Are we still pretending the wheels/legs aren't broken?

Geonovast · May 27, 2019

The lander touched down perfectly level at roughly 3 m/s. It then immediately flung itself to the ground, then began climbing uphill, a roughly 8 degree incline. It crawled a good 50 meters before it stopped.

steuben · May 27, 2019

The legs are fine. It's the ground that's broken.

Superfluous J · May 27, 2019

I've never experienced this phenomenon. In my personal experience, 1.7's legs are better than 1.6's legs which were better than 1.5's. Not saying they're perfect or anything but in my gameplay I'd say they were temperamental, but far from "broken."

Fraktal · May 27, 2019

They still kick out with excessively disproportional force when compressed, for one.

radonek · May 27, 2019

Dunno about broken legs, but your lander does not look very good to me. Tall, quite high CoM, that's just asking for trouble. Single landing leg sticking out at sides… if you land on even mildy inclined ground, that one leg will bear almost all of the force before others touch down and can share the load. Your design is really helping any problems to manifest in worst possible way.

May 27, 2019

deleted

Edited March 29, 2020 by Guest

Geonovast · May 27, 2019

12 minutes ago, radonek said:

Dunno about broken legs, but your lander does not look very good to me. Tall, quite high CoM, that's just asking for trouble. Single landing leg sticking out at sides… if you land on even mildy inclined ground, that one leg will bear almost all of the force before others touch down and can share the load. Your design is really helping any problems to manifest in worst possible way.

The CoM in its condition is right about where the solar panels are. That center fuel tank is completely full. Ideally it would be lower, yes, but it's not "quite high".

I know how to build a lander. I have put landers down on the Mun that were this tall with narrower stances and have never had it just immediately flip. Landing legs did not used to launch landers straight back up like this, as Fraktal put it:

29 minutes ago, Fraktal said:

They still kick out with excessively disproportional force when compressed, for one.

It's possible to have one leg hit the ground before the rest of them with literally any configuration. Even if it had hit solely on one leg, which it didn't, it should not have that ability to immediately fling something on its side like that.

But you're completely missing the point, which is that the physics are so broken that the legs made it crawl uphill, backwards.

Fraktal · May 27, 2019

16 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

Even if it had hit solely on one leg, which it didn't, it should not have that ability to immediately fling something on its side like that.

One leg kicks back with enough force to flip a lander 90° to its side before SAS stops the rotation. You try to get it back up, the instant one or even two legs are holding the lander's weight at about 160° from directly downwards, the leg(s) kicks out with enough force to literally send the lander flying sideways. You somehow get the lander back upright on its engine with legs retracted, then extend the legs, the lander does not rise off the ground, it jumps with enough force to become airborne for a full second under munar gravity. Granted, I've seen this behavior with the micro legs instead of the ones in the video above, but still.

It's normal behavior for the legs to compensate for being compressed by exerting more force against the compression. The problem is that said compensation is far too quick and far too strong, resulting in rapid and massive overshoot. But there isn't much choice there: if the compensation is too powerful, it overshoots; if it's not powerful enough, it oscillates (ie. bounces up and down endlessly, mostly seen when you build a plane that's overweight for the starter landing gear) and people were up in arms when the latter happened in 1.5. Getting it just right would take literally hundreds of hours' of trial and error and Squad isn't going to invest that much time into a bug that isn't game-crashing.

ExtremeSquared · May 28, 2019

My assumption is that they will need/get a fair amount of work before the robotics dlc releases. Unless the robotics parts are not intended for locomotion...

Gargamel · May 28, 2019

4 hours ago, Geonovast said:

The lander touched down perfectly level at roughly 3 m/s. It then immediately flung itself to the ground, then began climbing uphill, a roughly 8 degree incline. It crawled a good 50 meters before it stopped.

Sounds like you need an exorcist, not a game dev.

Dirt The Space Dirt Fox · May 28, 2019

Last time I was very seriously playing with wheels, my biggest scourge was dealing with them bursting literally every time a Kerbal got out of a command seat or just merely hooking or unhooking vehicles together, or even decoupling something from vehicles, and constantly have to repair them with an engineer literally all the time and the vehicles weren't anything extremely heavy either! I don't know if got recently fixed because I kind of gave up doing much with them due to this, it got too problematic and didn't used to be this way. I hope this is fixed in time for the DLC if it hasn't already as I have big robotics plans for wheel vehicles such as trucks!

mikegarrison · May 28, 2019

Back in the Unity 4 days, it seemed like the landing legs worked just fine. For some reason they have never really worked correctly in Unity 5.

ExtremeSquared · May 28, 2019

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

Back in the Unity 4 days, it seemed like the landing legs worked just fine. For some reason they have never really worked correctly in Unity 5.

I suspect the reason so many are ok with the current leg/wheel issues is that we played in the Unity 4 days, and remember how miserable the core stability and performance was, and happily traded that for borked landing gear.

mikegarrison · May 28, 2019

1 hour ago, ExtremeSquared said:

I suspect the reason so many are ok with the current leg/wheel issues is that we played in the Unity 4 days, and remember how miserable the core stability and performance was, and happily traded that for borked landing gear.

Yeah. About 1000% fewer times when we switch focus to a ship and it suddenly explodes with parts of it moving apart at supra-light speed. There was even a mod for making sure you had a quick autosave every time you changed focus.

But I still never understood how landing legs and wheels could go from working fine to "it's much better to just land on your engine bellmouth".

Edited May 28, 2019 by mikegarrison

KerikBalm · May 28, 2019

That seems to be a very particular combination of the flexing of the airbrakes and the landing struts... retracting either would stop that.

Of course, I have to ask... why air airbrakes deployed on Mun?

Xurkitree · May 28, 2019

I doubt that the wheels/landing gear cause stuff to move uphill under normal weirdness though... It seems like you have created a kraken drive there.

Aeroboi · May 28, 2019

Airbrake is a anchor in the ground. The landing gear suspension pushes back upon ground contact but then retracts because it is programmed to balance the suspension based on the other legs. Since the craft is on a slope the retracting suspensions lowers the back, because the craft pivots at the airbrake the lowering back will suspend backward as the legs suspension extends and retracts, at least this is what I think is going on. What is silly is that the legs suspensions want to compensate while the craft isn't upright. What would be good is for the game to read the craft legs are sideways so the suspensions will stop balancing.

AFAIK this method is used to create cannons to shoot capsules into orbit or space, some KerbalX crafts use this as "kraken" drives.