Scrap 4WD – Angstrom
This is a reference creation for my Scrap 4WD custom terrain asset tracks:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2896172724
*The creation has a seat (office chair top) hidden inside. You can just about see and access it if you crouch at the sides between the mid-section and rear wheels.
The following is my design philosophy/process:
I used cardboard blocks wherever possible to keep the weight down.
Concrete-3 blocks are strategically place around the periphery of the creation, both to balance the creation and also to increase its moment of inertia while minimising overall weight.
The wheels are cambered to lower the creation, but I also found that this make the creation handle corners better.
Each wheel is actually driven by 2 bearings in parallel (1 on each side of the wheel), essentially doubling the torque. Bearings in series (stack 1 bearing on another) will instead double your max speed.
Pistons (level-1 in the front, level-2 in the rear) are used in place of suspensions for shock absorption in order to avoid any form of suspension glitch. These work surprisingly well and are needed due to the fact that the wheels in Scrap Mechanic can sometimes randomly bounce despite running on perfectly flat surfaces.
I’ve tried quite a lot of variation of front/rear roller setups.
An early iteration involved the use of regular wheels (for friction), tilted downwards by a few degrees. This creates downward force whenever the creation rides along the lane walls, so much so that it would compress the shock absorbers.
I had wanted to use a conical shaped part for rollers, which when pointed down would assist in redirecting the creation back onto the track if it partially lands on the walls. Since such a part does not exist in Scrap Mechanic I tried to emulate one by making a stepped conical roller, which worked horribly.
In the end, I settled with angling the roller outwards (cambered similar to the wheels) to create a slope and this works well enough.
Larger rollers (3×3) work better than small ones (1×1), since if you hit a corner at high speeds and have small rollers, they can potentially glitch through the walls and leave your creation partially stuck in it.
Stabilizers that are high and tall at the mid-section prevents the creation from rolling over on fast corners. These are slightly inset compared to the front/rear rollers.
Lastly, I have horizontal-axis rollers on the front bumper. I balanced my creation to be more front heavy thus it tends to nose dive after jumps. If the angle is too steep on landing, these rollers helps prevent the creation from completely flipping over.
On each side of the mid section are concrete-3 weights sitting on suspensions. This is my attempt at emulating mass dampers which help prevent the creation from bouncing on landings. I may be biased, but in my experience, it does seem to work albeit not very consistent. At the very least it looks kinda cool.
There are quite a few glitch-welded parts in this creation, but all are done in-game without any mods or blueprint editing. I may make some tutorials on how this is done at a later date.
