Wheel Strength question

[Grubfist]

I have made a truck on Mars. It uses five 3x3 wheels per side. I noticed the rear part of the vehicle, where the cargo hold is, sagged a huge amount after I put in a bit of ice to fuel the hydrogen engine on the vehicle. After looking into wheel stats, I learned that I needed to adjust the wheel's Strength rating. I set the rear three wheels on each side to 100% strength and the front two wheels on each side to 50% strength. I have not driven it with these settings.

I am worried, however, what any downsides to Strength might be. Am I making the vehicle's wheels too rigid? Should I use a lower amount? Do the front wheels need to match it better? Wheels are still new to me, as since they were added, I've mostly ignored them in favor of living in asteroids, so any wheel advice is helpful, but especially based on people's experience specifically with heavy, small grid vehicles of the hauling and/or mining variety, since most of the information on the wiki is very generalized.

I also need help understanding Torque and Friction for my situation. I do not understand these concepts after reading the space engineers wiki and I don't understand them for real life vehicles either.

[Gorbadon]

Tourqe is how much force the wheel can output when spinning, think small car engine (low torque) compared to a big muscle car engine (high torque).

Friction is how much grip the wheel has, too much grip can cause your vehicle to flip over on sharp corners.

As far as stength is concerned I usualy increase strengh until the suspension stops to go higher if it was low down.
You may want to create a group of your wheels and put increase and decrease strength on your hotbar to regulate your suspensions on the fly.

[Grubfist]

Originally posted by Gorbadon:

Tourqe is how much force the wheel can output when spinning, think small car engine (low torque) compared to a big muscle car engine (high torque).

So basically like engine strength?

Friction is how much grip the wheel has, too much grip can cause your vehicle to flip over on sharp corners.

Sure, but I have no frame of reference. What is a high grip? What is a low grip? The game starts it at 50%, the wiki recommends "below 30%" and I assume different gravity would affect the ideal friction settings?

As far as stength is concerned I usualy increase strengh until the suspension stops to go higher if it was low down.
You may want to create a group of your wheels and put increase and decrease strength on your hotbar to regulate your suspensions on the fly.

My wheels are already in groups as there are many of them, but how would I know whilst driving if the change was too much? Or too little? What negative consequences do I face for having the strength too high?

[Gorbadon]

You have to figure out most of those settings on your own since a light vehicle will need other setup than a heavy cargo hauler, how high the center of mass is has also some effect.

If you don't want to waste resources on potential accidents creating a creative world where you can do test would be a good idea.

There are also scripts that can do some of the setup for you.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1089115113
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkhZ7BbYgvc

Edit:
Too high strength can cause traction problems on vehicles with more than 4 wheels because some wheels may get lifted of the ground on uneven terrain and can not provide propulsion any more.

[Gorbadon]

This tutorial should help you, well at least splitsie is better than me at explaining stuff ;)
It is an old tutorial some things have changed but most of it still applies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V26N_2HsH1I

[Bannor]

+1 for Splitsie

[JarutheDamaja]

Originally posted by Grubfist:

Sure, but I have no frame of reference. What is a high grip? What is a low grip? The game starts it at 50%, the wiki recommends "below 30%" and I assume different gravity would affect the ideal friction settings?

The wiki recommends 30%? I usually like the friction higher at around 60-75% because better acceleration and better uphill with heavy cargo transporter.

I personally wouldn't recommend to set the dampeners to 100% because then you have like zero dampening, when slightly jumping over things especially when loaded heavely, the tires or chassis will just get ripped off. I usually go with 12% at the front and 18-28% at the back. (2 full small grid large cargo on 2 rear-axels - depending on the terrain and your driving style)
If you have an asymetrical buld like cargo on the right passengers on the left, then it also makes sense to set the dampeners on the right side stronger, so that the car is equally bouncing over a bump. This is also the rule with front and back, the front is usually lighter so you want less resistance in the dampeners/springs. When you accelerate the force is going "in" the rear wheels, so you want them a little bit stronger.
Best is to just play around and stay away from 0 and 100% levels, except the speed limit xD

[Rays of Apollo]

Okay, so suspension strength is really spring rate?
Does anyone know if suspension load affects grip? Like, you're going over a hill and some load is off the suspension; in reality, you are "lighter" (have less grip) and are likely to slide. Will you slide in this game, or will the lesser normal force get overpowered by the unchanging wheel friction and flip you over?

This is cool... it also seems that "scripts" are literally scripts from like C# or whatever. I can make racecars with ABS and TC.

[Dan2D3D]

Originally posted by Rays of Apollo:

Okay, so suspension strength is really spring rate?
Does anyone know if suspension load affects grip? Like, you're going over a hill and some load is off the suspension; in reality, you are "lighter" (have less grip) and are likely to slide. Will you slide in this game, or will the lesser normal force get overpowered by the unchanging wheel friction and flip you over?

This is cool... it also seems that "scripts" are literally scripts from like C# or whatever. I can make racecars with ABS and TC.

Hi, wheel strength is used to find the "No damage" value on landing after a jump.

Wheel Friction = that is like adding nails on the tire so that one too needs to be setup properly,
-> Better do cool Drifting than flipping over.

EDIT

You may use this world to test your cars and find the best wheel values :

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1399740988

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