Landing gear can't wait for 1.2, needs bandaid.

[Arsonide]

On 6/5/2016 at 9:03 AM, cephalo said:

I would also like to point out that the game was not like this before. You could abuse the landing gear, and it was fun, and the game was a huge success.

We were fairly open about the issues surrounding wheels during the prerelease in the spirit of fixing issues. So allow me to answer why things changed with them between 1.0 and 1.1. At first, we were not looking to make any changes to wheels, but when we upgraded to Unity 5, the old ones no longer functioned due to changes within Unity itself. When I say no longer functioned, I mean that literally. So really, wheels had to change to be usable at all, and that was more out of necessity than choice.

As for band aids, trust me, we have plenty of them. Every engine issue that we can work around has been worked around to make wheels as usable as they can be. We are continuing to fix what smaller wheel issues we can for 1.1.3, but we really need to upgrade the engine to fix the big ticket issues. That isn't a choice we made, just the reality we have to work with.

In the mean time, I would be happy to help you with any issues you are having. The other replies here seem to have directed your attention towards cranking up impact tolerances. Were there any other issues you had?

Edited June 9, 2016 by Arsonide

[Stoney3K]

The only issues I had with gears were with the smaller (tiny steerable, small retractable, medium retractable) gears. These seemed to poof out when doing a take-off roll above 70m/s with hardly any weight on them. This may have been because of traction control, but the wheel stress meter kept reading zero while instantly going to 'overstressed' when going too fast.

It's not something that is impossible to work with, though. The stress tolerance balancing has already been mentioned -- what could still use some attention is the size ratio between the medium and large gears. The medium gears are the largest steerable gears available, but the landing strut length of the smallest "large" gear is a LOT longer. So it you attach the medium gear as a nose gear while using a large set of gears as main body gears, it means your aircraft will have a ridiculous nose-down stance on the runway (which will ultimately cause extra stress on the nose gear). The only solution is to mount the body gears higher up on the fuselage to make them level with the nose gear, but that would mean raising the wings, which is not always desirable.

When using the huge gear, the medium nose gear is absolutely dwarfed. But using a medium gear for the nose gear is inevitable since that's the largest gear available which has steering.

[eddiew]

2 hours ago, Arsonide said:

...As for band aids, trust me, we have plenty of them. Every engine issue that we can work around has been worked around to make wheels as usable as they can be. We are continuing to fix what smaller wheel issues we can for 1.1.3, but we really need to upgrade the engine to fix the big ticket issues. That isn't a choice we made, just the reality we have to work with....

Much appreciate the clarity in that, thank you  

Is the whole runway-donuts thing under the 'next unity version' umbrella then? I'll adapt my planned 1.1.3 career to be more rocket biased if so  

[Overland]

I know its not my field being a ground pounder rather than a flier.. While I do appreciate that squads working on things and making tradeoffs..

I find it rather concerning that atleast with the stock rover wheels ( M1 and rugged) that 3rd party mod wheels are able to sucessfully use these new wheel settings so correctly and function as they should yet stock ones fail too ..

What is it modders are getting right that stock stuff isnt?

These wheels are bloody old rover wise..while everything else has had an upgrade (or downgrade)

We're still stuck with the same bugged moon rover and rugged wheels .that despite all tweaks behave horribly

 

Its an alarming trend when someone outside of squad releases something that actually works...well 

 

Yet the ones payed to do this .dont...even with all official documentation at hand and associated resources

 

Plus..wheelsound..why not?

Its a mod..it works well..why isnt it stock .whats with the neglected silence

[KerikBalm]

2 hours ago, Stoney3K said:

The stress tolerance balancing has already been mentioned -- what could still use some attention is the size ratio between the medium and large gears. The medium gears are the largest steerable gears available, but the landing strut length of the smallest "large" gear is a LOT longer. So it you attach the medium gear as a nose gear while using a large set of gears as main body gears, it means your aircraft will have a ridiculous nose-down stance on the runway (which will ultimately cause extra stress on the nose gear). The only solution is to mount the body gears higher up on the fuselage to make them level with the nose gear, but that would mean raising the wings, which is not always desirable.

When using the huge gear, the medium nose gear is absolutely dwarfed. But using a medium gear for the nose gear is inevitable since that's the largest gear available which has steering.

Well, before we had the medium steerable gear, I used no steerable gear at all, and just SAS torque, engines on for only one side... reverse thrust on the other side if the design was capable, and differential brakes.

Now I can't activate the brakes on one side but not the other (no right click menu to activate brakes, moving the brake slider adjust both sides... unless you place them without symmetry, or use a mod to break symmetry). I find I can't steer effectively without steerable wheels anymore without resorting to the gimmicky adjustment of friction sliders down to zero.

Instead... since steering once the plane is accelerating for takeoff, or decelerating is generally a bad thing... on my "rough landing field" designs, I include two nose gears... a large/extra large fixed landing gear for takeoff and landings... and a medium landing gear for steering...

After the plane has decelerated enough (I use parachutes for stable and quick deceleration in most designs... but that requires an engineer to service it after each landing if its intended to be reused "in the field" and not recovered at KSC), I retract the large nose gear, putting the medium nose gear in contact, and enabling steering... and yes, that means its a nose down attitude...

Now if the rear gear are close enough to the CoM, that can be made to work on takeoff, and I quick like having the nose come down on landings (makes it much less bouncy, and stops quicker)... so in some designs, I'm fine with just the medium gear.

Pre-1.1... where stress wasn't an issue, but the largest steerable gear was even smaller... I had shuttle orbiters always landings with the nose slanted down... which is fine for an orbiter which doesn't take off horizontally, but it can work with the right gear placement (but for cargoplanes, and even most planes, the CoM shift makes having the maingear right under the CoM for takeoff a risky proposition.. if the CoM shifts behind them... its going to end badly)

 

(that one's actually a flyback booster for a two stage fully stock, fully recoverable shuttle... its way more trouble than its worth... and I barely pulled off the landing)

The other option is to use the offset tool to raise the larger landing gear, a bit like this:

but that was pre 1.1 as well... but offsetting the forward gear down as much as looks ok.. and then the rear onces you can offset up, and if the design allows it... to the sides to avoid clipping

[gilflo]

The main point with the gears is the steering.

Could someone explain the Modulewheelsteering in the Gearfree.cfg file: What about the steeringResponse and the steering curve numbers?

On a jet liner the steering generally works  as follow: On ground, each pilot can move the nose gear up to 90° each side by mean of a steering wheel. Using pedals only moves the nose gear each side less that 10°.

The pedals are connected to nose gear and rudder. You only use the steering wheel to maneuver the aircraft on taxi. Once on the runway for take off run you only use the pedals (action less than 10° on nose gear) and when you reach the speed at which the rudder get enough efficiency it becomes the main means to steer the aircraft on the runway at high speed. 

The problem with the nose gear in the game is that it looks like when you use the steering at high speed you move the rudder and the nose gear the same way whatever is the speed, which make the aircraft very difficult to control on runway at high speed.

So my question is: is there a mean in the Gear Free.cfg file to make the nose gear less efficient and to limit its deflection after a certain speed (more than 30m/s) and use only the rudder deflection to steer aircraft ?

[gilflo]

I tried other settings on my big SSTO from page 2: SteeringResponse is now 2, the curve remains the same. Steering is less agressive.

I set the friction more important on nose gear so that I can skid head to tail around the nose gear and I disable steering on nose gear during take off and landing run, using only Rudder, which is enough and i think it's the best setting for take off and landing. On the B9 procedural wings there's also a Authority limiter on control surface that can be set from 0 to 100 in case rudder inputs are to efficient on runway.

[Columbia]

I don't know, call me abusive of the landing gear but at times it would jitter violently when used, and generate speed by itself when I steer with it, as well as the brakes being too weak. It might be because I'm on 1.1.1230 though.

Anyone else having issues similar to that?

On the other hand, the smaller landing gear has new limits for how much stress it can take. It's good to take those into account when designing planes with them.

[eddiew]

On 09/06/2016 at 11:48 AM, Overland said:

I find it rather concerning that atleast with the stock rover wheels ( M1 and rugged) that 3rd party mod wheels are able to sucessfully use these new wheel settings so correctly and function as they should yet stock ones fail too ..

What is it modders are getting right that stock stuff isnt?

Mind cluing me up on the mod with working wheels? Whatever it is, I want it  

[Overland]

9 hours ago, eddiew said:

Mind cluing me up on the mod with working wheels? Whatever it is, I want it  

 

3 kinds of wheels..all work nicely

Compatable with rover wheelsound mod

And most other things too.. Im using these grizley and cub wheels with puma rovers from another pack and aircraft love the double wheels too

[Alshain]

On 6/6/2016 at 2:23 AM, KerikBalm said:

Having problems stopping?

Use a drogue chute like the shuttle did...

It didn't always.  It was capable of stopping without it.  The first many flights didn't have one.

[Bigbootie]

On June 5, 2016 at 2:12 PM, cephalo said:

I'm going to give that a try regex, it has less fuel than I have on mine which should make it lighter, but mine doesn't land so I gotta try something different.

 

Gimme a design! Screenie will do.

I have been building nothing but planes and rovers the last 3 weeks. Wheels are not great but they are not stopping me from the many take offs and landings I have done. Just click on my profile and check some out. Small, large, and, ridiculous sizes.

[KerikBalm]

13 hours ago, Alshain said:

It didn't always.  It was capable of stopping without it.  The first many flights didn't have one.

and ksp aircraft don't need drogues to stop... but they sure help, and properly mounted, they really help the stability of the aircraft when on wheels and decelerating. Proper mounting is at the aft end of the craft... like the shuttle.. a nose mounted chute will do bad things if you try to use it to stop.

Almost all my aircraft use drogue chutes (not necessarily the orange chutes with the name "drogue")

[Corona688]

On 6/5/2016 at 0:56 PM, qromodynmc said:

Im really having bad times to understand how people cant take off or land with current gears, smaller fixed ones are fishy but even those are not unplayable.

Im really plane guy and i design planes from 1ton to 200 ton, i just dont get all the fuss.

They aren't "weak", they are bugged.  Sometimes when you launch, you can right-click on a landing gear, and see that there's already a pile of force on it for no reason, and when you try to move your craft forward, it acts like its physically stuck in the earth to the point of jittering on the verge of collapse.  It's kind of like the old "stuck in the launch pad" bug except, even if you leave the runway, the landing gear will continue misbehaving once you land again.

It seems to have something to do with the craft in question.  Deleting and re-adding landing gear sometimes fixes it for me.

[GarrisonChisholm]

I'll add my 2-cents in, though I will say first that I am happily playing the game and am very grateful for its existence.

My first game (v1.02), I built Many aircraft.  They were fun to fly, to explore the world, and to resolve their engineering challenges.  I successfully built numerous space-planes as well (some happily pictured, but none as beautiful as @Val 's).  Aircraft were 40-50% of my invested time i that campaign.

Now in 1.1.2 (i think is what we're calling it) I don't build Any aircraft, because every aircraft I build veers violently off a straight-line whenever 40+ m/s is reached.  I tinkered, but I know my designs are sound, so I just stopped building aircraft.  I have lost 2 Kerbals so far, and both were in take-off accidents on the runway.  In my first game?  I think I lost 1 in a landing accident, about 12 on re-entry (don't ask), and 11 when I fell asleep during a return to Kerbin burn from Duna (mission control was fired; I didn't reload because space is unforgiving).

Aircraft are not fun right now, so I am doing the fun parts - things that go straight up.  I will not automatically update to the next version, because I *can* play what I have now, and I am not going to risk something worse happening until I have heard that aircraft can roll straight.

Here's hoping those resolutions are over the horizon!

[LaytheDragon]

If you are far enough in the tech tree to have Junos, it is much more than possible to land on Minmus, and if you can land on Minmus, you can get a polar orbit around it and grind extremely easy, high-paying (even with 20% science and funds as in my current career, which hasn't had Junos unlocked in it) orbital observation contracts, or with the tier 2 astronaut complex, do flag-planting contracts for large sums of funds. Also, you can farm Minmus science.

Edited June 17, 2016 by LaytheDragon

[Val]

11 hours ago, GarrisonChisholm said:

because every aircraft I build veers violently off a straight-line whenever 40+ m/s is reached

The veering will go away, if you place the main landing gear between CoM and CoL and the nose gear as far forward as possible.

[Hatchet82]

OK, so i just loaded up a new plane to test for a rescue mission, and it bounced off the pad..... (Probably the reason i need to make a rescue mission now that i read this Thread.) I have tried to follow the conversation but i think it is a case of people knowing what they are talking about and so not mentioning the important bits. Apparently, i need mod manager, and i need to edit a file. so my plane does not act like a basket ball. or wait until the next release to play, or go to a previous release of the game.

Can someone write the code down for me or link me to instructions?

[Merandix]

I honestly think that if squad will have to readdress landing gear for 1.2, perhaps it would be nice to take a peek at the pre-1.1 adjustable landing gear mod. I played once with that mod, and sadly can't go without it anymore (the pain, because obviously the writer is waiting out on the Unity-issues)... adjustable heights and all are nice. Many Mk 2 planes need a medium landing gear but look like a stork or crane high on very tall landing gear. It doesn't look nice, and it becomes top-heavy. Stock adjustable landing gear would be SO incredibly awesome and useful.

[wumpus]

To be only semi-on topic, did Mun landers really slide at 14 degrees (according to KE) until things flattened out in 1.0.4?  Most of my Mun experience was in pre-beta, so I can't be quite sure (back in the days when the Mun was flat and kerbals had it easy).

I suspect that non-aircraft landing gear could use some help as well.

[herbal space program]

My big issue with the gear is just the fact that the spring/damper system creates ridiculous phantom forces if you make less than an absolutely straight, slow <40m/s horizontal and  <0.2 m/s vertical touchdown. If the suspension bounces at all when you land, that energy will only magnify as you roll down the tarmac. The brakes and dampers seem to do the opposite of what they're supposed to do, and the plane will never stop moving no matter what you do, short of just retracting the gear.. My planes just keep on dancing around, even if forward motion is zero, and if I engage time warp, they shake themselves to pieces. I have a hard time understanding why there is no way for the devs to create some sort of kludge to paper over that behavior until it can be properly fixed.

[Znath]

Landing gear should be strong.  Just as many other parts in the game can be stressed and abused.  If it's a limit of the game engine, ok we can wait.  But I don't believe it's impossible to fix this bug.  And I don't think it's right to defend it as a change.

 

If you personally wanna weaken everything a lot and download the real solar system and up the gravity make air deadlier limit your oxygen and make all other features hyper realistic that's on you.

 

This is not a simulator.

That's why you can land on wing tips.  It's why you don't need to factor the weight of food and oxygen on your trips.  It's why Kerbin is tiny and the distances in the solar system are downscaled.  It's for the sake of fun and playability. 

 

When I first tried the kerbal space demo, most people thought you could get into orbit and that was that.  So I pushed on and landed on the tips of wings on the moon without guidance, stability controls, or anything.  When you push it, the game lets you to some degree.  There's a little absurdity in the game but you still can't go to mars on one monoprop tank...  There's a little sense of realism and a little healthy spoonful of sugar to go with it.  You still have to estimate a bit of delta-V even if you don't know what that is.  Got a bigger lander?  More fuel.  Didn't make it to orbit?  More boost.  Spinning? Fins, stability, bracing. 

 

But you don't need to calculate down to the narrowest impact landing like a hummingbird on a flower made of frozen spiderwebs.  Because that makes it into work, and too complicated for the average player.  There are mods for the diehards that want to make the game ridiculous.

 

Is it "realistic" to land on grass with a jet fighter?  Maybe not..... but usually there's more than one landing strip on the entire dang planet!  So this part of the concessions of realism we have to make to make up for the fact the game has basically one dang city in it.  And even that's not really a city.  Next best thing is the little island with a crappy runway on it.  Then the junkyard northwest of the desert with the "old style buildings not used in the game anymore"

 

[theend3r]

On 17. červen 2016 at 8:06 PM, GarrisonChisholm said:

I'll add my 2-cents in, though I will say first that I am happily playing the game and am very grateful for its existence.

My first game (v1.02), I built Many aircraft.  They were fun to fly, to explore the world, and to resolve their engineering challenges.  I successfully built numerous space-planes as well (some happily pictured, but none as beautiful as @Val 's).  Aircraft were 40-50% of my invested time i that campaign.

Now in 1.1.2 (i think is what we're calling it) I don't build Any aircraft, because every aircraft I build veers violently off a straight-line whenever 40+ m/s is reached.  I tinkered, but I know my designs are sound, so I just stopped building aircraft.  I have lost 2 Kerbals so far, and both were in take-off accidents on the runway.  In my first game?  I think I lost 1 in a landing accident, about 12 on re-entry (don't ask), and 11 when I fell asleep during a return to Kerbin burn from Duna (mission control was fired; I didn't reload because space is unforgiving).

Aircraft are not fun right now, so I am doing the fun parts - things that go straight up.  I will not automatically update to the next version, because I *can* play what I have now, and I am not going to risk something worse happening until I have heard that aircraft can roll straight.

Here's hoping those resolutions are over the horizon!

Same here except I've given up on KSP until this is resolved. BahamutoD (author of the best wheels and weapon systems) has also ceased to be active, for the same reason I assume. I hope it's fixed sooner than later but I've been waiting for new planets for 3 years so I probably can wait for wheels a few months or a year.

[herbal space program]

On ‎6‎/‎17‎/‎2016 at 10:41 PM, Val said:

The veering will go away, if you place the main landing gear between CoM and CoL and the nose gear as far forward as possible.

That is definitely true, but I would add that you don't even usually  need to put the main gear that far forward t take off successfully. Just having it say twice as close to the CoM as the front gear is usually enough to keep the plane from spinning out on the runway, especially if it's well-balanced aerodynamically and you pull up on the stick a bit as you get up to speed. It's landing that I'm finding next to impossible with these wheels, because any bounce at all on landing seems to generate ever-increasing oscillations for me until the plane flips out.

Edited June 22, 2016 by herbal space program

[Val]

11 hours ago, herbal space program said:

That is definitely true, but I would add that you don't even usually  need to put the main gear that far forward t take off successfully. Just having it say twice as close to the CoM as the front gear is usually enough to keep the plane from spinning out on the runway, especially if it's well-balanced aerodynamically and you pull up on the stick a bit as you get up to speed.

In pre-1.1 that was definitely true, but since 1.1, landing gear position relative to CoM has become much more important.

 

Quote

It's landing that I'm finding next to impossible with these wheels, because any bounce at all on landing seems to generate ever-increasing oscillations for me until the plane flips out.

I have not had that happen to my craft, either on or off runway.

Edited June 23, 2016 by Val
Grammar