[1.12.X] Feline Utility Rovers v1.3.4 (28. April 2022)

[Dr.Wolfram]

@Nils277, base was never attacked by kracken. Bigfoot landing legs do their job

Kerbal Shipping Program

 

Edited March 2, 2017 by Dr.Wolfram

[FellipeC]

5 hours ago, FirroSeranel said:

Unless the flatbed could be made to have such a low center of gravity it -can't- flip...

Yes, I think things could have a lower center of gravity, specially for use the Paw (the smaller) wheels.

So I take a look at the battery underside module. The default one weights 0.005 tons. That means 5 kilos, about 10 pounds. It's way too light!

Then I made a quick search and find that a Tesla Model S battery weights about 550 kilos, or about 1200 pounds. Than I made a copy of the Battery .CFG file with the altered weight to 500 kilos, since I assume this rover is more the size of a big truck, so complete batter pack would weight twice Model S' one.

The result was astonishing! In Kerbin I simple can't roll over with the Paw wheels. On Mum is possible, but needs to be aggressive with turns.

I have no idea how this balances with the rest of parts pack or even the entire KSP, was just a rough guess of mine, but it worked to lower the CoG of the rovers

[Nils277]

Update to 0.4.0 aka the FREIGHT Update

Quote

0.4.0 [Released: 3. Mar. 2017]

Enhancements:

• The switch for the resources is not visible when only one resource is available
• Moved the front AttachNode of the Cockpit to the height of the hitch nodes
• Renamed some parts for a more reasonable placement in the Editor
• Better clarity of the possible resource in the desctiption of the resource switch
• Resources for the Container are now configured with templates
• The bumper has an attach note for the adapter/decoupler now
• Increased the weight of the canisters and wheels for a slighly lower center of mass

Mod Support:

• Added support for Raster Prop Monitor
• Added support for ASET Props
• Added support for Surface Experiment Pack
• Added support for RealFuels
• Added support for Pathfinder
• Added support for Kerbal Engineer (Redux)
• Added resource support for Extraplanetary Launchpads
• Added resource support for OSE Workshop
• Added resource support for MKS
• Added resource support for Deepfreeze
• Added resource support for NearFuture Propulsion
• Added resource support for NearFuture Electrical
• The fuel-cell canister is now recognized as power producer by AmpYear and BonVoyage

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed NRE in category filter
• Fixed a bug where the KIS Container was available when KIS is not installed
• Fixed stack nodes for wheels on the KIS Freight Container
• Fixed distortion for the hitch/joint after docking/attaching parts
• Fixed NRE in ModuleKerbetrotterInternalUpdater
• Fixed error where the bellowed hitch is not updating when reverting flight
• Fixed bug where the hitch/joint behaves weird when placed/moved by KIS

Edited September 14, 2017 by Nils277

[royying]

I just want to show off my new stair car

[Nils277]

@royying Now thats what i call a brilliant idea  

Edited March 3, 2017 by Nils277

[Antik]

Holly wheels, that's a one big and avesome update, @Nils277! That's alot of stuff we can carry now.
@royying nice staircar, wery clever.

[Lightwarrior]

After the update with kerbalism installed fuel cell now has both stock and kerbalism converters, i suppose removal of stock converter needs to be added to kerbalism support config...

[Nils277]

4 minutes ago, Lightwarrior said:

After the update with kerbalism installed fuel cell now has both stock and kerbalism converters, i suppose removal of stock converter needs to be added to kerbalism support config...

 

Darn, forgot about that. Will be fixed in the next update.

[FirroSeranel]

19 hours ago, FellipeC said:

Yes, I think things could have a lower center of gravity, specially for use the Paw (the smaller) wheels.

So I take a look at the battery underside module. The default one weights 0.005 tons. That means 5 kilos, about 10 pounds. It's way too light!

Then I made a quick search and find that a Tesla Model S battery weights about 550 kilos, or about 1200 pounds. Than I made a copy of the Battery .CFG file with the altered weight to 500 kilos, since I assume this rover is more the size of a big truck, so complete batter pack would weight twice Model S' one.

The result was astonishing! In Kerbin I simple can't roll over with the Paw wheels. On Mum is possible, but needs to be aggressive with turns.

I have no idea how this balances with the rest of parts pack or even the entire KSP, was just a rough guess of mine, but it worked to lower the CoG of the rovers

 

 

Keep in mind though, Kerbals are much smaller than humans, and their vehicles are much smaller as well, typically a third to half the diameter of human spacecraft, so I assume their trucks would be the same, so 500 kg is probably a bit much.

I've been trying to solve the rolling problem (even with the wider wheels, it's very very roll-happy on the Mun at anything above about 12 m/s) by using different wheels, like the MaleMute's wheels, which give much less ground clearance. I don't like the look of them though, so recently I've been trying to make a half-track design with Kerbal Foundries, and to make the FUR double-wide. In general, I wish the Mun didn't have so much traction for turning. It seems to have very little traction for acceleration and braking, and near infinite friction for turning (and subsequently rolling over vehicles). This just isn't the case. If you look at footage of the moon buggy being driven, it slides sideways all the time before finally digging into deep enough dust to turn. But if I turn the Friction Control to manual, and lower it to a point where I don't roll every time I try to turn a little, I can't get it to turn at all, thanks to absolutely incredible amounts of understeer.

In general though, the center of mass of the FUR parts does seem quite high. In a real truck, the chassis is by far the heaviest component, and it's way down low, basically the thick gray beam under the carriage sections on the FUR, where you attach wheels and other under-body components. By comparison to the chassis and engine, the body of a real vehicle is quite light. (A couple of people can lift the body of most cars that have chassis. The engine, not so much.)

What would it take to lower the CoM in the parts in general? Is that set in the config files? Or does Unity calculate it as the volumetric center automatically?

Edit: Ooh, he already did some stuff to lower CoM, nice! And wow, very nice update, Nils!

Edited March 3, 2017 by FirroSeranel

[FirroSeranel]

Also, any word from Ferram4 about fixing KJR? It doesn't let stock parts like the grappling claw flex either... and I'm faced with hating stock joint behavior, but also wanting flexing joints in some vehicles.

[Nils277]

27 minutes ago, FirroSeranel said:

Also, any word from Ferram4 about fixing KJR? It doesn't let stock parts like the grappling claw flex either... and I'm faced with hating stock joint behavior, but also wanting flexing joints in some vehicles.

Haven't asked again.

But you can grab the latest state of KJR from Github (Not the release, but the current state of the repository) and use this. Tested it with this and it worked before i made the announcement of the fix.

Edited March 3, 2017 by Nils277

[Nils277]

@FirroSeranel A good way to keep the rover stable is to set the friction control of the wheels to manual and play around with the values a bit more

Reducing the friction a bit indeed reduces the chance of rolling over but it is also a good idea to make the friction of the wheels at the rear higher than the friction of the wheels at the front, this way your rover will stay way better on track.

 

Edit: Oh and i almost always only enable the steering on the frontmost wheels, the rover is way more stable with that.

Edited March 3, 2017 by Nils277

[FellipeC]

@FirroSeranel Yes you're right, Kerbals are way smaller, I always forget that.

 

@Nils277 I'm very happy by you take in account the CoG and increasing the mass of lower parts to help it go lower.

 

By the way I need a suggestion from other players. When the game load a base, for some reason the springs spring and in low gravity places like Mun rovers can do a quite big jump just after loading. That make anything in they roof colide with a garage ceiling, and sometimes explode.

I don't think I'm the only one having this issue, so I ask, how do you prevent that? Simple don't add things to roofs, don't let the rover parked in garage, what is the approach?

I tough of adding a coupler to the garage floor, so I can "dock" the rover. Things got even worse, as you can see here:

 

 

[Antik]

In the update you moved cfg's of life support module and canister into another folder and somehow TAC-LS don't want to cooperate with them now. It fills resoruses into crew cabin and cockpit though. Can such folderstuffing cause this?

EDIT: i think- the cause of this is that now to change resource, it needs to be specifically labeled as "isTweakable = true", if part isn't using your storage templates cfg. Neither of which is true in case of said parts.

Also, how to look on ASET monitor, that's behind copilot in cockpit? I simply can turn head there w\o iva viev extention mods.

Edited March 3, 2017 by Antik

[FirroSeranel]

1 hour ago, FellipeC said:

By the way I need a suggestion from other players. When the game load a base, for some reason the springs spring and in low gravity places like Mun rovers can do a quite big jump just after loading. That make anything in they roof colide with a garage ceiling, and sometimes explode.

I don't think I'm the only one having this issue, so I ask, how do you prevent that? Simple don't add things to roofs, don't let the rover parked in garage, what is the approach?

I tough of adding a coupler to the garage floor, so I can "dock" the rover. Things got even worse, as you can see here:

4

I'd try a couple of things...

• Try docking to the roof of the garage instead, maybe with DMagic's Flexible Docking Ports, or the extendable docking port from RoverDude's Malemute rover.
• Hook up an EVA strut after parking the rover.
• Put tougher parts on the roof of the rover, positioned so that the tougher parts (higher impact velocity) always hit first. Good parts for this are wheels (the KerbalFoundries surface track, or the small fixed landing gear are good for this). I-Beams are also quite tough.
• Use Allista's Hangars mod. It has garages that unload vehicles when they're parked, and reload them only when you want to take them out for a spin. This helps with part counts as well.
• Use KJR, if you aren't already. Its physics easing code helps reduce that jump. I usually just get a slight lift of maybe 10-20 cm, rather than a big leap into the air.

[Nils277]

57 minutes ago, Antik said:

In the update you moved cfg's of life support module and canister into another folder and somehow TAC-LS don't want to cooperate with them now. It fills resoruses into crew cabin and cockpit though. Can such folderstuffing cause this?

EDIT: i think- the cause of this is that now to change resource, it needs to be specifically labeled as "isTweakable = true", if part isn't using your storage templates cfg. Neither of which is true in case of said parts.

Also, how to look on ASET monitor, that's behind copilot in cockpit? I simply can turn head there w\o iva viev extention mods.

Oh darn (again). I forgot to change to the templates for the Life Support resources. They won't work for any LS mods at the moment. Will take care of that tomorrow. 

The ASET monitor is just there for fun to also have something to see when looking inside with JSIATP or the stock overlay.I don't think it has important information for the actual driving. 

[FirroSeranel]

The bay lights don't seem to be working in the large cargo bay (maybe others, haven't checked). Anything in the update that might have done that?

[Antik]

@FirroSeranel Works fine for me, both for large, small and ramp.

[Nils277]

19 minutes ago, FirroSeranel said:

The bay lights don't seem to be working in the large cargo bay (maybe others, haven't checked). Anything in the update that might have done that?

Haven't changed anything in these parts for all i know...

[FirroSeranel]

Hmm... I've had trouble with lights since installing Ven's Part Revamp. Some lights work, and some don't. But that shouldn't touch this mod's lights, the problem is how he's calling the light animation, I think. Strange...

The lights themselves do light up, they just don't actually cast any light.

[FellipeC]

Maybe increase the number of lights in settings?

[Nils277]

@FirroSeranel That is really weird. 

 

@FellipeC The weird behaviour when docking is due to the fact that the rover and the garage are considerd to be one vessel by KSP as soon as they dock. And a vessel does not collide with itself anymore, meaning that the small hitch bends because of the rovers weight and cannot collide with the garage because they are the same vessel. 

[mikerl]

I thought about asking for an ore container to mount on the underside, then saw your update that did pretty much what i needed.  Been playing around with it and now the talon wheels can do some nice drifting.  Although a retractable landing leg would help with trailer design, seems like they are more stable without front wheels.

[FirroSeranel]

Good thought, @FellipeC, but that's not it. They aren't even working in the SPH, even if they're the only lights on.

@Nils277 Yeah, it's an out of date mod that from what I can tell is basically unsupported at this point. I wish I could uninstall it. It's pretty, and adds some parts I never knew I was missing. But unfortunately it doesn't just re-mesh and re-texture stock parts, it completely replaces them, so uninstalling it would mean killing literally every ship I have in flight (since every single ship uses at least some stock parts).

 

2 minutes ago, mikerl said:

 Although a retractable landing leg would help with trailer design, seems like they are more stable without front wheels.

 

Yeah, I agree about the front wheels. The Little Bigfoot works pretty well though as a retractable leg for the front. It's about the right size, and looks pretty good with the FUR.

[Rafael acevedo]

5 hours ago, FellipeC said:

@FirroSeranel Yes you're right, Kerbals are way smaller, I always forget that.

 

@Nils277 I'm very happy by you take in account the CoG and increasing the mass of lower parts to help it go lower.

 

By the way I need a suggestion from other players. When the game load a base, for some reason the springs spring and in low gravity places like Mun rovers can do a quite big jump just after loading. That make anything in they roof colide with a garage ceiling, and sometimes explode.

I don't think I'm the only one having this issue, so I ask, how do you prevent that? Simple don't add things to roofs, don't let the rover parked in garage, what is the approach?

I tough of adding a coupler to the garage floor, so I can "dock" the rover. Things got even worse, as you can see here:

 

 

I went thru this extensively when alpha testing. It is not limited to FUR, but also to the buffalo and malemute rover (it is harder to observe in this since most of the parts that get stuck on the garage ceiling are integrated in the other rovers VS being discrete parts). Your best bet is not to put anything on the roof, except for the control unit on top of the cab. other things that help is to add struts to the cab and to lower only on side of the hangar when decoupling. Be careful cause these behavior might not occur in kerbin, but will occur under lower gravity. Here are some pics of designs that work and allow you to continually dock and undock.