anyone think rovers flip more easily since 0.21?

[lammatt]

it doesnt matter if i use docking mode nor do i have the SAS on

i feel like rovers are just more prone to flipping or rolling over after the patch

agree?

[Cykyrios]

Not sure they flip more easily, but since the pods' torque has been somewhat reduced (if I'm not mistaken), you can't correct as easily as before.

Not to speak of rovers comprising only seats and no (probe) pod, they can't be rotated along the pitch/yaw/roll axes at all, which means a lot of care is needed not to flip them over.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I don't find they flip more easily at all. Rovers I make are generally very stable.

[Scoundrel]

Now that we can toggle the reaction wheels the rovers are a little less flippy (assuming you haven't remapped your rover keys), but the issue with excessive traction remains, unfortunately.

[Tiron]

The 'terrain instability' problems seem to be worse to me, at least up in the mountains. There seem to be both more 'bad' sections of terrain and I swear they seem larger. I can't recall ever getting stuck on one in 0.20 or earlier, but it's happened in 0.21. the available thrust on the 'bad' segments is so low that if you'll end up clear down at 1.25 m/s if you get stuck on one, at least with my design.

I actually think there's two different kinds of bad terrain segments, negative and positive, depending on if the suspension thinks the terrain is higher or lower than it appears to be. You'll see certain segments where the suspension jacks all the way down and stays there, or jacks all the way up and stays there, regardless of anything else, and these are the 'bad' ones I'm talking about. I'll call the ones that push the suspension all the way down 'Positive' (because to do that without a bug, you'd have to have substantial positive G forces on the craft), and the ones where it jacks all the way up 'Negative'.

The Positive ones don't cause any problems: It pushes the suspension all the way down, so you've got no flex left...which doesn't really matter. I used to drive a no-suspension Bigtrak around on the mun all the time, with no issues (didn't hurt that it was completely immune to impact damage, as it turned out, but all of my crashes were caused by the fact I was cruising at 80 m/s and catching massive air off every tiny rise, not by it being unstable). So it drives just fine on the 'Positive' segments.

On the 'Negative' segments, it's like the suspension is actually trying to lift the craft off the ground and failing to do so. It looks and acts much like there's something clamped to the rover, holding it up so that the wheels barely touch the ground, except it also makes the steering highly erratic.

From what I've seen, it doesn't seem so much like the rovers are more unstable as that there's more, and larger, bad terrain segments of BOTH types that came out of the new terrain generator. From what I've been told in the past, it has something to do with 'imprecision' in the terrain mesh, or something, that fools the suspension and makes it act stupidly.

I reckon you could cure that by just...well, disabling the suspension. I'm not sure though, because my attempts to do so through the .cfg file have all failed. It seems like the suspension system is so tightly integrated into making the wheels work at all that you can't strip it out and have them still work, or at least I couldn't figure out how to.