Rugged rover wheels keep catching on surface - what's wrong?

[THX1138]

The ore tank is full for this test. The front wheels keep catching on the surface, causing the vehicle to flip and disassemble.

[Blu_C]

Ok, I see a couple problems that may be contributing, though I'm not sure if they are the actual issue.

1) Your center of gravity looks pretty high, which makes your rover much more likely to topple.

2) It is hard to read because of the video's res. but it looks like you were going about 8m/s? That is pretty fast for rovers in this game. It is possible that the forces you got at the bottom of the hill caused a structural failure (you didn't include the end of mission report, though, so I cannot confirm).

From those two alone I would try redesigning. First I would try for a wider wheel base with more space between the front and back wheels. I would also attempt to reinforce them with struts. Maybe add another pair of wheels at the midsection to help bear the load. If that doesn't help it may be a problem with the physics of the wheels (people have been reporting them behaving a little weird in 1.0.0, and I am not sure if they made any fixes there).

[TheXRuler]

I would say the main cause for your flipping is that you are hitting a roughly 30° (for lack of a better word) edge at the bottom of the slope. I don't think this would be much of a problem on normal terrain, as it usually has far smoother changes in angle. Also, I would strongly reccomend following blu_c's advice, lower your CoM and build a wider base etc. I think most vehicles that have such a high CoM to with ratio would have problems there