Control wheels, with IJKL

[OHara]

There are significant advantages to binding I J K L to control the wheels.

You can accelerate without commanding pitch forward, and steer without commanding yaw,
so there is no longer a need to disable reaction wheels and RCS while driving to reduce spin-outs and flips.
The you can let SAS  control reaction wheels and/or RCS to hold prograde as you bounce over the bumps.  SAS does not try to steer the wheels.

Mod-I sets a forward-drive trim, independently of pitch trim, that you can use as an approximation of cruise-control.

Now that the EVA headlamp defaults to 'U' (was 'L' long ago) there is no conflict to controlling wheels with IJKL, even with Kerbals in command seats.

The existing W A S D can be secondary keys, so that existing players can still command pitch-forward and drive simultaneously, while new players can use 'I' for wheels-forward and not be surprised that the craft bounces from the reaction wheels trying to pitch it forward. 

I am about to put this in a 'feedback' item on the bug-tracker, and thought I might collect other people's thoughts first.

(A related idea is to add IJLKHN as secondary keybindings for EVA-Kerbals' RCS-packs, so that they can be flown in the same way as a craft under RCS translation control.)

Edited December 27, 2018 by OHara

[qzgy]

Easier as it is for newbies to make a rover and use the same controls for the wheels than wonder why the normal controls which work for their planes and rockets don't work for their rovers or car replicas. 

 

Yes, it's fine if you know about it but for those who don't, I'd think it would be quite a challenge to figure out ijkl control wheels or something. How long did it take you to figure out those key bindings for RCS? Personally had to look them up at first. 

[The Aziz]

Yeah I'd change them back to WSAD, like I said in another topic here recently, Ijkl don't work for me, and I doubt I can ever get used to that. Because arrow buttons are currently for camera movement? Anybody uses that?

Edited December 27, 2018 by The Aziz

[Tonka Crash]

I use the number pad on my keyboard 8,4,6,2 with 5 as another brake key.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

I mean I drive my rovers with IJKL already, what's the suggestion here exactly?

To make it the default? I think that would be a bit un-intuitive to most players.

However, making it the default "secondary" keybinding would be alright.

[OHara]

I'm suggesting that Squad set both WASD and IJKL to operate wheels by default (the image in the top post).

Then when people ask about rover controls here (most recent example) we can say simply "try using IJKL" rather than "quit to the main menu, then back to settings ..." among the other suggestions.

'Primary' and 'secondary' behave the same way; 'primary' is just written first.  I was thinking to suggest WASD primary and IJKL secondary, but then noticed that WASD are disabled from wheels in Docking Mode, Linear Translation (player reaction thread) so I thought maybe list IJKL first and have them control wheels in all modes.

I'm asking here to see if there are better suggestions, or changes to make it easier for left-handed single-button mouse users -- whatever I haven't thought of.