How to make wheels work in >1g?

[herbal space program]

Hello everybody,

I'm hosting a challenge that for most entrants will involve driving on Eve, and to my chagrin it appears that for the most part rover wheels just self-destruct when you subject them to >1.5g gravity. They just start hopping all around out of nowhere until they break. Is there some way to adjust the settings so that this won't happen? It seems totally at odds with any rational interpretation of the physics.

[steve_v]

1 minute ago, herbal space program said:

It seems totally at odds with any rational interpretation of the physics.

The behaviour of stock wheels has been at odds with rational physics since 1.1 and there's little one can do about it.
There are spring and damper settings available when advanced tweakables are enabled if you want to fiddle with them, you might find something that works.

[herbal space program]

2 minutes ago, steve_v said:

There are spring and damper settings available when advanced tweakables are enabled if you want to fiddle with them, you might find something that works.

Alas I'm not having much luck with those. I just thought there might be some formula that I haven't stumbled upon yet.

[bewing]

You have to make sure that you have a reasonable number of wheels to support the mass of the rover. If you overload them, they do go nuts.

But yeah, in general, if you have a reasonable design then you can find a spring/damper setting that works.

If you can post a stock craft, then we can take a peek.

 

[herbal space program]

2 hours ago, bewing said:

You have to make sure that you have a reasonable number of wheels to support the mass of the rover. If you overload them, they do go nuts.

But yeah, in general, if you have a reasonable design then you can find a spring/damper setting that works.

If you can post a stock craft, then we can take a peek.

 

This is it:

https://imgur.com/a/KitmHbn

I do appreciate what you said, but in this case I would say that the behavior was well out of proportion to the increased load. With default settings, this ship blew all its wheels as soon as I tweaked gravity to 1.5+. As it turns out though, I've found that against my intuition, lowering rather than raising spring/damper strength is what seems to prevent the buggy behavior. At 0.2/0.3 spring/damper, this 25-ton vehicle seems to do fine on Eve, although it lopes and bounces along in a sort of Beverly Hillbillies way. So for my purposes I guess we can call this ticket closed, but I still think it's pretty clear they need to call in an exterminator on this bug-infested little corner of this otherwise awesome game.

Edited February 16, 2019 by herbal space program

[Xd the great]

4 hours ago, herbal space program said:

This is it:

https://imgur.com/a/KitmHbn

I do appreciate what you said, but in this case I would say that the behavior was well out of proportion to the increased load. With default settings, this ship blew all its wheels as soon as I tweaked gravity to 1.5+. As it turns out though, I've found that against my intuition, lowering rather than raising spring/damper strength is what seems to prevent the buggy behavior. At 0.2/0.3 spring/damper, this 25-ton vehicle seems to do fine on Eve, although it lopes and bounces along in a sort of Beverly Hillbillies way. So for my purposes I guess we can call this ticket closed, but I still think it's pretty clear they need to call in an exterminator on this bug-infested little corner of this otherwise awesome game.

Try using larger wheels. I am not rover expert, but larger wheels are significantly harder to pop.

[steve_v]

5 hours ago, herbal space program said:

I still think it's pretty clear they need to call in an exterminator on this bug-infested little corner of this otherwise awesome game.

I have been arguing for a complete overhaul (read in-house rewrite) of Unity's janky wheel system since KSP started using it. Squad has been "tweaking" it, rather ineffectually it would seem, with nearly every patch over the same period.
A number of band-aid fixes have been applied (autostruts, disabling collisions, exposing spring variables etc.) and yet wheel physics is still thoroughly unrealistic, unpredictable, and frustrating for players.

When is this going to be fixed properly @SQUAD? The old wheel system was at least reliable and usable, while the new one is anything but and brought precious little in the way of desirable features.
Ackermann steering is not worthwhile upgrade if it comes with perpetual-motion machine springs and unpredictable physics failures.
The Unity WheelCollider horse is glue, please throw it out and write something that works properly.
 

1 hour ago, Xd the great said:

Try using larger wheels. I am not rover expert, but larger wheels are significantly harder to pop.

The problem, if I am correctly interpreting it as the same one I have seen in several situations, is not the breakingforce of the wheels.
The problem is the screwey suspension physics code that makes them go mental and generate ridiculous forces, in many case forces which are capable of destroying any wheel.

It's the same problem that makes craft vibrate on the spot, and aircraft landing gear bounce up and down perpetually. It's Unity's crap wheel system.
FWIW, It's also massively exacerbated if you let the suspension bottom-out.

Edited February 16, 2019 by steve_v

[herbal space program]

8 hours ago, Xd the great said:

Try using larger wheels. I am not rover expert, but larger wheels are significantly harder to pop.

As @steve_v said, this is not about the size of the wheel, it's about the bizarre way that the spring/damper code generates phantom forces. Like I said, when I turned both of those settings way down, the craft drove like an old Buick with blown-out shock absorbers, but it didn't dance around on its own (much), and the wheels didn't break every two seconds. That's good enough for me, but its still kind of an embarrassment that they can't make this work better out-of-the-box.

Edited February 16, 2019 by herbal space program