Steering is made possible with the use of Hydros. A proven steering set up which involves a diamond wheel support and a small chassis which the suspension is attached to. When this concept is realized, steering is not too difficult.

Contents 1 Wheel Mount 2 Axle 3 Hydros 4 Finished Steering Axle 5 Braked Steering

Wheel Mount

This is a typical wheel support diamond ("face octahedron"). This will carry the wheel independently from the main chassis. For example:

The "wheel" nodes labeled here will become the position for the Wheels. The distance between the two nodes will determine the wheel width. It is wise to make the diamond symmetrical for stability (that is, the height equals the width). You will need one of these for every wheel that is steerable.

If you find your nodes are contacting the ground and obstructing movement, you can make specific nodes non-contactable. See the Nodes syntax.

Enlarged Hub Examples
Empty Hub	Supportive Hub

Axle

Bonehead has created a video to help visualize this implementation: View the video here

The axle is actually simply built out of four beams:

But you need a rocker, too. However it's easy to build. This only requires two nodes in front of the axle (be aware these nodes should be at least 80cm from the axle away) and beams attached to them as shown at this picture:

Hydros

After the steering chassis is completed, the Hydros can be added. Hydros are simply beams that change length when you press the right and left arrow keys, and are typically used for steering (although you can use them for other purposes if you so wanted).

In order to define a hydro, some specific information is needed.

1. Node 1 - One end of the hydro
2. Node 2 - The other end of the hydro
3. Factor - The decimal percentage (0.2 = 20%) representing how far a hydro can extend.
   1. The length of a hydro can be determined by Original Length ± (Original Length * Factor)

A hydro can also have two optional parameters:

1. i - The Hydro will be invisible
2. s - At approximately 20km/h to 40km/h the factor will be lowered gradually to 0 and will then be disabled. This is commonly used for rear-wheel turning, as it is disabled at high speed.

Example Syntax:

hydros
;node1, node2, factor, options
 43,    37,    -0.2,   i
 46,    36,     0.2,   s

The following example shows how hydros will push and pull nodes in a direction to induce steering:

Finished Steering Axle

The finished axle can look like this:

Don't forget to add suspension (as covered in the previous chapter) !

Braked Steering

It is possible to have a steering system that only turns one side of wheels. In the Wheels section, set the Wheel Braking value to 2 or 3 for left or right wheel respectively. This works well for emulating tracked vehicles such as bulldozers. These usually do not work well at high speed.