Can someone rationally explain how having a limited slip differential can make driving in snowy or dirty roads more difficult than without LSD?
Correct me if I'm wrong here but isn't LSD supposed to provide increased traction to the tire with MORE grip on the road since it is taking the available power away from the tire with NO traction? Since the tire getting the increased power has grip, it would make sense to make use of that available grip to help get the car out of the area where that one (or more) tire doesnt have grip.
If you were driving on an ice rink, you should expect the wheels to slip very easily anyway since the KJ has a lot of low end torque. So say you had a non LSD KJ (open differential) and you were driving in circles on the ice in a clockwise direction (always turning right) then your rear left tire would lose grip first since it receives power and its on the outside, and so it spins at a faster rate than the inside (rear right) tire does. Since it doesnt take much effort to break traction on ice with an open differential, you would have to apply very little gas to get the car squirrly. This means that although your right rear tire has more grip than the left rear, its grip is limited to the same amount as that of the left when it loses traction, which isnt very much.
However if you had LSD, the power lost to the left rear tire spinning would be transfered by the diff to the tire with more traction (the right rear tire), and you are able to go faster until the point where the right rear tire loses traction of its own. The next logical step in going faster is to have an ALL WHEEL drive system in which there is a front, rear, and center differential. A 4 WHEEL drive system in this scenario is better than having just a rear LSD, but not better than ALL WHEEL drive.
To get a better picture of this, read up on differentials on HowStuffWorks, and look at this clip of the Prodrive P2 on Top Gear at about 2mins45seconds when Jeremy drives around in a circle with the active center differential turned off, and then with it turned on. The ACD is basically an advanced LSD which coordinates power and braking force between front and rear wheels quite actively using microprocessors that scan traction conditions at about 300 times per second. This serves to provide maximum traction and elimination of understeer and oversteer at all times in relation to fluctuations in speed.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/differential6.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0hDqlASKHc