Rover Shocks Appear Broken after Separating from Ship

[aznelec]

When mounting my rover to a larger craft, I'm stacking small stack separators and reducing their force to zero. This causes them to collapse and give way, so the rover can drive off the pad.

The issue is when I add a part below the pad the rover is mounted to. In the following video, I show 3 steps, the last is where the break occurs:

1. WORKS: Mount the rover to a 2x2 plate using stack separators (with force turned all the way down) and struts.
   
2. WORKS: Add a second 2x2 plate underneath the first.
   
3. BROKEN: Replace the second 2x2 plate with a heat shield.
   

You'll notice in the third step that the shocks on the wheels appear to "break" (although the part says its operating normally), and the rover cannot be driven off the pad.

I've confirmed this issue occurs when adding heat shields, stack decouplers, and fairing bases below the first 2x2 grid.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[sal_vager]

Sorry to tell you this but Unity's wheels are rather limited in what they can handle, they aren't really intended for use as stick-on parts and they have a lot of weird quirks, like needing to reach the ground .

That's whats happening here and it's most apparent with those stubby TR-2L's, the structural plates if lifted high enough will prevent them reaching the ground so you get no traction at all.

You can use anything to lift them up, even other plates, it's nothing to do with the parts you mention nor is the lack of traction limited to structural plates, it happens with wing boards too, this is purely a problem with the wheels themselves.

Depending on your platform height, Rovemax M1's can reach the ground because they are taller, but even they have a limit, too high and they also lose traction.

What makes this worse is that the platform you made doesn't count as "ground" yet because it's still on the pad, so it needs to be moved before wheels will work on it properly.

This will let you stage a rover and drive it off a platform, but then you can hit another issue where the platform or rover becomes uncontrollable, depending which one you were controlling from.

Driving a rover onto a platform doesn't have any issues thankfully.

So what can you do? Well, as long as you move your platform off the pad your rover wheels will work, and to make sure the delivery craft doesn't lose control, add a decoupler between the craft and the platform and stage it before releasing the rover.

Without that decoupler, the rover not in control becomes unusable, but even without it, and if I'm controlling the top rover, the wheels will work when staged because it's not on the pad or runway and the structural panels will be treated as ground for the purposes of wheel collision.

If you'd like to try the ramp and the other craft I used to figure this out, you can find them here.

And finally, there will be no fixes to these wheels, they are being completely replaced for 1.1 with entirely new wheels and code, they won't even be Unity wheels anymore so these issues will be moot, and bugs with the wheels won't apply to the new code.

Hope this helps!

Edited October 18, 2015 by sal_vager