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Tips for long distance roving?


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It's been some time since I last used rovers, and I see  an update completely changed how wheels work. No longer can one physics warp x4 to make trip to another biome a bit speedier. Doing so results in heinous bouncing and eventual explosions.

 

Does anyone have any idea how to reduce that? Is it a spring or dampener setting? Maybe someone has a reliable design that is immune to that? I didn't mind 15 minute drives, but without warp that is an hour long boring ride into the next biome...

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The bouncy wheels issue is a bug in the spring equations in PhysX (which Unity uses, which KSP uses) -- there is no way around it, and there is no way to fix it until NVidia fixes PhysX (or KSP dumps unity) . The KSP devs added a lot of stuff to help users mitigate the bug as much as possible -- but "as much as possible" basically means that at 4x physwarp your rover is going to bounce and explode.

You can try tweaking stuff and hope you find a magic setting for your rover that makes everything work. Good luck!

Edited by bewing
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I'm able to do limited timewarp with current wheels. All I had to do is:

-make sure my rover is wide enough

-make sure the center of mass is as low as possible

-attach a lot of reaction wheels and set it to SAS only

-set wheel's spring strength to minimum and damper strength to maximum

-press W to drive away normally until sufficient speed is reached, and release the button (let it move by it's own momentum) before activating timewarp

- If the speed gets lower, deactivate timewarp, move again normally to gain some velocity, then repeat the step before

Hope that helps

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19 hours ago, r4pt0r said:

Does anyone have any idea how to reduce that? Is it a spring or dampener setting?

Yes, it has to do with springs and dampening.

Note that KSP is not a perfect simulation. You may not be able to get perfect wheel behavior even if you fiddle with the springs until you grow senile. However, you definitely can get really poor wheel performance if the settings are grossly wrong.

I know of no good tutorial for this directly in KSP, but I do know this video for a different game that explains what exactly springs and dampening does and which is useful in which situation. If nothing else, it'll help prevent you from doing it grossly wrong.

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