Landing is a nightmare.. Mods to fix it?

[LadyAthena]

SO first off.. I've been playing KSP 1 since.. forever.. Well into the beta years before it came to steam, or 1.0 release.

I however, quit playing for the past year, and came back.. Some things have changed. Like landing...

It wasn't like this before, before it was fluid and flawless, but now landing is a nightmare, (Especially for planes).

 

What's happening at least for me, is when I touch down my back wheels, it bounces like it just hit a powerful spring, and slams the nose down. I can no longer get any type of smooth landing like I used to be able too..

 

Are there any mods that deal with this? Or what am I doing wrong? It seems options were taken out too like "locking" the landing gears and such to stop bouncing, or the springy bouncing like you're sitting on a bouncy bed or something.

This isn't a problem of me landing too hard, too fast, or my plane being too heavy either. (unless they changed drastically how much weight the landing gears can handle).

My latest plane I land between 70-100m/s, (it's a spaceplane, so it has to have a little speed). Even then though, my downward angle is only a few degree's, it should be a smooth landing, yet the back wheels bounce up like it hit something, or bounced on a spring as I mentioned before, slamming the nose wheels down, then the back wheels will bounce multiple times more as well as the front. Despite these violent bounces the wheels dont break, so I doubt it's due to being too heavy of a plane.

[Guest]

Yeah, wheels are a mess. Your plane might be too light for its gear, actually, try fiddling with your spring settings. However, wheels in general have gotten worse since they had to rework them due to a Unity update.

[Hotel26]

I routinely set landing gear suspension to spring strength 1.0 and dampening 1.5 and get good results for 90% of craft.  Others require some individual tuning (like one I just performed for lunar gravity).

Having gear perfectly aligned with the nose and also perpendicular to the ground wards off many undesirable flaws as well.  (Just my experience up to 1.7.3)

                                                               

In your particular circumstance here, you are carrying a lot of kinetic energy into this landing, still aimed at the ground.  I'd suggest testing its stall speed close to the ground[*] by levelling off and flying as long as you can hold the nose up.  Find out just how slow it will go.  If it's a spaceplane, we can assume you're landing back at KSC with 3kms of runway?  Try holding off the landing until your speed is only 5-10 m/s above the stall?

This is one thing I like about tail-draggers: you will never land them reliably unless you attempt something resembling a three-pointer and, if the aircraft has been designed carefully, that angle of attack will be approaching a full-flare landing -- at which point, the machine is losing its will to continue flying.  I converted my Mink quadcycle gear to a tail-dragger for this reason and the touch-down accidents ceased instantly.

* by which I mean at something like 1km AGL (comparable air density)

Edited November 24, 2019 by Hotel26

[LadyAthena]

22 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

I routinely set landing gear suspension to spring strength 1.0 and dampening 1.5 and get good results for 90% of craft.  Others require some individual tuning (like one I just performed for lunar gravity).

Having gear perfectly aligned with the nose and also perpendicular to the ground wards off many undesirable flaws as well.  (Just my experience up to 1.7.3)

                                                               

In your particular circumstance here, you are carrying a lot of kinetic energy into this landing, still aimed at the ground.  I'd suggest testing its stall speed close to the ground by levelling off and flying as long as you can hold the nose up.  Find out just how slow it will go.  If it's a spaceplane, we can assume you're landing back at KSC with 3kms of runway?  Try holding off the landing until your speed is only 5-10 m/s above the stall?

This is one thing I like about tail-draggers: you will never land them reliably unless you attempt something resembling a three-pointer and, if the aircraft has been designed carefully, that angle of attack will be approaching a full-flare landing -- at which point, the machine is losing its will to continue flying.  I converted my Mink quadcycle gear to a tail-dragger for this reason and the touch-down accidents ceased instantly.

I'll give this a try thanks  

[klgraham1013]

Squad is still waiting on Unity to fix the wheel code for them.

[Vanamonde]

Your question has been moved to the modding subforum, since you're asking for mod suggestions. Good luck. 

[RizzoTheRat]

It's not just wheels, I lost a 70 tonne VTOL SSTO the other day to pogo stick landing gear, and that was with the damping set to maximum.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

I had to resort to using a set of MM patches for the stock wheels alongside KSPwheel; it makes them behave far better. But the patches as is likely need some tweaking, and i haven't took the time to do so myself (imma lazy)

Also it looks like they've had some issues with 1.8.1; i can only vouch that these work on 1.6.1 as that's my modded install currently.

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

You'll need the KSPWheel mod and the patches if you wanna give it a go.

[pmborg]

The normal Landing Speed giving two examples:
Airbus A320 land between: 130kts to 140kts (66 m/s and 72m/s)
C172  55 kts (28.3 m/s)

So 70 m/s is ok, if you consider it as maximum! landing speed in KSP, above than that, the airplane have aerodynamic problems.
Just like in real life the secret here in KSP is to use flaps.