Rovers weight

[pjesapjes]

How heavy has mun rover have to be to be able to drive normally on the Mun without drifting out of control?

i know they will always drift a little cuz of the low gravity.. but mine always seems to be uncontrollable because of their lightness..

if you awesome guys can answer this. what about Minmus and Duna?

however:

greetings from Iceland and happy crashing

Edited June 19, 2014 by pjesapjes

[LethalDose]

There's no magic weight for stability, it's more of an issue of how broad your wheel base is. Wider rovers (wheels placed further apart) will be more stable, not neccesarily heavier ones. <HYPERBOLE ALERT> Your rover could be 5,000 tons, and it'd still be unstable on the Mun if the wheels were 30 cm apart from each other.

Overall, use any tricks you can to make the CoM on a rover low and the wheels wide.

Also, welcome to the forums.

[Claw]

Welcome to the forums!

In addition to the wheel base...

Something else that gets people too is to make sure your keys that do roll/pitch/yaw are different than the keys you are using for turning/forward/backward. If they are the same, then sometimes when you try to move forward or turn, the rover will flip easier because you are adding extra torque. Some people also drive in docking mode to keep the torque from adding in.

Also, you generally want to steer only with the front wheels, and disable steering on the others. Disable brakes on the front wheels, and make sure they are enabled for the back wheels.

[pjesapjes]

I obviously didnt think that one through. wider wheel base and disable front brakes and use docking mode ! thank you so much