Rover Wheels Need QoL Improvements

[Drathfox]

I wanted to revive this thread adding some additional notes:

1: Wheels are too slow. the S2 and XL3 I can accept if they were kept slow but the rest of the wheels (M1, TR-2L, and TR4) can probably use double of their Drive Limiter value (200%) at least.

2: Climbing slopes needs to be improved. Currently I can climb 20 degree slopes at best. I'd like to request to have that number doubled (40 degrees). There are several things that we have access to in the Parts Manager to help but these max values we can adjust up to is insufficient or just aren't helping. The Drive Limiter (what manages the rover's speed or torque or w/e) is the most helpful parameter to climb with when at full 100% thus needs to probably be doubled.

3: Collision mesh is like the wheels are sitting on a thin plane circle so the rest of the wheels are just clipping in the ground, please make the collision mesh match the shape of the wheels or by minimum give them a cylinder shape?

4: Kerbals are OP when running into wheels...

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Also something I wanted to comment greatly about is the wheel steering orientation has been great from my experience. It amazed me that wherever I placed the wheels on a craft it would know which way it should steer and also when docking with another rover the wheels would once again switch settings and knew which way to steer automatically, something that has greatly improved over the original KSP so good job to whoever did that!

[The Aziz]

30m/s is about 100km/h. Do you really expect your rovers to zoom across rough terrains at highway speeds? Current values are plenty, thank you.

Same for slopes, 40deg is very steep. I would expect maybe some hardcore offroad vehicle to be able to climb hills like that, not lightweight rovers. 20 is plenty, you can always serpentine your way up.

[Jeq]

If you add more wheels you can pretty much climb anything. At least that is what i have been experimenting in kerbin mountains.

[bigwhitey95]

The main thing I want to see improved with rover wheels is just expected stability. Even if you add negative camber and positive caster angles to the wheels, sometimes when roving around it’s as if one of the wheels can sometimes clip into the ground mesh and the whole rover then just rapidly spins around (sometimes you can counter this by immediately turning on a reaction wheel and SAS, but it shouldn’t have to come to that).

I’m sure we’ve all experienced this multiple times - happens on runways with planes too. I had a rover do perhaps 60km of driving on Duna and I was having to quicksave every 2 minutes just in case my rover randomly flipped out and destroyed itself.

[Jeq]

4 minutes ago, bigwhitey95 said:

The main thing I want to see improved with rover wheels is just expected stability. Even if you add negative camber and positive caster angles to the wheels, sometimes when roving around it’s as if one of the wheels can sometimes clip into the ground mesh and the whole rover then just rapidly spins around (sometimes you can counter this by immediately turning on a reaction wheel and SAS, but it shouldn’t have to come to that).

I’m sure we’ve all experienced this multiple times - happens on runways with planes too. I had a rover do perhaps 60km of driving on Duna and I was having to quicksave every 2 minutes just in case my rover randomly flipped out and destroyed itself.

I think i saw bug report about this and i have feeling fix is coming.

[Vortygont]

On 1/6/2024 at 12:53 AM, Jeq said:

I think i saw bug report about this and i have feeling fix is coming.

Here is this bug report if I'm right