Plane landing gears are OP

[lammatt]

flew a shuttle to deploy an interplanetary probe today and when i returned to the KSC,

i was feeling my approaching speed was way too fast and was thinking it'll probably crash (~mach 0.8 when touching down on the runway)

and what surprised me is that... not only the plane wheels didnt break, the plane was indeed able brake very smoothly and came to a rest safely within a pretty short braking distance

===================

i have a feeling the landing wheels, in addition to the "impact tolerance" to limit the vertical speed when touching down, should also have a horizontal speed limiter which breaks the tires when the horizontal ground speed exceeds.

thought?

<iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/8pOMT/embed"></iframe>

Edited March 22, 2014 by lammatt

[Rhyunix]

Landing gear are quite strong, mainly because of their uses- landing gear is used on massive craft going at huge speeds as well as tiny craft gliding down. The idea is that, since there is no variation in landing gears, there is one, very strong, small landing gear for everything

[Lambert2191]

considering how hard it is to land anything, I think it's pretty much fine. If you wanna make it realistic and have it break if you go over a certain speed, that just halfs the amount of people that can actually land one of these things. Nah, screw that.

[lammatt]

considering how hard it is to land anything, I think it's pretty much fine. If you wanna make it realistic and have it break if you go over a certain speed, that just halfs the amount of people that can actually land one of these things. Nah, screw that.

hard?

i dont know about the stock game, (i never played stock since like 0.18 or so because flying planes are more fun than than opening the parachute and AFK...)

but with FAR, it's not even hard if you have any experience playing any air combat game.

it's way easier than any of the ace combat and HAWX

(while i agree judging when/how steep to re-enter atmosphere requires a little bit practicing, and an unpowered landing is quite a challenge when it's your first time doing so)

Edited March 22, 2014 by lammatt

[jwenting]

yes it's hard, especially if you have experience in realistically modeled flight simulators. I've something like 10.000 hours in MS Flight sim (gathered over about a decade, don't worry) and have a hard time flying any aircraft in KSP.

[Javster]

Don't make landing harder than it already is for new players.

[Clockwork_werewolf]

Considering the heavy landing legs weights 0.1 and the landing gear weights 0.5 I don't think the landing gear is OP.

On a small craft (2 wings, 3 canards, 2 flaps, 1 turbo jet, 1 fuel tank and 3 landing gear) the landing gear adds about a 3rd to a quarter of the total weight. These massive landing gears (in comparison to the size and weight of the craft) should be able to take a good amount of the force of a landing.

On a large SSTO (say 100 tons) no matter what the configuration, most commonly only 2 of the wheels would hit the runway at the same time. This means each wheel needs to take 50 tons of force on landing without much room of elastic compression like the landing legs. Quite often at a 5 m/s vertical and 30 m/s horizontal landing this impact has caused a wheel to break off resulting in... well... problems.

I would love to see a smaller say 0.2-0.3 tons landing gear with less impact tolerance and a larger maybe 1 ton but twice or more impact tolerance landing gear just to deal with the HUGE difference in aircraft sizes. Yes I know this can be found in mods but I think this is about stock landing gear.

[TMS]

Small landing gear are massless in flight. They only have mass values in the VAB/SPH.

Or... that's how it used to be. Not sure if they fixed that discrepancy yet???

[Clockwork_werewolf]

I don't use Machjeb or other readouts so I'm never quite sure of things like this. Present info would be helpful. The landing gear is still very hard to use in a large plane even if they are overpowered (if massless) on a small plane.

[Kasuha]

I agree that airplane landing wheels are not ideal. Speed limit on Minmus' lakes of 1300 m/s on them and limited not by these wheels but the fact that you clip into terrain at that speed. So there probably should be some reasonable top speed at which these wheels start failing.

On the other side, when I land at high speed my plane usually crashes anyway. Because it's not just about speed but also about the impact shock. So it seems to me, OP might be using joint reinforcements or other helping modifications which might make these wheels seem to be even more overpowered than they really are.

[katateochi]

I know that realistically the wheels are probably over powered but I wouldn't like to see them changed. They are more fun as they are and can be used for different things, like very fast drag-racers. I like to see how fast I can land, if I get it wrong there's not a lot of plane left, if I get it right its great. But if there was a limit to what the wheels could take then that little challenge gets taken away which I think would be a pity.

[WhiteWeasel]

Try building a plane with rover wheels with your said speed tolerance, then come back when you realize how hard that is.

[Kasuha]

Try building a plane with rover wheels with your said speed tolerance, then come back when you realize how hard that is.

Rover wheels may declare speed tolerance up to 100 m/s but break at 50. I don't think anyone should complain if plane wheels started breaking at 250 m/s. Except for people who want to use them to make speed records, of course.

Edited March 22, 2014 by Kasuha

[Whackjob]