I finally finished work on a suspension script for the Baserunner and incorporated that in a major overhaul. The difference is quite huge, as you can now safely drive around at 150km/h (~40m/s).

That's definitely more than I hoped for. Hope you like it : )

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1865885986

That looks very interesting and might help quite a bit with driving uphill and varrying amounts of cargo. Integrating this will likely require a lot of testing and finetunig since I'll have to check for interactions with my own scripts, too.

Thx for sharing this!

Okay so having done some research I stumbled across https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1471585938 which is pretty much exactly what I was trying to design. I set the desired angle to 60 degrees (or -60 depending on side) and set the tension to about 30MN and it was immediately functional. Some tweaking may be required since it sems a little stiff.

RE the suspension thing, life kicked me in the teeth a bit but you'll be the first to know.

Step 1: Realise there's a visual editor and I should look at that before delving into C#.

Part 1:
I'm pretty close to releasing a 3.0 version of this. The next version makes use of the Faster and Stronger Rotors! mod from the workshop which drastically increases the speed of the vehicle. I reworked the Functional Wheels! mod and will probably release both in tandem in about a week or so. The changes make it faster and a heck of a lot more stable. Up to 20rpm seems perfectly safe in heavy terrain now. And for wide open areas with only minor obstacles, up to 100 rpm seems safe enough (which equals about 100km/h).

Part 2:
This time around the mod also covers rotors (makes them stupidly resistant which has become necessary with higher speeds). I used the visual script builder to create some very basic scripts (an automated 'go slow' when driving into a deep trench + differential like speed adjustments for turning quicker, which rly payed off).
I'm currently finishing a a small version of the suspension and a basic vehicle that goes with it. If all goes well, that one will also be part of 3.0.

@Gejaheline, if you've got a script for the suspension or are working on one please let me know.

Other input is just as welcome of course ; )

Gotcha, I'll give it a shot. If that doesn't work I might actually be compelled to try writing an in-game script to dynamically control the suspension.

The Functional Wheels! mod is still pretty much mandatory, but the recent-ish changes to reduce Clang and self-damage make this vehicle's moving parts pretty robust overall, so I'm hoping it serves long into the future!

Thx for the feedback : )
Nice to hear that this one's still out there and rolling. I hope it works as intended!

The torque values on the suspension rotors are the ones that need tweaking. They were optimized for 1g and don't have as much force to resist now.

Multiplying the torque value with the planet's gravity should give you the necessary numbers. The SE-wiki says that mars has 0.9g instead of 1g (could be outdated), so you multiply the original torque value with 0.9 (if that's still correct) and insert that number as the new torque.

Hi, I adore this machine and I've used it extensively for quite some time (until an extended break from SE), but having recently pestered some friends into trying it on Mars I seem to have messed up the suspension somehow - it always lifts up until the wheels are at maximum extension! Any pointers on tweaking the rotor forces to sort that out?

Yeah I may do that, though what I'm after now is for the small ship, which looks like there isn't any out there. Thanks for the info though!

I don't know, if you can still build it manually (it changed back and forth a couple of times), but the ones I made work. I uploaded the suspension pieces seperately. If you can't get it to work yourself, you can cut the necessary parts out there and copy paste em

Is it still possible to attach a rotor head to the suspension?

thanks, ill look into it in the future when ill try some DoK models again :)

If that doesn't help either, a quick info would be great : )

I'm pretty sure, it's not your fault ; )
The functionality of most aspects in the game has changed drastically over the years. Something like 100 patches could've dropped since a workshop entry was published. And most of them are just not optimized for the current versions of the game.
It would honestly be a huge task to do that since with the high frequency of incoming patches.

In case of the Baserunner however there's an easy fix. Add this mod and it should work just fine: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=633061554


(Even in older versions of the game the primary limit of this vehicle was the resistance of the wheels. Wheels have been borderline-broken for what feels like ages and the devs just don't seem to care at all. I created a mod to fix that, because I just got so frustrated with it.)

im starting to guess that its somehow my fault, but workshop vehicles just dont work for me.. even going in a straight line at 5-10m/s wheels just go flying or disappear. have i forgotten to change some setting or is there a button combo i dont know yet? because in videos all vehicles just work

The issue here is traction. All vehicles in SE have that issue... There's also no mod for it as far as I know.

Some people use thrusters as a workaround. Artificial masses can help as well as they will help to push the wheels into the ground, but you'd need to deactivate those later on (and I'm not even sure those work on planet surfaces).
Anyway, driving diagonally can work as well. Instead of taking the shortest route, drive like your on a serpentine road. This will decrease the angle the vehicle has to overcome. If that doesn't work either, you can only try to get yourself up to a higher speed before driving up that hill (though the forces on the suspension might be a problem here).

A carrier design? Makes me wonder if we ever see something as big as the Kapisi in this game... As of now, I'd really like to see something that handles heavy terrain with ease. I've been testing your Baserunner on Mars, and sometimes it had significant problems with crawling over small hills, even on low RPM. Maybe that's not the problem of the Baserunner itself, could be that I just don't know how to drive it properly, but right now I'm eager for an easy-to-drive AT vehicle.

Thx! If the game ever gets more optimized, I'll upload an even bigger version, a carrier design ; )
The chassis and suspension is already complete and it gets through heavy terrain very smoothly. But for now at least, the game's performance isn't quite where I need it to make it practical.

Oh, that was simpler than I expected, thank you. I like how you made it possible to make sharper turns by lowering RPMs on either side. Very ingenious.

The left and right side wheels can be controlled independently in order to get a smaller turning radius. This makes things a bit more complicated of course, but it helps a lot.

Hop into the Pilot seat and press 1 and 2 a couple of times (forward movement for the left and right side wheels; each hit will increase the movement a bit further).
To make it stop, hit 4 and 5 a couple of times (each hit will decrease the movement speed slightly until the vehicle moves backwards).

I can't figure out how to drive this thing :( Any tips? My attempts at going forward have miserably failed so far.

The current and most hated problem is whenever massive rovers reach 40 or 100 the front or back wheels disappear destroying the whole vehicle... totally lags my game server..

Yeah.. I know that feeling. At some point though it was just too much for my taste. SE is going in circles it seems and I'm not sure they'll ever fix the stuff that's rly holding the more invested people back...

Man SE sure have lots of problems until this day space,ground and air has problems and i almost know them all. Anyway nice build.

Just fixed the wheel resistance mod to bring this beauty back to life.


Btw, thx for the compliment ; )
Guess I overlooked that one

OMG! I love this thing! It is so massive and beautiful. It so much fun to drive, thank you so much for sharing your wonderful design and hard work with the community!

This thing works really well with Digi's Control Module mod. can make it so W is forward and S is backwards and Spacebar breaks.

Yeah. Though I highly doubt, that the devs are gonna do anything about this particular issue. I'm not even sure, if I'm using a little known feature or if it's an unwanted exploit.

Thx for the compliments btw! Make sure to hit me with a message or comment once your vehicle is done. I would love to see different applications for this. Inspiration is always great.

ohh alright, understandable. it is very odd, its almost like half of the suspension peice has lost collision, since the head just falls through most of it. hopefully there will be a patch for it soon, but thank you very much :) Loving the baserunner and extremely inspired by your suspension idea!

A rescent update (like 3 or so weeks ago) changed this. I'm not completely sure what exactly causes the issue since the parts I created up to that point remain stable. I posted the individual pieces of the system as seperate objects on the workshops. You could use copy/paste for now to make use of it.

Btw, assembling this on a planet has always been rather tricky anyway.

question... i tried to duplicate the suspension you used here for a long-distance durable planet miner, but i cant get the rotor to connect to the suspension... im doing it on a planet, ive tried to use a piston and a ship with landing gear arms to put it in position, and ive tried pointing the suspension upward and dropping a rotor head on it from a rotor that i break, but it wont connect... am i doing something wrong?

It should work properly now. If there are any new issues, just let me know :)

I was also planing to publish an upgraded version anyway. So I used this opportunity to just do that. Have fun!

Yep, you are right. For some reason it explodes as soon as it's spawned. I will fix that as quickly as I can.

Useless if you spawn it it breaks.... Bad Blueprint

I will try that tonight with the half slopes and see how it goes.

Half blocks would still be bigger than the catwalk varriant. I used catwalks to squeeze a connection in beetween two layers of blocks by using the offset settings of rotors. With half blocks it would be one block wider (unless you use an exotic way of arranging slopes, so that they fold into each other. Though I would have to test that).

I have a mod called Armor Slabs and it's basically half blocks. Thicker than catwalks and more durable.

Yes, heavy armor would work as well and without any issues. I only used catwalks, because it makes everything a little more comapct.

Atm I'm working on a small block version of the suspension and due to the non-existence of small catwalks I'm using armored slopes. It's actually only slightly bigger that way. Full blocks of armor would again make it a little bigger.

Can you use Heavy Armor Slabs in place of the catwalks?

You can try this as well:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=621733778

In this version the vehicle is already spawned and ready to go (it's my testing area).

That's odd. Have to check that.

Links in the description, but for everyone's convenience here you go again: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=633061554

Its crash (1 or 2 front wheels) in the moment(!) of spawn - in air... Before it can able to touch down.

"I made a mod to fix that kind of issues"

Can you share link for this pls? Thx

My best guess is, that you need to allign it with the ground more precisely. (Or just go with the easy way and use the mod I posted which will rebalance the basic wheel's crash resistant to be more in line with the steerable part).

Either way, this a rly big vehicle and it's pretty much right on the edge of what you can do with the vanilla version of non-suspended 5x5 wheels. 2 or 3 wheels can hardly carry the vehicle without breaking. Add a little speed to that (since it spawns in mid air) and you'll exceed the crash resistance easily (thank the devs. they screwed up basic wheels).
Again, I made a mod to fix that kind of issues.

Why 1-2 front wheels breaks every time when I spawn it?

I love the suspension model you've created! I'm making my own large mobile base and really needed a robust all terrain suspension.

phew ok ill be going through these steps next time ok thx

Did you actually place the suspension with a wheel? If the wheel doesn't spawn, but only the steering piece it won't work.
Did you actually use the rotor head from a placed rotor after deleting the base? If you use the rotor head part from the menu it won't work either.
Lastly, did you place the steering wheel on a station (fixed position)? Could cause this as well.

Hope that helps.