Why do my planes turn quickly on the ground?

[LHACK4142]

When I turn most of my planes and rovers at high speeds, they strongly tend to keep turning faster and faster in the direction I turned, which often results in the craft flipping over. It happens even if I just touch the steering. How can I stop this from happening?

 

Thanks.

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

My best guess is that you're just going too fast. At high speeds, even the smallest inputs can have huge effects, which can lead to things like flipping rovers. For planes, this usually isn't a problem, since they usually just go straight on the ground, and by the time they're going fast enough to cause problems if they turn, they're probably in the air.

(Another thing that sometimes happens, depending on which wheels you're using, is that every single wheel will be automatically set to respond to steering inputs instead of just the ones in the front, which can lead to excessive turns. You can toggle steering for individual wheels in the popup windows.)

Assuming the wheels themselves aren't the issue, though, you could try spreading out your wheels more, lowering your center of gravity, or just going slower. Hope this helps!

[jimmymcgoochie]

A few things that might help:

• Enable advanced tweakables in the main menu settings. Much of what I’m about to say requires it and it’s worth having that switched on anyway for the other abilities you gain e.g. autostruts.
• Turn down the friction setting on the front wheel(s) of your planes. The nose wheel tends to ‘dig in’ especially when using jets at the rear of the plane, meaning any slight deviation from straight ahead will be exaggerated as the engines keep pushing forwards but the front wheel acts like an anchor until the plane pivots sideways, drops a wing and ends in a long chain of fiery explosions. This can also affect rovers, though to a lesser extent as they generally lack high-power thrust and don’t go nearly as fast.
• Swap the wheel controls to different keys. By default, wheel controls are set to WASD, the same as pitch and yaw control, which causes a lot of interference and can lead to poor controllability especially on low-gravity bodies like Minmus. Set your wheel controls to use the arrow keys instead and you’ll completely bypass this problem without having to faff with reaction wheel settings or losing the ability to control the rover’s attitude at the same time as driving.
• Balance your brakes to be more rear-biased by reducing the brake force on the front wheels and increasing it at the back. It’ll increase your stopping distance a little bit, but decreases the risk of face-planting into the ground. Avoid braking and turning at the same time as this can lead to skidding and then flipping.
• Increase the suspension spring and damper strengths to keep the rover/plane stable when turning and to reduce the risk of clipping the ground with something other than a wheel which can easily ruin your day.

If you can provide some screenshots- or better yet, a video- of the problem then we can give more specific advice.