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how to make resizable wheels stop bending at connection point?

3,662 JumpingJack  3.7 years ago

Right now I am building an extremely fast, high performance track car with a lot of down force and I've noticed that whenever I attach resizable wheels to anything that is not the main chassis, or in this case, a suspension piece, they seem to bend at the connection point under heavy loads of down force when the suspension is already fully compressed.

I already know of some valid solutions, but they create other problems that are much harder to fix.

1) reduce downforce

I can't do that, at the speed the car is going, it needs the amount to stay on tracks with elevation change like the Mirage Speedway.

2) increase wheel weight.

the amount I would need to increase wouldn't be realistic and it would be hard to reduce more weight on the car as I have already done as much as I can to get to the target weight.

3) increase the suspension weight or whatever the wheel is attached to.

Again, can't do this because reducing more weight would be impossible and the mass wouldn't be concentrated in the middle.

4) raise the vehicle

The center of mass has too much range from top to bottom and the resting height would look horrendous. Also, due to the connection point not being rigid, no matter how high you raise the car, the connection point will still sink further and further towards the ground and when it reaches the ground, the wheels start bending in insane levels of negative camber.

5) stiffen the shocks

This sacrifices low speed handling and it also seems that no matter how stiff the springs are, the connection point still compresses and eventually bends the wheels when the floor of the car sinks down and scrapes the ground.

6) use the built-in resizable wheel suspension

It behaves very weird and unrealistically. it also has too much suspension travel.

7) use two shocks stacked on top of each other

Again, too much suspension travel, and still doesn't fix the problem of the connection point not staying in its spot and sinking by being pushed by the amount of downforce.

8) make the shocks really small for less suspension travel

Again, still doesn't fix the connection point problem, and also, rescaling a gizmo part such as a shock or a piston doesn't scale it's range travel distance corresponding to the new scale. With pistons this can be countered by adjusting the range, but I have not found a way to change the range of the shock, so no matter what size you make it, it will always function at its 1,1,1 partScale.

9) don't use any suspension

Tires lose a very significant amount of grip. Even if I compensated by turning up the traction, spinning out would be much more likely, it would be so fast that you would not have any time to react, and it would spin the entire car in circles 10 times around, that isn't realistic.

So if anyone has a solution that I haven't found yet, or just general SP aerodynamics, and SP automotive knowledge, please share! I'm very eager to fix this problem and finish my build.

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    440 Zilozite

    @JumpingJack tutorial

    1.6 years ago
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    3,662 JumpingJack

    @Zilozite what did I do?

    1.6 years ago
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    440 Zilozite

    holy crap thanks

    1.6 years ago
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    3,662 JumpingJack

    @Ruvien0Republic0Officer
    I tried your drag car and reverse engineered its suspension. I found that your dragster actually generates more lift than it does downforce. my track car generates much more than the dragster you sent me. So the wheel bending problem is still present.

    3.7 years ago
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    3,662 JumpingJack

    @Ruvien0Republic0Officer
    could you elaborate on what you mean by 2 hinges?

    3.7 years ago
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    3,662 JumpingJack

    @Ruvien0Republic0Officer
    The vehicle weighs 1738 lbs. I don't think weight is a problem.

    Now if you know about down force in race cars, it's effectively like adding extra weight to keep the car planted to the ground, without the extra inertia that usually comes with increasing mass.

    So what I got from your comment is that it seems that it is a problem with weight, just not in the form of mass, it's in the form of downforce. Which is now an entirely new problem because the car needs the downforce To take the high speed turns (and also not fly off the road on an incline) but the suspension can't compress.

    3.7 years ago