RoveMax XL3 Wheels

[Libra00]

So, i've been trying to build a kethane mining rover of the friggin' huge variety and I'm having a heck of a time keeping these XL3 wheels attached. Either they fall off or whatever they're attached to falls off. I've scrapped the project and completely rebuilt it 3 times and whether I attach the wheels to girders, structural panels, directly to the tanks (16kl kethane tanks, orange tanks, w/e) even girders attached to tanks, they stick going up or down the side of the runway and things fall apart. There's a pic of the current version here (http://i.imgur.com/nCIjqe3.jpg), it's completely stock except for the kethane parts and a couple of decorative bits. I have no idea how to make it work, struts don't seem to help other than to keep it from driving like a puddle of jello. It needs to be sturdy enough to handle the newly extra-cratered mun surface on potentially long drives, and it's not even handling the runway on Kerbin with empty tanks. The project is at a standstill because I really don't like most mod wheels.

Anyway, any help/advice is very much appreciated.

-Libra00

Edited September 12, 2013 by Libra00

[Dangerous_Beans]

do struts linking the wheels together help?

another possibility might be to build a large H frame with wheels along the long edges, and hang everything from that?

beyond that i can't suggest anything.

[Libra00]

Hey, thanks for the quick response.

Apparently the wheels aren't considered attachable surfaces, nothing can attach directly to them except as the destination for struts. As such I've had struts linking from tanks, girders, etc to the wheels and that holds them in position better but doesn't keep them from breaking with what seems like a small amount of force. Mechjeb says the vehicle masses just under 50 tons (empty), and maybe that's the problem. I'm kind of worried how it will manage when I've got 64,000 liters of kethane in there, even just with the Mun's gravity.

I'm still experimenting with this, and I've found something that helps a fair bit but isn't a complete fix. I switched to using a few quantum struts (I know, I go nuts with the mods) to hold the wheels on and they seem to do a better (but not great) job. Also, I removed almost all the default struts and put a few strategically-placed Q-struts to keep things flexible but not floppy and it works a fair bit better. I can get on and off the runway at 6-8 m/s without any catastrophic failures. It's a bit jittery, but I vastly prefer jittery to exploded. I think I'll mark the thread as answered for now barring major changes or revelations.

[DailyFrankPeter]

Perhaps these can be redesigned so that they don't come stuck on such a big cantilever (the bending stress is huge this way, and it negates the usefulness of these biggest wheels for the biggest vehicles). I strongly think they should attach underneath the load, axially to the load force.

Maybe someone can mod this and Squad can adopt the model into the core game?