No more rover flipping

[Cheif Operations Director]

I know this is a bit scientifically inaccurate but when SAS is enabled on vessel marked as rover can it slow down your rover when doing a turn. I'm beyond sick of turning by accident of whatever and then my rover goes in a 180 and it hits the solar panels and BOOM. This would make scientific exploration with rovers and such also more useful because you can do long term mission S with them. Im just a bad rover driver but I still What to use them. 

[linuxgurugamer]

Flipping with the rover usually means you are driving too fast.  Also, the center of gravity of the rover maybe to high which makes it more prone to flipping.

[Cheif Operations Director]

50 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Flipping with the rover usually means you are driving too fast.  Also, the center of gravity of the rover maybe to high which makes it more prone to flipping.

If I make it lower it can not traverse a hill.

[Gargamel]

5 minutes ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

If I make it lower it can not traverse a hill.

The CoG doesn't have to be actually low, it just has to be low in relation to the width of your footprint.      So you really need to make the rover either wider, or shorter, or both.    You can increase your ground clearance of needed, but to keep the same stability, you'll need to also make it wider. 

 

But slowing down is the easiest thing to do.   Go fast till til you need to turn, then slow down. 

 

[Cheif Operations Director]

1 minute ago, Gargamel said:

The CoG doesn't have to be actually low, it just has to be low in relation to the width of your footprint.      So you really need to make the rover either wider, or shorter, or both.    You can increase your ground clearance of needed, but to keep the same stability, you'll need to also make it wider. 

 

But slowing down is the easiest thing to do.   Go fast till til you need to turn, then slow down. 

 

Ok

[se5a]

I gave up and used MechJeb to do all my rover driving for me. it'll automatically slow down for corners when you set waypoints. 

people can whine about "cheating", but driving is just not fun. not when the only controls are full acceleration and no acceleration, without any sort of cruise control. 

[klgraham1013]

it doesn't help that steering and acceleration isn't analog in KSP.  Especially for rovers.

Edited August 29, 2018 by klgraham1013

[Dafni]

32 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

it doesn't help that steering and acceleration isn't analog in KSP.  Especially for rovers.

You mean like proportional input? But it is, when you use a joystick. Makes a world of difference, especially for planes and landers, but rovers benefit a lot too. Worth to consider.

[klgraham1013]

19 minutes ago, Dafni said:

You mean like proportional input? But it is, when you use a joystick. Makes a world of difference, especially for planes and landers, but rovers benefit a lot too. Worth to consider.

Good call.  At some point it was suggested that rover wheel torque be controlled by the mouse wheel.  Which I though was a neat idea.

[Cheif Operations Director]

It's just so annoying because I always forget to quick save. I got my rover on a good place to do science and then I blow it up. One time I blew up 3 rovers in one day!

[Kerbart]

2 hours ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

It's just so annoying because I always forget to quick save. I got my rover on a good place to do science and then I blow it up. One time I blew up 3 rovers in one day!

One can argue that your problem is quicksave. Without something to bail you out when things go wrong, the lesson would sink in much deeper and you’d replace the convenience of speed by the virtues of taking it slow.

Right now there’s no pay-off for carefulness; you simply hit F9when things go wrong. There’s a reason the real Mars rovers move at snail’s speed.

[Dafni]

44 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

One can argue that your problem is quicksave. Without something to bail you out when things go wrong, the lesson would sink in much deeper and you’d replace the convenience of speed by the virtues of taking it slow.

Right now there’s no pay-off for carefulness; you simply hit F9when things go wrong. There’s a reason the real Mars rovers move at snail’s speed.

True words.

And "virtues of taking it slow over the convenience of speed" has a nice sound to it. Almost poetic. Perfect point about the real rovers too. Nice post!

[Kenobi McCormick]

On 8/29/2018 at 12:35 PM, Kerbart said:

One can argue that your problem is quicksave. Without something to bail you out when things go wrong, the lesson would sink in much deeper and you’d replace the convenience of speed by the virtues of taking it slow.

Right now there’s no pay-off for carefulness; you simply hit F9when things go wrong. There’s a reason the real Mars rovers move at snail’s speed.

Quicksaving isn't the problem, and as I've said countless times in Fallout 4 discussions regarding the restrictions on game saves in Survival mode, it does nobody any favors to restrict or block saving the game when the game is full of bugs, glitches, and unintended incidents. KSP isn't much better than Fallout 4 in that regard, especially when dealing with rovers.

 

As far as NASA's rovers....they move at a snail's pace less because they can't just hit F9 and more because designing a vehicle that can bomb across the Martian surface at 50+ MPH isn't designing a vehicle current rocketry can deliver to the Martian surface. We could easily design a rover that would be able to race across at highway speeds, in fact all it takes is just one phone call between NASA and anyone running in the Baja 1000, but the resulting vehicle would be too heavy and too power hungry to be feasible to deploy.

 

Lastly...what's so virtuous about taking it slow in a game where there's nothing noteworthy to explore nearby? You land on a planet's surface and, unless you land RIGHT ON TOP of a biome divider, there's nothing any different 200m from your lander as there is right between the landing legs, or 2 miles out. Being able to haul ass in a rover isn't a matter of convenience, it's a matter of spending less time staring at the same texture tiles waiting for a new biome in which to run the same exact experiments for the 95th time.

[Cheif Operations Director]

3 minutes ago, Kenobi McCormick said:

Quicksaving isn't the problem, and as I've said countless times in Fallout 4 discussions regarding the restrictions on game saves in Survival mode, it does nobody any favors to restrict or block saving the game when the game is full of bugs, glitches, and unintended incidents. KSP isn't much better than Fallout 4 in that regard, especially when dealing with rovers.

 

As far as NASA's rovers....they move at a snail's pace less because they can't just hit F9 and more because designing a vehicle that can bomb across the Martian surface at 50+ MPH isn't designing a vehicle current rocketry can deliver to the Martian surface. We could easily design a rover that would be able to race across at highway speeds, in fact all it takes is just one phone call between NASA and anyone running in the Baja 1000, but the resulting vehicle would be too heavy and too power hungry to be feasible to deploy.

 

Lastly...what's so virtuous about taking it slow in a game where there's nothing noteworthy to explore nearby? You land on a planet's surface and, unless you land RIGHT ON TOP of a biome divider, there's nothing any different 200m from your lander as there is right between the landing legs, or 2 miles out. Being able to haul ass in a rover isn't a matter of convenience, it's a matter of spending less time staring at the same texture tiles waiting for a new biome in which to run the same exact experiments for the 95th time.

Exactly

[Kenobi McCormick]

4 minutes ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

Exactly

Mmm.

 

As far as the original topic goes, I have two serious suggestions for you that help me greatly:

 

1: Stop using the stock rover wheels. They don't slide readily and that's why you flip so easily. Mod wheels...my favorites are the tracks floating around...tend to be willing to slide a little instead of just traction rolling you every time you try to steer.

 

2: Get a gamepad of some sort and drive your rovers with that. It's harder to flip the thing over if you've got proportional steering as you can feed it in juuuust enough to turn without rolling it.

[Cheif Operations Director]

Most Science in real life is done with probes. In Kerbal their is no reason to do that other than some credits. Not even that many credits at that. Just some practicality. Which is easier... 1. Remake all the planets 2. Make rovers more stable. 

[Gargamel]

5 minutes ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

Exactly

But not exactly.  

Yes, you can have a rover designed to fly across the surface in a straight line.  For two reasons: 

One, you have instant control of the rover, and can make the minor adjustments required to avoid obstacles.   Except there aren't any real obstacles in KSP.  There are massive land features you usually see coming a mile away and have time to slow down for, but there aren't solid rocks or boulders or trees, or little pink men to swerve around. 

Two, as above, you're not turning.    Turning is what usually makes a rover flip. 

Every vehicle that has ever been made has a safe cornering speed.  It differs from vehicle to vehicle, but at some high speed every vehicle will tip over while cornering.   When you drive a car, and encounter a sharp turn, do you keep going at the same speed and assume the physics engine will hold you in place?   No, you slow down to what you know is a safe speed, navigate the corner, and continue on.

Even with the best design, you still need to slow down.

 

[Kerbart]

16 hours ago, Kenobi McCormick said:

Quicksaving isn't the problem, and as I've said countless times in Fallout 4 discussions regarding the restrictions on game saves in Survival mode, it does nobody any favors to restrict or block saving the game when the game is full of bugs, glitches, and unintended incidents. KSP isn't much better than Fallout 4 in that regard, especially when dealing with rovers.

Wait. Wut. You call flipping a rover a bug?

16 hours ago, Kenobi McCormick said:

 

As far as NASA's rovers....they move at a snail's pace less because they can't just hit F9

Read the point above. As I mentioned... the problem is the fact that we're used to hitting F9. NASA doesn't flip their rovers. As you said... because they can't.

 

16 hours ago, Kenobi McCormick said:

Lastly...what's so virtuous about taking it slow in a game where there's nothing noteworthy to explore nearby? You land on a planet's surface and, unless you land RIGHT ON TOP of a biome divider, there's nothing any different 200m from your lander as there is right between the landing legs, or 2 miles out. Being able to haul ass in a rover isn't a matter of convenience, it's a matter of spending less time staring at the same texture tiles waiting for a new biome in which to run the same exact experiments for the 95th time.

What flips your rover is the laws of physics. Do 50mph and hit a bump, or try to make a sharp turn, and things go whaazoooeey!!! While I'm not a fan of adding realism just for the sake of realism... This is a game about space exploration, and this is how it works when you move a rover over rough terrain. What you really want is the ability for rovers to move autonomously; I will agree on that.

But turning the game into Gran Tourismo because your inability to pinpoint landings or deal with the realities of space exploration... no. Just no.

[Gargamel]

18 hours ago, Kenobi McCormick said:

in fact all it takes is just one phone call between NASA and anyone running in the Baja 1000, but the resulting vehicle would be too heavy and too power hungry to be feasible to deploy.

And completely useless on a foreign planet. 

The only thing that might still but usable on an off road buggy might be the structural frame.    But then, since every other component would useless after being in space and then in an oxygen free atmo, there wouldn't be any need for that specifically designed frame.  Air breathing Engines are no good.   Tires will explode, and if they don't, tires go flat eventually, and there's no kerbal engineer up there to fix them.  Bearings would immediately seize up in vacuum and cold.  Shocks would snap in the cold.  The battery would not survive (hence why the tesla roadster didn't carry any auto-batteries, they're not space rated).  Standard mechanical devices that aren't space rated usually just don't work in space. 

Rovers are designed, from scratch, from the ground up,  and they cost a lot of money.  A lot.  That's why they go slow.  There is no calling a tow and flipping the buggy back over.  You cannot fix things that are broken.  The cost of one wrong move, in practical, scientific, and monetary terms, is just too high to speed across the surface of a planet when you have a 30 minute reaction time. 

While off road racing has a lot of good theory coming out of it that can be used, there is little practical application between the two. 

[kerbiloid]

Did you try to use spring bands?

Spoiler

Try to attach your wheel not to the rover body directly, but to the far end of standard structure panel attached to the rover body with the near end.

Try to do attach the panel in longitudinal direction, not in transverse one.

Feel free to combine several panels into a stack like on the photo.

Edited September 3, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Cheif Operations Director]

All I'm saying is that making rovers more useful and frankly fun would be nice. Maby adding "super wheels" that roll like leads bricks so you do not flip would be nice. I just do not see the point in rovers at all they can only do a little science for the same cost as a crewed mission. Which is totally unrealistic. So in short

Make Rovers Great Again!

 

[TheFlyingKerman]

Flipping rover is simply a non-issue thanks to a magical device known as reaction wheel.

[Raptor9]

On 9/2/2018 at 11:30 AM, Kenobi McCormick said:

As far as NASA's rovers....they move at a snail's pace less because they can't just hit F9 and more because designing a vehicle that can bomb across the Martian surface at 50+ MPH isn't designing a vehicle current rocketry can deliver to the Martian surface.

I wouldn't call that an accurate explanation.  The main reason they move at a snails pace is because of the transmission delay.  If you move at 0.5 m/s (1.1 mph/2.4 kmh),  with anywhere from 4 to over 20 minutes of communications delay between Earth and Mars, your rover will have traveled 120 to 600 meters by the time you get the video feed of an approaching obstacle.  Not to mention that a steering input takes just as long to be sent back to Mars, meaning the rover will have traveled a total of 240 meters to 1.2 km by the time the steering command actually takes effect to avoid that obstacle.  The resources and money invested into the mission is also an important factor to take it slow, but even if you had an unlimited budget and time, the comms delay would still restrict your operational pace.

With Curiosity on Mars, JPL plans the day's movements by analyzing the rovers immediate surroundings using it's many cameras, planning the sequence of actions, sends the commands to the rover, and then monitors via the much-delayed telemetry feed.  Of course, this leads to some levels of required autonomy on the rovers part.  If you want something similar, check out the Bon Voyage mod that lets you give rovers a destination; and they drive there on their own (even in the background, like how you leave ISRU operations running and come back to it a few Kerbin days later).

If you're looking for a stock solution for your real-time, hands-on driving mission, then it comes down to a mix of engineering problems to solve, and deliberate/reasonable driving.
1) As others have said, try to design a rover with a low center of gravity and a wide wheel base.  A wide wheel base is important in the longitudinal axis as well as the lateral.  It does you no good if your rover does forward flips if you need to slam on the brakes suddenly.  As @Gargamel mentioned, if you need a higher clearance for the anticipated terrain, you will need to take that into account with how wide your "footprint" needs to be.  Keep your heaviest parts as low as you can, like RTG's or LFO tanks if you plan to run fuel cells.
2) Adjust the suspension and friction settings in the wheels' part action window for your target celestial body, and then test, tweak, re-test.  If you want to test a Mun rover, bring up the Alt-F12 menu and hack gravity to 0.16, and then drive the rover around the KSC.  For Duna, put it at 0.30; for Eve use 1.7, etc.
3) I personally turn down the wheel friction fairly low so that the rover tends to slide a lot.  It can be fun for sure to do power slides on the Mun, but more importantly it keeps it from flipping over if you over-steer.  This can also lead to the rover sliding across the surface when parked, so I just max out the friction setting of one or two of the wheels when I stop, like setting the parking brake.

A good rover can be just as difficult to design IMO as a well-balanced aircraft.  You're trying to design something that has to take into account multiple physics effects, while maintaining a reasonable mass and keeping it small enough to be packaged and transported somewhere "out there".

Lastly, while I agree on the blandness of the terrain, especially Duna, rovers definitely can play an important part in certain hard-to-reach locales like Eve or Tylo.  The more biomes you can reach per surface expedition, the easier it is.  I know a lot of people try to bypass the thick sea-level Eve atmosphere by taking a rover down to research sites at lower elevations, and then driving it to the peak of a high mountain to launch back to orbit.

[Gargamel]

18 hours ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

All I'm saying is that making rovers more useful and frankly fun would be nice.

Most of that comes down to how you design them. 

 

[se5a]

it doesn't help that most the stock wheels don't really promote low CG design either. that, and there's no much early parts to design a decent body/chassis for them.