Magwheels! Wheels that in 0g let you climb stations and asteroids like magboots!

WaviestBow6 shared this feedback 5 years ago
Submitted

a99270d5263128b36451ba22e0ed9505Wheels are primarily used on planets for good reason as they need to be pulled to the ground to work (duh)

You don't often see them in space as its both difficult to use and much easier to just build a dedicated ship without wheels.

So what I'm proposing is a sort of "advanced wheels" block that can be placed on a "advanced suspension" (or something like that) which would be a separate block from the normal wheels. What these would do is replace the ability to jump (or not) with the ability to activate magnetic locks by pressing "x" and when locked the rover would stick to large stations or large asteroids and could drive around. With the added downside to requiring more power and maybe parts to build and would only be able to work in 0G (unless Keen likes the idea of the bat-mobile driving through the top of the cave on Earth)

These would function literally the same as the magboots the engineer currently has which allow him to walk around on asteroids or large stations that have no gravity

Now of course you could say "why not use artificial mass and gravity generators"

1. With the ability to have wheels that could travel around a station you aren't locked to just the floor and could go up and down walls to get from place to place meaning their would be a point to building something other than just ships to get around in space!

2. You could make small rovers that could travel around an asteroid since with the last major update giant asteroids can now spawn and on average these large asteroids as far as I have found were around 600 to 1000 meters long! Making driving on them even more of an amazing idea!


These new wheels would give a point to building rovers in space since a diversity of builds is always fun to see! And again unless you have a dedicated station, normal wheels are pretty worthless in space since again they need a flat area with gravity and the rover needs artificial mass blocks to not float into space.

So lets see some space rovers please!


Also I am going to point out one thing with this, I think Keen should disable magwheels connecting to ships unless they are stations since having magwheels locking to moving grids doesn't seem healthy to performance. So maybe they should act like connectors and kind of float towards the locked ground.

Well anyways that's my long post of an Idea so lets see what Keen thinks.

TLDR Magboots but for wheels! Magwheels!

P.S. Thanks to Roy2DC for the picture

Replies (1)

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While awaiting this idea to be implemented, consider putting the grav gen and AM on the rover directly.

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I did that years ago as my first ever gravity drive. Now I just use thrusters on override. Uses more power, but is easier to do on a small grid, and works in atmo with atmo thrusters too.

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Not a bad idea

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It's a neat idea. Downthrust on asteroids is what we've been using since before wheels were even implemented (rotor + blocks on them). Downthrust is also great on planets, as it gives you more turning control and even lets you climb steep walls. Mag wheels would be a lot of fun though.

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Linear motors, effectively landing gear that sticks but can or does provide locomotion, or can be moved by external forces, could make elevators (or grid-casting catapults) very easily possible without having to faff with pistons, thrusters, wheels. or whatever else there is. Also could simplify collision detection as the block could be constrained to only be able to move in two directions, ruling out other test cases. In principle at least.

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