Fixing rovers

[Thanny]

As I see it, these are the things that need to be done to make rovers viable:

1) Variable acceleration. Rather than only 0% and 100% as wheel powers, make some kind of throttled speed control. It could be an additional throttle, or just have the wheel power ramp up as the key is held down longer.

2) Variable braking. Have brake pressure increase the longer the button is held down, rather than being on and off.

3) Variable steering. Like the previous two items, this is either straight or hard left/right, which makes it impossible to safely steer at speed without reaction wheels (i.e. it's better to tap the rotate button than try to steer the wheels). Steering more in a given direction with a longer key press is an option, as is making it persistent with a new key to center the wheels (i.e. steering works more like a throttle from left to right, with a shortcut to go completely straight).

4) Bearing friction. Right now, wheels spin completely freely with zero friction, which leads to absurd speeds going downhill (I recently got up to >53m/s on Minmus). Make rover wheels more like Earthly EV wheels - when not actively applying power, they use regenerative braking (and yes, that should recharge batteries a bit). Doing this makes a better case for having a dedicated wheel throttle instead of a gradual increase on keypress, since you'd need to have constant throttle to even go downhill.

Being able to disable brakes on the fly would be a helpful addition for the interim, as it's easy to forget to set the action groups before launching.

So, has there been any indication that changes like these are planned for KSP at any point in the future?

[Spartwo]

They have to fix wheel physics first.

Over a year on and this still happens.(30 seconds in)

[cantab]

Lack of analogue acceleration, braking, and steering honestly isn't a big deal. We were playing and enjoying racing games back in the NES days. Something like ABS would be a big help though, since it's easy to build a rover that likes to do stoppies otherwise.

[Melfice]

I thought #3 was already a thing though?

I dunno... maybe I'm just wrong on that.

EDIT: As for #2: I agree. Though, in the mean time, this problem can be circumvented by just making the rear wheels brake. You might slow down a bit slower, but it saves you from that totally rad stoppie.

[Renegrade]

Being able to disable brakes on the fly would be a helpful addition for the interim, as it's easy to forget to set the action groups before launching.

Landing gear can already do this, I don't understand why they didn't do that for rover wheels too... :/

By the way, I was testing out wheels, and I noticed that the Apollo ones seem to have better suspension but weaker grip and brakes than the TR-2Ls (it's much harder to stoppie with the apollo wheels even though they raise the CoM more with their long spindly arms). I think the traction/brakes have a lot to do with the handling issues being reported..

[tater]

I'd like to have certain parts able to be considered "collapsable," and landed in a cargo pod of some sort and assembled by an engineer on the surface. Perhaps a mass limit on the cargo pod.