Are landing legs supposed to sink into the surface of Eve?

[Galane]

I did some Eve lander testing yesterday, attempting to design one cable of landing there without parachutes. Got enough thrust and fuel to *land* but MechJeb won't do the final landing burn quite soon enough and things get a bit broken.

So I resorted to hyperedit's ship lander. That brought the landers down safe - until the legs sunk into the surface so far the engines would hit and get destroyed or knocked off (in spite of KJR), and did it again more times despite adding more legs and positioning them lower.

The R&D department has plenty of work ahead to come up with an Eve lander design that uses thrust only. No chutes, no wings, no balloons - nothing but thrust.

[kurja]

They always sink in if the craft is very heavy, especially in high gravity. Adding more legs to support the weight helps, to an extent. You could also put on some trusses and then put the legs on those, to get them lower so your engines won't touch the ground even when the legs sink in. Some have also built their own stronger legs with structural parts. That's about it, as far as I can tell.

[annikk.exe]

You should be able to land it manually without much difficulty. (I disapprove of MechJeb, HyperEdit, etc... so ignore me if you want)

Landing on Eve with thrust alone is easier than you might think, as the terminal velocity at sea level is only 50m/s. The trick will be trying to land quickly, so as not to burn too much fuel.

[celem]

It is something of an issue on Eve as people have said.

It will still work if you use plenty of strong legs and lighten the craft as much as possible.

If your landing legs get 'stuck' embedded into the ground then raising/lowering them individually will shake them free prior to liftoff

[Sirrobert]

Make sure you are using the biggest lander legs you have, and remember that the gravity on Eve is 70% stronger than Kerbin. So you need 70% more legs on Eve than you'd need on Kerbin (I gues)

[700NitroXpress]

Landing legs are useless on Eve, go with I beams or use structural panels or combinations of both. I managed to land at 9 m/s on Eve using parachutes because burning fuel is counter productive, you need that fuel to get off the planet.

[nhnifong]

This is something squad has confirmed as a bug which they intend to fix in the next version. Until then, you open the cfg file and set suspensionUpperLimit = 0.00, or just making it smaller which is what I think squad was going to do.

KSP has a lot of bugs, sometimes they can be challenging to overcome and sometimes they are just annoying.

[Liowen]

They always sink in if the craft is very heavy, especially in high gravity. Adding more legs to support the weight helps, to an extent. You could also put on some trusses and then put the legs on those, to get them lower so your engines won't touch the ground even when the legs sink in. Some have also built their own stronger legs with structural parts. That's about it, as far as I can tell.

Hmm my rover was not ever heavy to be honest but it sank into the ground and actually nearly broke. I used the same lander setup on Duna and it was seemingly fine, and the rover is doing well on Duna as well.

I think the gravity as well as the surface may play an equal roll into this effect as Eve has water, or is it ice, in may of its areas causing it so sink into the ground a bit. I could be wrong on that point, but I have noticed it happen.