No more rover flipping

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Some tips about tippy rovers:

Upside down jet engines, with the exhaust facing the sky. No, not running, you aren't even gonna bring fuel/intakes for them. Just sitting there, why? The COM on all jet engine models is well ahead of the physical model itself to account for all the plumbing we don't see. Placing these on a rover upside down will put their collective COM low, pushing the entire COM of the rover down, it's even possible to get it below the ground this way. Making for an extremely tip-resistant rover. (It'll just skid out if it was gonna tip.) If this sounds a bit "cheaty" to you just think of them as counter weights or ballast.

Also, roll bars, bumpers, fenders, and a skid pan. 80 m/s resistant structural pieces.

This truck for example, is nigh invulnerable since it can only ever contact the ground in any given orientation on it's structural pieces. It's survived it's carrier plane ramming a mountain side at full speed. Of course this adds some weight, but hey if you want to drive it like you stole it, you gotta pay the price!

Edited September 11, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Firsty Kerman]

ISNT THERE a mod that can help with moving veichles?

[linuxgurugamer]

9 hours ago, Firsty Kerman said:

ISNT THERE a mod that can help with moving veichles?

It's simple, just turn off crash damage.

The vehicles are following the laws of physics, as does the rest of the game.  Vehicles flip because of physics, not because of magic.  And a mod which would prevent that would essentially be magic.

[kerbiloid]

But first of all don't be like Apollos, use this thing.

Upd.
Oops, looks like this thing is removed, so "... if you still have it".
Otherwise somebody could reproduce it, it looks rather simple.

It's very strange that the lunar and Martian sci-fi rovers are less armored than hunter jeeps.

Edited January 2, 2020 by kerbiloid

[linuxgurugamer]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

But first of all don't be like Apollos, use this thing.

Upd.
Oops, looks like this thing is removed, so "... if you still have it".
Otherwise somebody could reproduce it, it looks rather simple.

It's very strange that the lunar and Martian sci-fi rovers are less armored than hunter jeeps.

I may have it, will need to find and check the license.

”armour” is heavy.

Otherwise, make yout own with this mod:

 

Edited January 2, 2020 by linuxgurugamer

[linuxgurugamer]

I found it on the forums here:

 

[kerbiloid]

38 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

on the forums here:

I've seen it, but that's only several wheels, not rollkages, as I can see.

P.S.
(I have the rollkages, just its license requires the author permission to share, so I don't)

Spoiler

McBeth Engineering RollKage by AngusMcBeth and Electronicfox

Please do not redistribute without prior permission.

You are free to alter these parts as you wish provided it is for personal use only.

 

Edited January 2, 2020 by kerbiloid

[linuxgurugamer]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

I've seen it, but that's only several wheels, not rollkages, as I can see.

P.S.
(I have the rollkages, just its license requires the author permission to share, so I don't)

Ok, it was just what I found, and I wasn't sure about the license.  Too bad.  But at least you can make your own with Structural Tubing Restructured

[hypervelocity]

On 12/30/2019 at 5:16 PM, linuxgurugamer said:

It's simple, just turn off crash damage.

The vehicles are following the laws of physics, as does the rest of the game.  Vehicles flip because of physics, not because of magic.  And a mod which would prevent that would essentially be magic.

yeah, let's just pretend the vehicles are flipping because physics and not KSP phsyics

driving, and more generally any interaction with the ground in KSP is just terrible and I find these requests and cries for help all valid

I do certify I use some of the methods discussed here and some of my own to reduce these issues

Edited January 2, 2020 by hypervelocity

[Guest]

They're flipping because physics. Someone mentioned 80m/s. None of you probably realized (courtesy of lousy ground textures) that it's 288kph (or 179mph, for the metrically challenged). This is how fast F1 racers go. Those cars have a whole array of aerodynamics designed solely to keep them on the ground, especially in corners. There's a video of one, upon leaving another car's aerodynamic wake, lifting off, flipping over a few times like a badly designed KSP airplane, and landing in the bushes. It was probably going at something around 80m/s. In aviation terms, that's 155 knots, the landing speed of a mostly unloaded F-16, or ten knots below the maximum speed a Cessna. TL;DR: Yer going too fast!

If you were to be going at highway speeds, you're looking at driving at 30-40m/s. I once charged down a mostly straight highway at 47m/s, on a very urgent business. It wasn't very legal, but I knew that highway well enough, traffic was light and it got me where I was going, (barely) on time. That's about as fast as you can drive safely in a car on that particular highway, provided you have a good engine, good brakes, good road and a good idea of what's ahead. You're all trying not only trying to do that much over grass, sand and rocks, but you're trying to turn at this speed. Without analog steering, no less. People regularly fly off the road at much lower speeds.

The problem with KSP is that driving at 10-20m/s gets you nowhere, and there's no stock way to automate the rovers. Wheels are all right, not perfect, but they do work if used as intended.

[linuxgurugamer]

2 hours ago, hypervelocity said:

yeah, let's just pretend the vehicles are flipping because physics and not KSP phsyics

driving, and more generally any interaction with the ground in KSP is just terrible and I find these requests and cries for help all valid

I do certify I use some of the methods discussed here and some of my own to reduce these issues

KSP Physics is still physics, and follows the same laws of physics.  Specifically, mass, inertia, CoM all play into it.

And have you considered the actual speeds involved?

10m/sec is more than 22 MPH or 36 KPH.  A significant amount of speed, especially when you consider that I've seen people traveling at 30m/sec and then complaining that they flip, but they don't realize that that speed is more than 66mph.  m/sec is not intuitive for most people, while MPH or KPH is intuitive since that is what we use on a daily basis 

[hypervelocity]

agreed with the aforesaid!  although, I gotta say: did you ever see a 100 ton structure bouncing on the surface of a planetary surface (w/o any other force acting on it & regardless of the local gravity)? this is KSP and although it is a fair representation of real world physics, the limitations of its coding, engine and such make this representation imperfect, sometimes evidenced by the issues described in this topic. I find suggestions related to CoM and design choices to be appropriate, but let's leave room for KSP's wackyness as well

Edited January 2, 2020 by hypervelocity

[Rocket In My Pocket]

5 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

They're flipping because physics. Someone mentioned 80m/s.

As far as I can tell, I'm the only one who mentioned 80 m/s, but it was in relation to how much impact the structural pieces you'd make your roll cage out of can survive.

I don't think anyone suggested actually driving at those speeds, I certainly didn't lol.

Yes though, I agree that the m/s readout is misleading to a lot of people and causes much of the frustration with rovers.

Edited January 3, 2020 by Rocket In My Pocket

[DoctorDavinci]

5 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

They're flipping because physics. Someone mentioned 80m/s. None of you probably realized (courtesy of lousy ground textures) that it's 288kph (or 179mph, for the metrically challenged). This is how fast F1 racers go. Those cars have a whole array of aerodynamics designed solely to keep them on the ground, especially in corners. There's a video of one, upon leaving another car's aerodynamic wake, lifting off, flipping over a few times like a badly designed KSP airplane, and landing in the bushes. It was probably going at something around 80m/s. In aviation terms, that's 155 knots, the landing speed of a mostly unloaded F-16, or ten knots below the maximum speed a Cessna. TL;DR: Yer going too fast!

If you were to be going at highway speeds, you're looking at driving at 30-40m/s. I once charged down a mostly straight highway at 47m/s, on a very urgent business. It wasn't very legal, but I knew that highway well enough, traffic was light and it got me where I was going, (barely) on time. That's about as fast as you can drive safely in a car on that particular highway, provided you have a good engine, good brakes, good road and a good idea of what's ahead. You're all trying not only trying to do that much over grass, sand and rocks, but you're trying to turn at this speed. Without analog steering, no less. People regularly fly off the road at much lower speeds.

The problem with KSP is that driving at 10-20m/s gets you nowhere, and there's no stock way to automate the rovers. Wheels are all right, not perfect, but they do work if used as intended.

^^ This

I have a few rovers I use for racing on Kerbin and I routinely reach speeds of over 100 m/s (360 kph / 223 mph) ... the only reason they are the least bit stable and stay on the ground (for the most part) is due to the aerodynamics (and of course reaction wheels )

 

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

Only having played KSP I realized how much slow the cars are...

 

[Pds314]

Use the friction control. IIRC you can even use action groups to make friction control change as needed at the press of a button. But even not considering that, just use the friction control. You can use it to make it hard to turn aggressively or make it so that when you do turn aggressively you slide instead of rolling over. Even something very bulky and not at all well-designed like the crater crawler has no issue doing donuts or sliding around corners if you have friction control set correctly. You might not be able to climb a mountain with friction control set that low, but then again nobody is climbing a cliff with something like the crater crawler.

Edited January 3, 2020 by Pds314

[Pds314]

Friction control: Don't do a barrel roll. Half-sliding, half-rolling at 28 m/s but not tipping over.

Edited January 3, 2020 by Pds314

[Pds314]

Aggressively suboptimal rover design: An orange tank on stilts. High center of mass, very small wheelbase, way too little wheels for the mass of the vehicle, moving at over 40 m/s:

But set the damping, spring, and friction to something sensible, and it can turn as much as you want. At high speeds it will have a turn radius the size of a small town but so what? It's aggressively suboptimal. But at least it's not falling over:

And if you're worried low friction means it's like an ice rink with no ice skates, well, I mean, it's not TOO bad. It can still slalom the little bunkers or whatever they are without rocket boosters.