Some rover/ground interaction/kerbal pedestrian thoughts

[HephaistosFnord]

So, had an opportunity to play around w some fun little rovers all week, on Kerbin, the Mun, and Duna.

Some things that need attention:

Last-Chance "Bedrock" Collider
- Physics-enabled entities should NEVER be allowed to fall through the planet's actual surface. You already have easy ways to calculate this; somewhere appropriate in the physics pass, any object within N meters of the ground needs a check to verify that it is not BELOW the ground; if it is, it needs to STOP FALLING, and be placed so that its lowest-Z collider vertex is at something like ground-z minus 0.5m or so.

Kerbals falling through the ground to infinity should be a *mathematical impossibility* within the physics engine.

Ground Friction Physics
- Everyone knows wheels are a bit bugged.

- But did you know you can take a single XS square plate, slap a seat on it, put four sepratrons in a pinwheel-pattern around it, and when you fire it off *the plate will never stop spinning*? It eventually goes up on one corner, and then it's an Inception top until the sun burns out of the sky.

Physical Interaction
- I flip my little one-man rover-buggies *a lot*. It would be nice if, in addition to the 'climb up' action, there was some way to "grab ahold" of a part lying within arm's reach of an actively-controlled pedestrian Kerbal, and the Kerbal could then apply forces to that part - perpendicular to the vector between the kerbal's CoM and the part's CoM - with the WASD controls. So I could, say, grab a corner of a flipped buggy, and hit 'W' to flip it back upright if it's light enough.