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Eve lander keeps sliding sideways until it breaks


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Hello, I am looking for help with my Eve lander. I have already done similar missions in earlier version (like two years ago), but I played very little since then. Maybe something has changed in the game physics.

I am doing a mission to Eve with ISRU. I have tested the lander ship on Kerbin and even did some tests directly on Eve with Hyperedit. Everyting was fine, no weird behavior. Then I tried to fly the complete mission. The descent on Eve went on perfectly, I deployed all parachutes and the ship landed at about 3 m/s at a slight slope. Nothing broke on touchdown. However, the ship does not come to rest. It keeps sliding sideways - not even down from the slight slope I have landed on but sideways or upwards. Parachutes are still deployed, flying wildly in the air. The ship shakes, landing legs are getting broken, until it disasembles after something like 10-15 seconds.

I tried landing in two different locations (a few km apart) and the same happened.

Just before landing: You can see there is a lot of landing legs, the speed is reasonable and the terrain is quite flat.
http://fialky.eu/ksp/before_landing.png

A few seconds after landing: the landing legs are not in "landed" position, ship slides, parachutes are flying.
http://fialky.eu/ksp/sliding.png

A few more seconds after that: parachutes have disappeared, but the ships keeps mooving. 
http://fialky.eu/ksp/screenshot47.png

I am quite sure the ship does not sit on anything else than the landing legs, because nothing else gets broken during the sliding. I am using these mod: Hyperedit, Simple fuel switch, Missing history, Transfer window. This particilar ship contains no modded parts.Do you have any idea what might be the problem, please? This is honestly quite frustrating, I have spent many hours designing and testing the ship (many previous models broke on descent or did not make test flight to orbit). Have I encountered some glitch in the game? Or is my ship just so badly designed?

Thanks for any suggestions.
 

Edited by ondrafialka
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12 hours ago, ondrafialka said:

 Have I encountered some glitch in the game? Or is my ship just so badly designed?


 

both. it''s a glitch, but can be prevented with design

as far as i can tell, the problem is landing legs. the ship is bouncing on them too hard. the ship works on kerbin, but eve has higher gravity. the ship weight is pressing down hard against the landing legs, causing malfunctions. i have encountered a similar problem.

possible solutions:

- try to add landing legs

- try to tamper with spring values in the landing legs

- try to use a different model of landing legs (i only had this problem with that specific model)

if you can find a solution, please tell me which one it was, since i had the same problem myself

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On 11/29/2020 at 12:41 PM, king of nowhere said:

both. it''s a glitch, but can be prevented with design

as far as i can tell, the problem is landing legs. the ship is bouncing on them too hard. the ship works on kerbin, but eve has higher gravity. the ship weight is pressing down hard against the landing legs, causing malfunctions. i have encountered a similar problem.

possible solutions:

- try to add landing legs

- try to tamper with spring values in the landing legs

- try to use a different model of landing legs (i only had this problem with that specific model)

if you can find a solution, please tell me which one it was, since i had the same problem myself

Thank you for pointing me to the landing legs. I have tried fiddling with the settings and got these results:
- Maximum spring and damper: explosive destruction upon landing
- Spring 1, Damper 1.5: ship broke into several pieces immediately
- Spring 0.8, Damper 0.8: ship jumped a few times with some wobbling, but came to rest
- Spring 0.8, Damper 0.9, only 4x4 legs extended (there are 4x7 legs total): ship landed softly without any additional movement.

So it seems there were more landing legs than necessary for safe landing and in Eve's gravity it let to some kind of resonance. The whole ship weighs about 75 tons  (all tanks are empty).

Edited by ondrafialka
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11 hours ago, ondrafialka said:

So it seems there were more landing legs than necessary for safe

Maybe something to keep in mind for the next time: always try to have the minimum of whatever that allows the craft to perform the task.

Since springs cause issues in some circumstances, players often use structural or wing parts for the higher impact tolerance instead. 

 

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