[1.8.x] Kerbal Foundries -- Continued - Tracks, Wheels, and Gear

[Shadowmage]

1 minute ago, Drew Kerman said:

If the above fails, it's def the small retractable gear and I'll make an issue for it

Have you tried the other KF landing gear / other stock converted parts?

[Drew Kerman]

7 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Have you tried the other KF landing gear / other stock converted parts?

Nope, my workaround has just been to remove the patch and null out friction. I'll make a report this weekend 

[Drew Kerman]

19 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Have you tried the other KF landing gear / other stock converted parts?

It did it with the small ALG wheel and the medium stock wheel (converted). It has to be something with what I'm doing in their placement? Here's a photo

So the original design has the wheels attached to the fuel tanks, but just now I also tried attaching them one at a time to the underside of the main fuselage with 90° angle snap and then offsetting them to the fuel tanks and got the same response - around 40m/s the craft just starts to veer off left. @Shadowmage maybe you want to try to replicate the behavior, here's a craft file on KerbalX.

[kcs123]

It seems to me like craft design mistake. I was having similar issues in some of previous KSP 1.x.x version in the past. I found that too wide spread of landing gears while not having enough distance between fron nad rear landing gears caused such issue. Although I was using two landing gears on rear in one at nose, effect seems very similar.

What I would try to do in attemt to improve design is to attach front landing gear to hull and then offset them to apear like they were attached on wings, as much as offset tools allow it.
Estimated good position should be somewhere around 1/2 of distance between hull and current position or engine placement.

It is always possible that some bug is involved, but I think that this is due to unity physics/wheels behaviour in general and exploited even more with certain craft designs.

[Shadowmage]

5 hours ago, Drew Kerman said:

It did it with the small ALG wheel and the medium stock wheel (converted). It has to be something with what I'm doing in their placement? Here's a photo

 

So the original design has the wheels attached to the fuel tanks, but just now I also tried attaching them one at a time to the underside of the main fuselage with 90° angle snap and then offsetting them to the fuel tanks and got the same response - around 40m/s the craft just starts to veer off left. @Shadowmage maybe you want to try to replicate the behavior, here's a craft file on KerbalX.

Thanks for trying, but a craft file only helps me if is stock + KF parts only (and/or other mods already in my dev setup like SSTU and TU).

Have you made sure to disable the motors on the parts (if they have them)?

Does the problem manifest when using any of the stock craft files with the converted gear?

 

Edit:

This is almost certainly something to do with your specific craft design, as I'm not getting that problem in my testing.  Things track straight, even at ludicrous speeds --

Here is my 'gremling' acrobat aircraft, 100+ms, zero pilot input, tracking straight down the runway.

Stock Aeris A3 with converted gear, 100ms+, zero pilot input, tracking straight down the runway.

 

Are you also sure that those props aren't inducing yaw from differential thrust and/or to simulate the effects that prop planes have in real life (you actually have to hold the rudder during takeoff in a single-engine prop plane to get it to track straight)?  (granted, shouldn't be a problem on a twin engine as the motors should be counter-rotating and the torques/effects should cancel out.... but its KSP and that would ahve to be specifically programmed).

 

Edited January 13, 2018 by Shadowmage

[Drew Kerman]

4 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Are you also sure that those props aren't inducing yaw from differential thrust and/or to simulate the effects that prop planes have in real life (you actually have to hold the rudder during takeoff in a single-engine prop plane to get it to track straight)?  (granted, shouldn't be a problem on a twin engine as the motors should be counter-rotating and the torques/effects should cancel out.... but its KSP and that would ahve to be specifically programmed).

Like I said, the exact same behavior occurs with the stock gear both with the KF patch and without the KF patch, but disabling friction allows it to track straight as an arrow, so yaw forces are not a problem

I think it may be the lack of a nose gear. I'd say it could also be the wheels being angled backwards due to the tail dragging but the tail comes off the ground before the wheels go crazy. Anyways, I agree it's most likely a craft design issue. KSP hates tail draggers I guess. How cruel!

8 hours ago, kcs123 said:

What I would try to do in attemt to improve design is to attach front landing gear to hull and then offset them to apear like they were attached on wings, as much as offset tools allow it.

thanks, but as I said in the post above yours I already tried that Oh well, just sticking to stock landing gear and disabling friction. Good thing tho is that when I land I can reverse the props to slow down since the brakes won't work

[Fireheart318]

Is there a way to make wheels not break? Going fast is damn-near impossible!

[0111narwhalz]

13 hours ago, Fireheart318 said:

Is there a way to make wheels not break? Going fast is damn-near impossible!

You can scale them up, or you can go into the difficulty settings and disable overspeed damage.

[Shadowmage]

On 1/13/2018 at 1:31 PM, Drew Kerman said:

Like I said, the exact same behavior occurs with the stock gear both with the KF patch and without the KF patch,

If it happens both with and without the KF patch, obviously the problem is not with KSPWheel, but something with the craft design (specific layout, parts being used may have issues).

To answer your original question 'are there friction controls' -- yes -- disabled by default and not officially supported -- you have to activate them from within the KSPWheel difficulty menu (stock difficulty options -> advanced -> KSPWheel -> enable friction adjustment), and when you play with the friction settings you are on your own for support of any stability/physics problems that may result. 

With the above setting enabled, you should have both a global friction adjustment (in the difficulty settings), and a per-part friction adjustment (in the part-right click menu).

On 1/13/2018 at 9:52 PM, Fireheart318 said:

Is there a way to make wheels not break? Going fast is damn-near impossible!

Define 'fast'?  (or rather 'fast' is all relative....)

Most of the rover-type wheels should get you up to at least 20m/s, which is ~40mph, and very fast for a rover (the LRV had a top speed of ~6ms / ~12mph).

(as others have stated, you can disable the speed-based damage stuff from the in-game difficulty options)

[Fireheart318]

Fast = ∞ (or at least 300m/s)

[TiktaalikDreaming]

1 hour ago, Fireheart318 said:

Fast = ∞ (or at least 300m/s)

300m/s is just shy of Mach 1.  There's a stack of reasons you shouldn't expect rover wheels to deal with that.

Edited January 15, 2018 by TiktaalikDreaming

[0111narwhalz]

1 hour ago, Fireheart318 said:

Fast = ∞ (or at least 300m/s)

If you're going at 300m/s, you're not using your wheels. If you want to touch the ground at 300m/s, you're looking for the antigrav stuff.

[Shadowmage]

And physics integration starts to fail at around 100m/s due to the time-stepping.  100ms / 50 updates per second = 2 meters per physics update.

At that speed, even approaching a small hill/incline will result in explosions due to things seeming to 'phase into' the terrain before the wheel suspension can kick in to keep things moving/suspended.  If you ever wondered why trying to land an aircraft (or anything) at ~100m/s+ is so difficult... ^^

 

There are lots of reasons why I have the limits on speed set where they are.  Suffice it to say, they will not be changing to such a large degree.  Minor balance adjustments, sure.  300m/s wheels?  Nope.  Even the landing gear should probably have a max speed of ~200m/s or less, but I've currently left them as 'infinite max speed' as a compromise. 

I might be willing to see ~80m/s on some of the fastest wheels for special uses (race-type cars on perfectly flat race-tracks), but it is not likely that any such parts will be included in KF (as it is more industrial themed).

So your options for super-high-speed land-travel are -- aircraft landing gear (either the ALG or converted stock parts), or using the anti-grav stuff (repulsors).  For any speed above ~100m/s, I would highly recommend the repulsors set to max height -- it is the only thing that will keep you safe at those speeds on any not-perfectly-smooth terrain (and even they have limits due to the physics integration).

[Citizen247]

"The only wheels that reached that hit that sort of speed in the real world are those used on the ThrustSSC for its land speed record attempts. That took place in a perfectly flat area with precision engineered wheels that had to hold up to enormous forces:
 

Quote

"The vehicle shape produced by Ron Ayers, and its ground clearance, dictated a wheel of 34 inches in diameter; at the anticipated design speed of 850mph, this meant a rotational speed of 8,400 rpm, and as a measure of the difficulty in design, a radial acceleration at the periphery of the wheel equal to 34,000 times the force of gravity."

http://www.thrustssc.com/thrustssc/Club/Secure/mn7_Wheels.html

 

A normal wheel would explode just from the force of rotation at those speeds, let alone hitting a bump. 100m/s is 223mph, that's fast for landing an aircraft, it's well over the top speed of most production sports cars, and far in excess of anything that goes "off-road". So 100m/s is a bit OP for industrial wheels, let alone 300m/s. Playing with FAR and AJE most of my planes don't hit 300m/s in flight. Landing speed is usually no higher than 80m/s if I can help it.

Edited January 17, 2018 by Citizen247

[Shadowmage]

Updated release is available:

https://github.com/shadowmage45/KerbalFoundries2/releases/tag/2.1.2.12

Minor maintenance update -- fixes a issue with 'on motorized wheels' contract objectives.

[krautbernd12]

Is the large landing gear meant to not be steerable, despite the toggle on the part? Sorry if this is redundant, but i tried the search and came up empty.

[Shadowmage]

3 minutes ago, krautbernd12 said:

Is the large landing gear meant to not be steerable, despite the toggle on the part? Sorry if this is redundant, but i tried the search and came up empty.

More specifics needed -- which part are you referring to?  (what is the part name as listed in game?)

ALG - Large -- is only steerable if the wheel angle is exactly zero.  The original models were not setup in such a way as to allow for proper steering mechanics when the strut is not straight.

Stock conversion patch -- should be steerable.

[krautbernd12]

2 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

ALG - Large -- is only steerable if the wheel angle is exactly zero.  The original models were not setup in such a way as to allow for proper steering mechanics when the strut is not straight.

Yeah, sorry for not mentioning it - i meant the large ALG. Thanks for clearing this up, that was exactetly the answer i was looking for.

[Loki stephens]

does this work for 1.3 it, crashes me every time.

[Loki stephens]

well I got it to work halfway..i deleted the KSPwheel folder and left everything else,the game loads and there are parts wheels and treads stuff like that.but if I put the KSPwheel folder back it crashes every time..any advice anyone could give?

[TiktaalikDreaming]

7 minutes ago, Loki stephens said:

well I got it to work halfway..i deleted the KSPwheel folder and left everything else,the game loads and there are parts wheels and treads stuff like that.but if I put the KSPwheel folder back it crashes every time..any advice anyone could give?

Which version of KSPWheel are you using and do you mean KSP 1.3 or 1.3.1?

[0111narwhalz]

1 hour ago, Loki stephens said:

does this work for 1.3 it, crashes me every time.

If you have the 1.3.1 version of the mod and the 1.3.0 version of KSP, it will crash. If you have the 1.3.0 version of the mod and the 1.3.1 version of KSP, it will crash. This is known and expected. If you get the right version (by scrolling back in the GitHub release history or updating KSP), it should work.

If it crashes and you have matching versions, supply logs and other, more detailed information.

[Loki stephens]

I have version 1.3.0 of ksp, I have like 3 versions of kerbal foundries,where can I find it for my version im not used to git hub so I have no clue which one I should get for my ksp version..thank you for your time.

[Loki stephens]

ok I got version 2.0.2.6 it works with everything in place .thank you for the info, very cool mod also one of my favorites.

[Jimbodiah]

If you have 1.3.0, then why not just update for 1.3.1?  All mods that worked for 1.3.0 have been updated for 1.3.1. Same with 1.2 players basically, no reason not to update. The only mod that doesn't support 1.3 is RSS/RO, and that works just fine with the small patch they posted (been running it since 1.3.0).