What the heck is going on with the Friction on the Mun and Minmus?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

For the past several missions, I've been chalking up the squirrely behavior of everything I put on the Mun or Minmus to bad builds on my part.  But it happens over and over again, regardless of the craft I build and on both bodies.

The ground has very little friction.  Regardless of whether the lander has legs or wheels... they like to slide around with minds of their own.

Case in point: my recently landed ore harvester just slides down the slightest incline while the drills are working.  Okay, the thing is shaking, maybe (ignoring for a second the drills actually penetration of the surface) MAYBE the shaking is making the physics model allow the lander legs to slide downhill.  Except, previously, I've had a perfectly stationary MPL station decide to go sliding away whenever I switched between vehicles.  Rovers with the brakes on will slide away.  Its all very weird.

I'm running a totally Vanilla, latest update version of KSP.  I don't remember this being an issue when I played x years ago... but its getting really frustrating since I picked up the game again.

Is this a 'Feature' of which I'm unaware, or a known bug, or possibly an artifact of leaving the game running for too long?

Ideas?

[bewing]

No, they are both just really slippery -- and gravity has a lot to do with friction, so low-G worlds really are treacherously slippery IRL.

You may need to turn on "Advanced Tweakables", but there is a button in the wheels' context menus to turn off Auto Friction and set it to Manual instead. Then there is a slider that will let you crank the friction way up.

Note: If the upper part of a drillshaft impacts the surface while it is running, it will bounce your entire craft into the air. And I don't mean the head of the drill, I mean one cylinder down on the shaft.

Because of a bug in the physics library (which KSP has no control over), anything that has a suspension will bounce on the ground. I call it microbouncing. This will always cause any craft with legs or wheels to slowly drift downhill (and sometimes uphill). Often it's better to retract legs if possible. Or creatively use something else as your "landing legs" that has no suspension.

 

 

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Good to know, thanks.  I thought I was losing my ever loving mind.

[AHHans]

That's why Minmus has lakes! So that there is one place where you can land without your lander constantly sliding around.

P.S. Just wait until one of your Kerbals stumbles and then takes a 5 km and 10 min slide downhill on one of Minmus' icy slopes...

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

4 hours ago, AHHans said:

That's why Minmus has lakes! So that there is one place where you can land without your lander constantly sliding around.

P.S. Just wait until one of your Kerbals stumbles and then takes a 5 km and 10 min slide downhill on one of Minmus' icy slopes...

I don't have to wait.  I've seen it.

What was worse: Val was out of monopropellant, so I got to walk her back up hill to the rover that had broken its antenna on the Green Thing that I needed to scan.  That was almost a whole beer's worth of time to get there.

KSP really needs a 'keep walking' feature so I don't have to hold the damn W watching my wobbling avatar struggle up a hill, only to do slow stupid turns just as she missed her grab for the ladder again.  and again. ...and again.

[linuxgurugamer]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

KSP really needs a 'keep walking' feature so I don't have to hold the damn W watching my wobbling avatar struggle up a hill, only to do slow stupid turns just as she missed her grab for the ladder again.  and again. ...and again

A mod called Wwwwwwwww. Also another mod called Walkabout which I'm working on will also have tgat

[Jacke]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

...only to do slow stupid turns just as [Val] missed her grab for the ladder again.  and again. ...and again.

There's also a mod that turns the Board key and the Grab ladder key into toggles, allow you to enable them, then just contact the hatch to enter or the ladder to grab on.

 

Edited May 28, 2020 by Jacke