the medium gear are just Too Damn Huge (tm), try doubling up on the main gear by just adding another set. Keep them close to the CoM (but behind the center of lift) so the nose gear won't get overloaded. There is a Stress Tolerance number in the part description which shows how much force your gear can take. Divide the sum of all gears by 10 and it should be more than your plane's weight.

Also, try tweaking the spring and damper settings and overriding the friction control.

[boolybooly]

Thanks for the advice all.

I did try adding 2x rear medium gear to a wing joint instead of the bottom of fuselage and that does not explode.

It then did something very odd which I cannot replicate after a restart, because it made the wings vibrate like moth wings when the plane was taking off, which appeared to happen repeatedly at different sections of the T3 runway, then as the wheel / craft progressed down the runway it stopped vibrating and the craft progressed normally until it hit another vibrating section etc until lift off.

I dont know what is going on there but it looks to me like the game engine got into ta state causing a runway / wheel interaction problem. While it is the kind of thing which could be involved in the exploding LV-10s, they only explode when they lift off and stop touching the runway so I think it might be a different kind of bug. But it does suggest there are problems remaining from the transition to Unity 5 relating to the runway and the wheels and the state the game engine gets itself into.

I expect that when Squad get back from their holiday they will do some bug fixing so it'll be fine, but they can't fix 'em if they don't know where they are!

[UnionPacific1983WP]

Also, on pre-1.1 planes, the medium and large wheels just cause the plane to bounce all over the runway until you get in the air... if you can do so with all the bouncing.

[Verband]

Maybe post your craft file?

[Greenfire32]

Yeah wheels and landing legs are super bugged right now. I often find myself asking how this update could have possibly been OK'd for release when arguably the two most important parts of the game don't work properly.

Edited June 22, 2016 by Greenfire32

[bewing]

The LY10 can just baaaaaarely handle 8 tons each. The main trick on takeoff is to fly straight off the end of the runway, and don't rotate at all. Additionally, you can put some incidence on the wings -- and make the front landing gear a little higher than the rear. Both of those can get you off the ground while accelerating horizontally, but can sometimes make your takeoff run a little more squirrelly. (Which also means tweaking the friction settings.)

Edited June 22, 2016 by bewing

[Greenfire32]

3 hours ago, SmokeyM said:

Possibly because not everyone is having problems with them? I, for one, have had no issues unless caused by poor ship design. They're not bugged, they're just realistic now.

Ah right. The good old "If it's not happening to me, it's not happening at all," argument. Well the abundance of "Wheels are bugged" threads will disagree with you there. I doubt veterans and newbies alike are suddenly out-of-the-blue designing bad ships.
 

3 hours ago, SmokeyM said:

On another point, I would argue that fuel tanks and engines are the two most important parts, or at least more than landing gear. Without those, nobody's going anywhere.

Oh for Pete's sake...semantics. Obviously wheels and legs are no more important than fuel tanks and engines. The point I was making is that in a game where we visit other planets, not being able to visit them is what I would consider game-breaking. And if I can't land and move about on other planets, then what's the point of even going in the first place? If half the game is launching something and traveling to another world, then the other half of the game is visiting said world and returning home safely.

And when talking about wheels and legs being bugged, I'm not talking about trying to land at over 250 m/s or trying to lift 8000 tons of craft on super tiny wheels (basically user errors). I'm talking about phantom forces that cause your plane to bounce while holding still on the runway or wheels that explode when you stow them or legs that just refuse to deploy altogether.

Currently (or at least, last I heard) Squad's answer was basically that it's Unity's fault and that until they (Unity) update the Unity engine itself, there's nothing Squad can do about it. And to me, that seems like an extremely good reason to not "update" to a build that will effectively break your game. I'm more mad about the fact that Squad decided to update to Unity 5.whatever knowing that their wheels would become oversized paper weights than I am mad about wheels and legs not working as intended. Because it means that not only are they bugged, but they cant be fixed either. This is unacceptable not only because in previous versions they weren't bugged, but also because we're now in "official release" and no longer in "beta." Bugs of this caliber in an "official release" shouldn't exist. Not in this capacity.

It just doesn't seem like a responsible decision was made regarding that. And after all the bad "rush-jobs" that were made to hit the ever-mythical "1.0" status, yeah I'm still a little burned. It seems like we're just meeting deadlines because reasons instead of delaying deadlines because our game's broke and needs more fixing.

/SaltyRant

Now I do have to back-track slightly and give you some points here because I missed it when I made my original post:

On 6/20/2016 at 0:00 PM, SmokeyM said:

If I understand your problem correctly, then I have also encountered it:

I had problems with a design, where my rear wheels would always explode when I lifted the nose, just as I was getting off the ground. I found that the problem with my design was that my rear wheels were too far behind the CoM, and would undergo massive stresses when I forced the front of the plane up (not to mention the amount of effort to get the nose to lift). Moving the wheels forward a little, closer to (but not ahead of!) the CoM, solved that problem completely. Just be careful! You'll find that you can bump your tail on the runway really easy!

This is absolutely probably what the OP is encountering instead of a bugged set of wheels. If anything, this should solve the OP's issue outright. But then we have the OP saying this:

On 6/1/2016 at 11:07 AM, boolybooly said:

It then did something very odd which I cannot replicate after a restart, because it made the wings vibrate like moth wings when the plane was taking off, which appeared to happen repeatedly at different sections of the T3 runway, then as the wheel / craft progressed down the runway it stopped vibrating and the craft progressed normally until it hit another vibrating section etc until lift off.

And I come right back to being mad about bugged wheels.

Edited June 22, 2016 by Greenfire32

[bewing]

@Greenfire32: You can land just fine if you use anything other than landing legs. See, creativity and problem solving are also part of this game.

You can move about very nicely with rover wheels. You can also land and move about very nicely with retractable airplane wheels. I just did an Elcano on Minmus with LY10 gear, and they worked great. Don't clip them, don't overload them, and make sure they are on straight -- and they work fine.

If you have bouncing issues on the runway, connect the wheels to the fuselage and use the Offset gizmo to move them where they should be, instead of attaching them to the wings. Or change the spring and damping ratios. Or both. This fixes the issue every time. Yes, the positive feedback loop in the damping is still a bug -- boo hoo.

Going from Unity 4 to Unity 5 gave us 64 bit support, much better behavior for large part count vehicles, and wiped out most known kraken. Unity 4 is becoming unsupported legacy software. Unity 6 is coming soon, so we get to do this all over again. So you'd better get your panties unwadded pretty quick.

 

[Greenfire32]

57 minutes ago, bewing said:

@Greenfire32: You can land just fine if you use anything other than landing legs. See, creativity and problem solving are also part of this game.

I'm going to pretend you did not seriously just recommend I ignore landing legs for...landing...
You're right, creativity and problem solving are part of the game. But that ^ is not a solution to the problem....

As for everything else, I already stated we're not talking about user errors regarding either pilot error or craft design, we're talking about bugs: something the player has precisely zero control over. And its great that Unity 6 is on the way soonish. But I would implore the Devs to at least look at what it does to their game before hopping on board. If it turns out U6 creates more problems than it fixes and a good portion of those problems can't be fixed or worked-around, then stay on U5. Don't make the same mistake of going from U4 to U5 when U5 breaks your game.

And as for 64bit support? I'd rather the core game works without having to download a plethora of mods and work-arounds to fix stock bugs. I'm excited for 64bit, but not at the expense of the game itself.

I've been playing KSP since before the Mun was in it. I love KSP. And it makes me super mad to see it get thrown around for the sake of meeting a deadline. If it's not ready, it's not ready.

Delays suck, but broken games suck more.

[bewing]

22 minutes ago, Greenfire32 said:

I'm going to pretend you did not seriously just recommend I ignore landing legs for...landing...
You're right, creativity and problem solving are part of the game. But that ^ is not a solution to the problem....

It is, though. So I will repeat it: use wing parts or engine bells to land on, unless you are foolishly intent on making your own life hard.

Quote

And its great that Unity 6 is on the way soonish. But I would implore the Devs to at least look at what it does to their game before hopping on board. If it turns out U6 creates more problems than it fixes and a good portion of those problems can't be fixed or worked-around, then stay on U5. Don't make the same mistake of going from U4 to U5 when U5 breaks your game.

You are failing to understand some programming things here. Unity 4 had bugs that affected the game, and they will never be fixed. Therefore, there is a maximum playability of the game when using Unity 4. Kraken would occasionally eat your ships. Unity 5 also has bugs, and they will also never be fixed -- but overall, the package is better than Unity 4. As a developer, if you want to improve the game, you have to upgrade the physics engine, period. There is no choice about it. There are always tradeoffs. You get a lot of improvements, and a few drawbacks to each upgrade. You cannot say "wait until all the drawbacks are solved, before taking the step forward". Because they never will be.

The game is better overall now than ver 1.0.5 -- if you just work around a few issues. If you are dead-set on magnifying the issues into mountains, and minimizing the vast improvements into molehills, then you have issues.

Quote

Delays suck, but broken games suck more.

There will clearly never be a game or software package that you consider unbroken, so I would rather have the improvements now and not wait a lifetime for hopes of bugfixes to come.

Edited June 23, 2016 by bewing

[boolybooly]

Its a bit sad they didn't fix these issues last patch but there is no use crying over spilt milk. As long as they are aware that this needs fixing I expect it will get fixed. The move to Unity 5 was a big move and likely to throw up problems and I have been following KSP for long enough to know that stuff gets broken but also that it eventually gets fixed. Though saying that there is a long list of longstanding bugs and I hope these will get fixed too once the new production team has settled down. In the meantime to avoid getting upset I am playing something else... anything else ...  ... but I will return to KSP, its there in my steam library and isnt going to be removed.

I bought it a few times in the early days just to be supportive but still the best fifty gaming bucks I ever spent.

They should probably bring out some DLC but that said, I would only want to get those if the vanilla version plays well, if you see what I mean. Food for thought.

[Violent Jeb]

19 hours ago, Greenfire32 said:

This is unacceptable not only because in previous versions they weren't bugged, but also because we're now in "official release" and no longer in "beta." Bugs of this caliber in an "official release" shouldn't exist. Not in this capacity.

It just doesn't seem like a responsible decision was made regarding that. And after all the bad "rush-jobs" that were made to hit the ever-mythical "1.0" status, yeah I'm still a little burned. It seems like we're just meeting deadlines because reasons instead of delaying deadlines because our game's broke and needs more fixing.

posts like this I wish I could double like.

You just can't justify this stuff post 1.0. sorry sympathizers.

I mentioned in another thread that we need a middle tier of wheels because the small ones are too weak and the big ones are too big. Not that it is likely to fix anything aside from people overloading the small ones.