Are we still pretending the wheels/legs aren't broken?

[JustAToy]

Looks to me like the cause is the airbrake compressing and then the legs popping off the ground.     

For what it's worth you may be the first to have discovered a new means of moving base modules about. 

 

[Whirligig Girl]

10 hours ago, EchoLima said:

The early landing legs didn't have suspension. Maybe that's why. 

No actually it is definitely related to how they had to change the wheels and legs for unity 5. From 0.22 to 1.1, the legs and wheels worked reasonably well.

[klgraham1013]

I still have my old versions of KSP and can confirm the jump to Unity 5 broke wheels in ways that have still yet to be completely fixed.  Unfortunately, it's probably a #BlameUnity thing.  So, Squad's only going to do the minimum necessary to keep things working and pray for a Unity update to fix their problems.

Edited May 29, 2019 by klgraham1013

[RocketSquid]

The default spring strength is a bit (okay, more than a bit) too high. Turn it way down, but not all the way, and turn damper strength a bit up and the issues will be reduced, if not totally solved.

[Shadowmage]

Every time one of these threads pops up I always wonder...

Why doesn't someone just patch the stock wheels to use the KSPWheel modules, and never have to deal with these stock wheel-shenanigans again?  Then I realize.. oh wait.. someone did.  Might even have been me

https://github.com/shadowmage45/KerbalFoundries2/tree/master/KerbalFoundries-Patches/Stock

I know that mods aren't a solution for everything, or for everyone, and aren't even available on consoles.  But for this specific case I would not be waiting for SQUAD to fix it (they aren't going to, its a Unity engine problem).

 

[The Destroyer]

Came back to the game after leaving around 1.0 ish, immediately noticed how weird the legs are now. Angled landing wheels creating phantom speed, and landing gear on my initial Falcon 9 style rockets being extremely bouncy, (virtually leaped up into space after loading onto the launch pad, and landing...) had to kill the springs and max the damper to get it to behave.

[Pthigrivi]

Are they much worse in the last couple of updates? I’ve done some playing around each time they come out but I spend most of my time in an old 1.3 save. 

[Cavscout74]

39 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Are they much worse in the last couple of updates? I’ve done some playing around each time they come out but I spend most of my time in an old 1.3 save. 

Personally, I thought 1.4 was the worst, and they've gotten marginally better since - mostly from adding the ability to adjust spring/damper values in the field.  Dropping spring value & upping the damper does make a world of difference.  Usually. 

 

[Ion Forbes]

On low gravity worlds, the landing gear on my SSTOs will often start bouncing up and down, and the only way to stop it is to manually set spring strength to the lowest setting and gradually ease it back up. That being said, they have certainly improved over the past few versions.

[jwenting]

When things fail, I first assume I failed, not the game. In my experience that's an assumption far more likely to be correct than any other.

Sadly a lot of people seem to always want to blame something else, anything else, before blaming themselves, for their failures.

[I_Killed_Jeb]

11 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Every time one of these threads pops up I always wonder...

Why doesn't someone just patch the stock wheels to use the KSPWheel modules, and never have to deal with these stock wheel-shenanigans again?  Then I realize.. oh wait.. someone did.  Might even have been me

https://github.com/shadowmage45/KerbalFoundries2/tree/master/KerbalFoundries-Patches/Stock

I know that mods aren't a solution for everything, or for everyone, and aren't even available on consoles.  But for this specific case I would not be waiting for SQUAD to fix it (they aren't going to, its a Unity engine problem).

 

I might need to jump on this once I figure out how to set it up correctly

 

5 minutes ago, jwenting said:

When things fail, I first assume I failed, not the game. In my experience that's an assumption far more likely to be correct than any other.

Sadly a lot of people seem to always want to blame something else, anything else, before blaming themselves, for their failures.

It sounds like in that case you need to get better at the game.

Edited May 30, 2019 by I_Killed_Jeb

[Claw]

On 5/27/2019 at 8:35 PM, mikegarrison said:

Back in the Unity 4 days, it seemed like the landing legs worked just fine. For some reason they have never really worked correctly in Unity 5.

 

The Unity wheel functionality completely changed from Unity 4 to Unity 5 (as in totally changed). It also instituted several additional constraints, such as the limit to 20 wheels. The built in functionality works great if you are building a single vehicle that can be individually (internally) tweaked to work properly. If the tweaks are off, then it doesn't respond very well.

Because of KSP's modular design, the required wheel tweaking doesn't really work because the circumstances for every wheel/leg is defined by the user created creation it's attached to. Some things are heavy, or light, or bouncy, or bendy, or rigid...and each setup really requires it's own tweaks which aren't easily "detectable." Some of these tweaks has been exposed for the user to adjust, but not all of them.

 

[Tonka Crash]

For a workaround I use a Ground Tether module that's in USI-Tools. USI-Tools installs as a dependency for most of the USI mods, so a lot of people have it available, but don't know about it. It straight up kills motion. If I have a bouncy landing that doesn't seem to want to settle down toggling this on and off a couple times will settle it down. It also stops craft from sliding around once landed.  I use it mainly to keep bases from slowly sliding downhill. 

// Add USI-Tools Ground Tether option to command modules
@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleCommand],!MODULE[USI_InertialDampener]] { MODULE { name = USI_InertialDampener } }

Manually tuning the spring/damper settings can also help a lot. It's tedious, but I've had good luck when I've messed with it. 

[Snark]

My own experience is that it's the auto tuning that gives me the most grief. It always seems distinctly... out of tune. If I turn off auto tuning and crank the damper up to a significantly higher value than the spring strength, I find that I generally get much better results.

[Serenity]

11 minutes ago, Snark said:

My own experience is that it's the auto tuning that gives me the most grief. It always seems distinctly... out of tune. If I turn off auto tuning and crank the damper up to a significantly higher value than the spring strength, I find that I generally get much better results.

I wish that was the case for me.Everytime i try to change the damper or spring strengh everything goes haywire.

[jwenting]

10 hours ago, I_Killed_Jeb said:

I might need to jump on this once I figure out how to set it up correctly

 

It sounds like in that case you need to get better at the game.

No, it means I'm realistic and don't have an overinflated opinion about myself and my skills, don't consider myself infallible so that everything that goes wrong MUST be someone else's fault.

[Tonka Crash]

In the 1.7.1 release notes:

=================================== v1.7.1 ============================================================
+++ Improvements
[snip]
* Add and apply High Gee settings to wheel suspension.

+++ Bugfixes
[snip]
* Fixes to wheel suspension spring and damper settings.
* Fix wheel damage on docking, undocking and loading on high Gee CBs.
* Fix wheel friction.

[Cydonian Monk]

7 minutes ago, Tonka Crash said:

In the 1.7.1 release notes:

Nice. Hopefully that does the trick for new legs and wheels, but it still does nothing for old legs and wheels on already launched craft. Not that I really expect them to keep infinite backwards compatibility.

I wonder if the "friction" fix prevents craft from sliding uphill?

[I_Killed_Jeb]

6 hours ago, jwenting said:

No, it means I'm realistic and don't have an overinflated opinion about myself and my skills, don't consider myself infallible so that everything that goes wrong MUST be someone else's fault.

Oh OK that must be why SQUAD keeps trying to fix it, because it definitely isn't broken and everyone except the great jwenting has no idea how to build a craft

 

18 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

Nice. Hopefully that does the trick for new legs and wheels, but it still does nothing for old legs and wheels on already launched craft. Not that I really expect them to keep infinite backwards compatibility.

I wonder if the "friction" fix prevents craft from sliding uphill?

Why wouldn't the fix apply to the existing craft?

[Cydonian Monk]

19 minutes ago, I_Killed_Jeb said:

Why wouldn't the fix apply to the existing craft?

Why would it? The new default settings for springs etc only apply to new craft.

Also, part of what I'm talking about are craft from before they added suspension & dampeners. When converted all of those craft received "default" settings, many of which were way too strong for them. I have a not insignificant number of craft such as that.... A few have been "hacked" through persistence file editing, but it's still annoying. 

Anyway, I'm just glad this not-imaginary problem is still getting some attention. 

Edited May 30, 2019 by Cydonian Monk

[ExtremeSquared]

It's not surprising they got some attention before robotics dlc. Obviously the first robots everyone's going to build are walking robots, and walking robots that fall apart and spontaneously fling themselves onto their backs make for poor gameplay footage.

[Orky Kultur]

13 hours ago, ExtremeSquared said:

It's not surprising they got some attention before robotics dlc. Obviously the first robots everyone's going to build are walking robots, and walking robots that fall apart and spontaneously fling themselves onto their backs make for poor gameplay footage.

I mean, in practice I've seen 2-dozen helicopters and no walkers so *shrugs*