Formula One Racing

[sevenperforce]

How fast can you get a car moving on the runway?

Here's the twist: you can't use powered wheels or reaction engines. You must build your drive wheels from structural parts and drive them with rotors. DLC will obviously be required.

How fast can your vehicle go? 

[Ultimate Steve]

After many tries, I have found that it is very difficult to get above 50m/s with conventional wheels made out of structural parts like girders and panels, as they have a tendancy to break, so my idea was to use wheels with brakes on as super grippy wheel segments. However, when brakes are on, rotors will not start to turn even if their brake values are set to zero, so I settled on turning the wheels sideways and turning their friction control values to maximum.

However, this means that the wheels behave like omni wheels:

And as such, the entire assembly is incredibly difficult to steer. The two normal wheels at the back keep it at least directionally constrained, but changing that direction is tough even with all those reaction wheels.

Getting the spring/damper combo on the forward gear correct was also a challenge, and there ended up being a lot of jittering. Velocity spiked above 71 a few times but 70ish was the highest I got in a screenshot.

Slowing down is done by rear brakes, as if any of the front wheel or rotor brakes were used, the entire thing would flip over due to the angular momentum transfer. This was also a problem during testing. Initially I used rear wheel drive (or even four wheel drive) in early tests (mostly with structural wheels) but I found that the torque from the wheels, not just in acceleration, but in steady state (torque counteracting friction) above a certain speed would be enough to flip the craft no matter how many spoilers and weights I added, it seemed. This was mostly fixed by using front wheel drive.

There are two large rotors driving each wheel (coupled with docking ports) for a total of four. Power comes from batteries, and the big ore tank is used to provide more normal force, and therefore more grip/friction force. Each forward wheel has 12 spokes/segments.