Potential rover wheel bug or construction ignorance on my part?

[painking]

So as I design my rover, I obviously want to test it to make sure it can move at a decent clip and not flip over when I try to do a turn. However, my wheel placement seems to determine whether or not the rover will move at all. This isn't what the end product will look like, just pointing out some strange inconsistency in the wheels.

If I place the wheels like so:

The rover won't move, and will be stuck in place. The wheels spin forever. I wanted them like that so the rover could be closer to the ground so it wouldn't tip over as much.

But when I rotate them 90 degrees downward like so:

The rover can in fact move and turn. I just wish this wasn't my only option as the rover is quite high up. Is this a bug? Or is this simply how rover wheels need to be placed in order to work?

Edited June 5, 2013 by painking

[georgTF]

Call it a feature. The wheels will behave according to their placement at least as far as steering goes. You'll have to place them correctly to get them to work.

If you want extra stability widen and lengthen the vehicle (using structural pieces for example), then the CoM can be slightly higher without causing ill effects.

PS - I'd rotate the OCTO core to point forward, so that you have more use of the navball.

[Johnno]

They're supposed to be downward like in your second picture. What you can do is mount them higher by putting cubic struts or other components onto the base.

If you can make sense of this small diagram:

*\__/* Where * are your connection points for the wheels, \ and / are struts/components and __ is your baseplate.

I snapped a quick n dirty picture of my mun rover, may not be the clearest but hopefully it helps at least. It uses the regular 1x1 structural panel as base.

[painking]

I see. Alrighty, thanks for the information.