steering on landing gear

[ForScience6686]

Is there a trick to the steering for the small landing gear?  I'm trying to setup a fleet at the island base, but it is a pain to move things around.  Yes I have unlocked steering but it does not provide much agility for taxi operations. Multi point turns is also qquite a hassle without engines that can reverse.  This is a problem on all my crafts, but it has never really been an issue until I've needed the ability to taxi for island operations.  Any ideas?

[CitizenVeen]

from the wiki:(http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/LY-10_Small_Landing_Gear)

 

"As of the 0.23 update, the LY-10 Small Landing Gear has the ability to steer, allowing sharper turns on the ground. This can be toggled either through tweakables or in flight. "

and

"If multiple wheels are used in a design, the SPH automatically turns off steering on all but one wheel. To improve steering capability, it is sometimes useful to manually reactivate and invert the steering on the rear wheels. "

The steerable landing gear steers betters in general I believe. I've found riding arround for any other reason then taking off or landing on the runway allways a pain if youre not using the rover wheels.
If you use KAS/KIS, maybe drop a rover on the island to pull your planes arround? By flying it over there inside the cargo hold of a plane?

[Snark]

How do you have your landing gear arranged?  Can make a big difference to turning radius.  If you keep a short wheelbase (i.e. your front gear is not too far in front of your back gear), you'll get a tighter radius (though less stability when landing).

One option:  have some "extra" gear so that you can adjust your wheelbase as desired.

For example:  Picture a plane with fairly conventional tricycle arrangement of landing gear:  two widely-spaced gear on the back, mounted out on the wings, and one gear up on the nose.  The front gear is a long distance in front of the back gear, for landing/takeoff stability, but that means the craft isn't very maneuverable on the ground (big turning radius).

Now add a 4th landing gear. It's centered on the fuselage, like the nose gear, but it's mounted farther aft, so it's only slightly in front of the rear gear.  This gear is set to "initially deployed = FALSE" in the SPH.  Then go in to the Action Groups menu and remove it from the "Gear" group (which it was added to by default), so that when you open/close the landing gear with the G key, it doesn't get affected.

So now you're good.  You normally keep it closed, can fly and land normally, extend and retract gear normally.  When you're in a situation where you need to maneuver on a tight turning radius, you manually click on the "extra" gear to extend it, then manually retract the nose gear.  Presto, you have a much shorter turning radius on the ground.  Giving your plane some hefty reaction wheels to assist with the turn can also help.

Edited December 27, 2015 by Snark

[ForScience6686]

So it just sucks at steering?  Is it limited on it's steering range?  I have tried activating and inverting the rear gear with no improvement.  I was guessing that my best option would be a ground tug, but I'm not sure how to go about it in stock.

[ForScience6686]

Snark that is a great idea, I will give it a shot tonight.  The ship I'm dealing with currently does have a very long wheel base as the wheels are mounted on therear to prevent smacking the engine on the ground.  II'd like to change that but i'm testing its other abilities at the moment.  

[Snark]

Just now, ForScience6686 said:

So it just sucks at steering?  Is it limited on it's steering range?  I have tried activating and inverting the rear gear with no improvement.  I was guessing that my best option would be a ground tug, but I'm not sure how to go about it in stock.

It has a much more limited steering range than rover wheels.  This makes sense, since planes typically land at a much higher speed than rovers can travel, and a landing gear that turned that much would be a landing hazard (planes would tend to flip sideways too easily).

Another idea that occurs to me, in addition to the "reconfigurable wheelbase" idea I proposed above:  If you're only doing short hauls and don't mind the extra drag, you could make a rover-plane hybrid.  Give the plane landing gear and rover wheels.  Position the rover wheels so that they're low enough to hold the whole plane off the ground when the landing gear is retracted, but high enough that they don't touch the ground when the landing gear is deployed.

That way, you land on the gear as usual, and brake to a halt.  Then you retract the gear, lowering your plane onto the rover wheels.  Then you can drive around rover-style.

[ForScience6686]

So here is my goal, to setup a reusable fleet at the island air base that is self sufficient ( except for fuel tankers in case I can't get a suitable mining setup there).  So this adds the requirement to taxi.  I would disagree with real world planes, they can actually be quite nimble on the ground.  

My current plane is my first ssto, so rover wheels are not an option, as that would add too much drag.

 

[Snark]

2 hours ago, ForScience6686 said:

I would disagree with real world planes, they can actually be quite nimble on the ground.

Yes, except that real world planes have something that KSP doesn't, which is proportional steering.  The pilot of a real plane can just nudge the steering wheel a little bit (to make a safe, gentle turn while traveling fast), or pull it way hard over (to make a sharp turn, while traveling at a safely slow speed).  In KSP, basically the only option we have is a button to press which yanks the steering all the way to one side.  It's all-or-nothing, so the "all" has to be gentle enough not to cause planes to flip out if you steer some while landing at speed.

(Maybe proportional steering is an option if you have a joystick or some other form of "gradual" controller.  But I would guess that the large majority of KSP players are just using mouse and keyboard, so proportional steering isn't practical.)

Of course, if Squad really wanted to, they could make a mod that adjusts the steerability of the landing gear based on ground speed (i.e. make it automatically adjust so that it can steer by bigger angles when traveling slowly), but they haven't done that yet.  I suppose it wouldn't be hard to write a mod to do something like that.

2 hours ago, ForScience6686 said:

My current plane is my first ssto, so rover wheels are not an option, as that would add too much drag.

Yes, that would definitely be a bad idea.    But if you just need it for something that shuttles back and forth between KSC and the island base, it could be an option.  Your spaceplanes don't need to be very nimble on the ground, as long as the fuel trucks are.

[Temstar]

I wonder, could you turn steering on for the back two wheels (assuming they're also small landing gears) to get similar effect as "four wheel steering" in cars?



Four wheel steering decreases turning circle. I suspect in KSP with planes you will need to have steering inverted on the back two wheels though or else the plane will just crab.

[ForScience6686]

I had great results with shortening the wheel base.  But in order to get the agility needed on the ground I had to sacrifice some landing stability.  But more practice with the plane has made it easily and a parachute on the rear if I start to get off track.  It looks a bit funky but after looking at real world planes the gear tends to be rather closer than I normally design.

Thanks for the idea snark!

And I do use stick so proportional steering is available, but a shorter base makes huge improvements.

 

 

[Geschosskopf]

9 hours ago, Temstar said:

I wonder, could you turn steering on for the back two wheels (assuming they're also small landing gears) to get similar effect as "four wheel steering" in cars?

.....

Four wheel steering decreases turning circle. I suspect in KSP with planes you will need to have steering inverted on the back two wheels though or else the plane will just crab.

I do this as a matter of course in KSP.  It's the only way to get a decent turn radius on an airplane.  There are a few things to keep in mind, however.  Let's assume you have a standard nose-wheel plane, 1 in the front and 2 in the back.  You set it up the following way:

1. Nosewheel:  right-click and "unlock steering".
2. Left Maingear:  right-click then "unlock steering" AND "invert steering".
3. Right Maingear:  same as #2 because the changes you make on the left side DO NOT mirror automatically to the right side.
4. Without ModuleManager, this ONLY works for wheels that already steer in stock (the Small Gear Bay and that low-tech fixed gear).  The medium and large wheels don't have steering in stock (a major failing IMHO).