Rover wheel breaks on gravity load

[cawsp]

So I recently decided to try going to Duna. I planned my mission and executed. Part of my mission was to land a rover on Duna. I finally did it! I was really excited. The first thing I did was check to make sure nothing broke then I saved and quit (other life duties got in the way). Now when I load that rover again one wheel breaks as soon as gravity loads. I've tried loading again and again but every single time is the same. The wheels are perfect and the rover is on solid ground when I first load and then as soon as the game is finished loading and gravity starts one of the wheels breaks.

This is super frustrating after I finally got a mission successfully to another planet!! Is there anything I can do? I might try saving with the broken wheel and then modifying my save file to not have a broken wheel and see if that works but I would prefer not to do that if possible...

Also I drove this rover around Kerbin for 5 minutes before starting my launch so it should be a good enough design.

Thank you!

[*Aqua*]

IIRC wheel suspensions are fully extended when loading a craft. In your case they probably clip into the ground and are pushed up violently during physics start.

There are only two ways I can imagine how you can solve this:
1) As you already said: Load the craft, let the wheel break, save it, edit the save. There's a possibility that the fixed craft will break again upon loading.
2) Edit the save file to lift the rover a few centimeters into the air. I'm afraid I can't help you with that because I'm not sure how the game handles landed crafts. I think it tracks the position as if it is in orbit. So try to edit the orbit parameters first.

[steve_v]

1 hour ago, *Aqua* said:

...they probably clip into the ground and are pushed up violently during physics start.

It's a bit of a long shot, but installing KJR might help here. To quote the feature list:

• Physics Easing
  • Slowly dials up external forces (gravity, centrifugal, coriolis) when on the surface of a planet, reducing the initial stress during loading

Edited December 31, 2015 by steve_v

[cawsp]

Thank you both for your suggestions! I actually now have no idea how it got fixed. I restarted the game and my computer and all of a sudden the wheels don't break anymore. I'm really happy I didn't have to edit the save!! That always feels like cheating to me even if I'm fixing something.