Rovers have mushy steering

[maddog59]

I've tried building a number of rovers, and except for the very lightest one's it seems like I just can't get them to steer properly once I get them to the Mun. They won't accelerate in a straight line, and when I try to steer they keep side-slipping in one direction or the other. Sometimes I'll bring them to a stop on a relatively flat space, set the  brake, and they start to slide in one direction or another.

Any suggestions on how to build a better rover? 

[Stamp20]

You can set the steering and friction force higher by changing it from auto to override in the right-click menu. You might need to enable Advanced Tweakables in the main menu settings.

[antipro]

I'm not sure what mushy exactly means, anyway all I can quote about

14 hours ago, maddog59 said:

Any suggestions on how to build a better rover? 

is 

On 12/25/2020 at 5:53 AM, bewing said:

For your grip issue, the answer is the "Friction Control: Auto" in the wheel's menus. Click it to "Manual" and then turn it up a lot. You might think that's what you did with the "Traction Control" -- but traction control is something completely different (it has to do with brakes, not friction). Truly, you probably want to turn the Traction Control off (slide it down to zero).

 

Edited September 12, 2021 by antipro

[king of nowhere]

is this a problem with SAS wheels turning your rover around? that's the most common cause of problems; on mun the gravity is low enough that reaction wheels may put your rover off course - or helping its stability, if used properly.

aside from that, maybe there's nothing wrong and it's just the different gravity? low gravity always reduces control.

but you've been posting for a while, and you probably know all of that already. let's see other things that could be causing problems

you mention that they tend to deviate from a straight line. assuming your rovers are symmetric, i've seen it happen when the wheels are damaged. And i'm not just talking to normal wheel damage that can be repaired by an engineer. sometimes, when you take a hard bump, nothing apparently breaks but some wheels get slightly shifted. this difference of a few degrees is not visible by the naked eye, but it is enough to deviate the rover. do your rovers have this problems always? or only after they are used?

 

if none of this is the answer, please post picture of your faily rovers with as much information as you can

[maddog59]

My thanks to all of you for the suggestions. I've been busy and haven't had time to play for a few days, but will give all of that a try soon once real life gives me a bit of a break. I expect I'll probably be back asking for more help! 

<later>

No apparent wheel damage or misalignment, but that was a good item to know about for future efforts.

It looks like changing the Friction Control to Manual and maximizing it to 10 did the trick. I've got one reaction wheel set to Normal, and another set to SAS only (I've got both an MK2 drone core and MK2 Inline cockpit on the rover), and that corrected the problem of it doing head- and tail-stands during acceleration and deceleration.

It is a far far better rover that I've built now than I've ever built before (apologies to C. Dickens). 

Thanks for all of the help! 

Edited September 18, 2021 by maddog59