drewmacrae

I don\'t mean to brag but... my kerbals just re-invented the wheel... Or rather, managed to pry one off of Tosh\'s cart and attach it to their rockets. So if you want to make crawlers to move your ships around: rovers to explore the mun: whether big: or small: These wheels are the thing for you! Attach them like landing legs, and use \'q\', \'e\', \'j\', \'k\', \'l\', \'i\' and \'n\' to steer your rocket around as if it\'s being pushed by the RCS. The wheels will orient themselves and drive, and an RCS system will even assist if you\'ve got one. I recommend starting off slowly at first and avoiding the edges of the launchpad and the little rut in the center. Whether you want to explore, meetup on the surface of the Mun or just turn your ships on the launchpad1, you\'ll find these are the parts for you. 1: This rotation tends to be more along the lines of yaw and pitch than the intended roll. For the sake of your Kerbals, use broad wheelbases. Confirmed compatibility with 14.3. Download Known issues: [li]When in flight, active and resting against rocket, wheels can clip into other parts ??? S:| ???[/li] Planned Release 0.3: [li][glow=green,2,300]Parts are activated using toggle key (I don\'t yet know which one) inactive parts have a locked suspension, and 'parking brake' and don\'t perform intensive computation[/glow] Some weirdness here on startup and behavior if landing when off[/li] [li][glow=red,2,300]Better omniwheel drawing with more limited suspension[/glow][/li] [li][glow=green,2,300]Archive omniwheel part for posterity\'s sake[/glow][/li] [li][glow=yellow,2,300]Commands are only recieved by parts on the active (focused?) vessel[/glow]I tested and couldn\'t reproduce this bug.[/li] [li][glow=green,2,300]wheels work if mounted sideways[/glow][/li] [li][glow=green,2,300]Icons[/glow][/li] Released Plugin 0.2: [li][glow=green,2,300]Un-hardcoding the controls Fly-by-wire Code Example[/glow][/li] [li][glow=green,2,300]Posting source to Github Github repository [/glow][/li] [li][glow=green,2,300]Exposing wheel friction curves in cfg file[/glow][/li] [li][glow=green,2,300]Better part.cfg file to access public variables[/glow][/li] [li][glow=green,2,300]Parameterize steering capabilities[/glow][/li] [li][glow=green,2,300]Holonomic drive systems[/glow][/li] Unplanned Future Work: [li]Holonomic drive systems with augers2[/li] [li]Add a non-steering caster design[/li] [li]Swivel caster design [/li][li]Tread[/li] [li][glow=red,2,300]fix lagging wheels on takeoff if resting on rocket[/glow][/li] [li]further balancing work these may be too heavy, (which makes them safer but a real chore to lug around and rather slow)[/li] Notes: [li]WheelFriction curves are weird. You have to make a copy of the curve, set the stiffness in the copy and then attach it to the collider.[/li] [li]Wheel colliders are sensitive to their orientation. This part will not work sideways. It will just fall till it lands on its collider. That took me a day to figure out.[/li] [li]Blender is a real pain to use, but it\'s less of a pain than any other program I\'ve seen, so I\'m gonna stick with it. [/li] [li]Please yell at me if there\'s something crazy wrong with my model, my part, my source code, my comments or my plugin and I\'ll try to fix it. If you have trouble understanding the source code feel free to ask. Open source is scary because it means people get to see my code. My style is nowhere near as good as Tosh\'s.[/li] References and test parts: [li]Thanks so much Tosh for your fine example. I found the code and the models for your cart quite insightful and helpful... also I stole your wheel. Sorry to whoever modded the texture, the old one feels less rubbery and more... lets say 'vacuum compliant'[/li] [li]I stole textures from Tosh and HarvesteR. [/li] [li]Thanks to Normak for Kosmos, it\'s been fairly good to me. I think I mostly like having lightweight junk to launch or drive about.[/li] [li]Thanks to every FIRST robotics team to ever build drive-trains with these units[/li] [li]Thanks Bassman and Bourg for the linear algebra[/li] [li]Why I still want to do a holonomic drive[/li]

Thanks for all this. I like your logic to balance it to stock, and where you\'ve made textures they\'re good.

Thanks Prefim, I waas running into this as well and just assumed I was doing something wrong.

I\'m not sure blocking IO is the best idea. I\'d like to see flight data recorders so we could do 'science,' and those would require the right to do output to some sort of file. That said, I think autopilots and flight data recorders give a novel opportunity to make custom parts that maintain the balance of the game. (In my mind, orbits, stock mun landings etc are just hard enough) of course auto pilots begin to throw that balance a bit as well but tuning them is a challenge itself. Could someone who\'s worked with the factory post some sort of tutorial, I\'d love to build my own DLLs and I\'m fairly certian that a tutorial wouldn\'t create a risk or require the sharing of licensed information. In terms of developing an ecosystem, I think swamismurf is right, but the installation of custom parts has been difficult, and sharing source with a community that is comfortable with the syntax and the compiler seems like a good basis for the community.

8)Got my 3DConnexion Space Navigator shortly before version 0.8 I think (the one with RCS) I\'m on OSX and used Controller Mate to set it up as a pair of joysticks to control the craft in all 6 DOF, to date it\'s my most impressive use of a peripheral. In the end I fought a bit with which axes should go where. I\'d still love a cockpit view to go with it.