You should try doing a crash rover--a shell made of struts and beams that you can literally drop and, for the most part, let it smash into the ground, using the armor to keep the rover intact. Then just jettison the debris using small SRBs, and your rover's ready to go. (plus it works well for the in-line design) I've managed to make one that can crash into the ground at up to 70 m/s, leaving the rover totally unscathed. They're wicked fun to test and build.
Thank you for this tutorial, I'd say! I did a lot of things in KSP. Landed nearly on all landable targets, planing to build a station around Kerbol and have a lot of fun going nuts. But I totally can't handle rovers to bring them up to some places, I would love to have some. I appreciate this.
Protip: Rovers do not always have to be big! If you can design a fairly compact rover with, of course, the necessities for driving and performing science, try mounting the engines of a lander on the side, and attaching the rover to the bottom, making sure the wheels do not go below the landing gear. This tactic not only allows re-usable rovers, but you can air drop them onto a planet using parachutes. If you are going to a planet without an atmosphere though, I suggest landing, or giving it a separate propulsion system.
I haven't gotten nearly this far but I still love watching your videos for learning purposes. I insta-subscribed because of your "We woulda had to hire a gardener ... but with all these spare rockets just laying around we figured we could just burn them off... Great informative videos and funny too... I'm having quite a hard time figuring this game out but you're making it TONS easier.
I also want to thank you for all the info I have learned watching you. I never would've gotten as decent as I am now! I am doing things I never thought possible, this game makes me feel smart, and it's soooo rewarding. Keep up the awesome videos!
7 years later, and now we're at the point you can load the parts of a rover into a normal ship and build it live, on-site with tools. I love this game.
There's some encoding glitchiness in here, clearly. Either that or TH-cam mucked it up during processing-but I've never actually heard of that happening, so it was very likely a production issue.
I actually made a big mistake in my staging, I de-coupled my main Engines/boosters when i was orbiting Kerbin. So thus i had a speeding rover in space! so since i had only a rover now i had to perform Maneuvers and burns with the onboard RCS and the LV-1R Spider engine, with the amount of fuel i had left, i managed to reach and land on the Mun. *I was like "GET THE CAMERA!!"*
When I landed my first rover I used the radial engine approach, and that's what I've been using since. The only difference is that my rovers were controlled by an unmanned pod, which allowed the above "lander" part to be lighter. Thanks for the "fuel transfer trick". I think I'll find applications for that. I also had no idea you could repair the tires, thanks again!
I've sent ships to other planets, landed one kerbal on both moons then taken him home; but for the life of me these space stations confound me! Good work man.
A couple days ago I made a successful landing at my Mun base. I now have 7 Kerbal Crew and 2 base modules! Not quite ready to dock yet, but I was VERY proud of myself! I'll give you a virtual high-five for that docking!
Took me a very long time and many tries to land a rover! I did it in a similar fashion to Curiosity and it was tough getting it too balance properly. Really like the video :)
Scott, thank you so much for this video, I have so many problems and more problems trying to land rovers on another planet... Thank you and please keep the great video's coming!
I just discovered your videos and I love how you explain so many things in this game, it's really helped me fall in love with KSP. If I may request, I see a lot of mods and some of the instructions seem to be written for an engineer. Would you consider a quickie explaining how some of the mods are worked and more importantly, how, when you build, you manipulate parts so easily? I cannot seem to get things to attach at angles and things as clean as you do. Thanks again for your videos, wow! great stuff, I'm glad Game of Thrones is done, I have a new Scott Manley show to watch now! -X.
Im so proud of myself.. Today for the first time I docked a ship onto my space station above the planet :) Gave myself a high five :D Love your videos Scott :)
About the "build the rover around the lander" method you mentioned at the end of the video, I do almost the same thing, but I start with the rover and add fuel tanks and engines to it to get it to the surface. If I'm building a rover for Minmus, I'll usually just integrate the two functions into one, so I end up with a small rover that has enough fuel in it to get from Minmus orbit to the surface with some reserve to be able to control my decent if I end up going off a cliff or something of that nature. I also try to include enough RCS blocks to be able to self-right the thing if it gets flipped, and at least one of the spherical monopropellant tanks (placed so it doesn't throw off the rover's center-of-mass _too_ much)
For the record, the writers of Kerbal-Engineer did end up including a slope at target status to the interface. I usually just build thrusters into my rovers as well as resource processing so I can fly them around long distances and replenish them in situ.
2:00 I have my wheel controls on the arrow keys, as well as RCS translation controls. It works great. Just make sure to remove the camera rotation, which is binded to the arrow keys by default.
I made a little rover Sojourner-like that I put inside a 2.5 m service bay which acts as bottom to a mobile lab, with a fuel tank between the two parts and radial engines and landing legs. There is a little blue decoupler set to minimum expulsion force to 1 to make the rover be rooted inside the service bay. Found out it works pretty well. The rover is composed of a small white probrover part, with a 4x2 solar pannel on its top, an antenna just beside the solar pannel six small wheels, three on each side. Two mysteryy goos on each side just above the wheels and temperature, pressure and sismic sensors just beside the antenna and ore scanner on the front with a head light and atmospheric analysis on the rear. The most difficult part of rover missions is not to make it flip over when turning or breaking too hard in descending slopes. Another consept was the same rover attached to the bottom of the fuel tank, the fuel tank equiped with radial engines as you did, ditch the rover when just above the surface and fire up the engines to make the craft land elsewhere. I initially though of a disposable delivery system but it is kind a waste of resources where I over engineered the rocket and had to use the third stage as a descent stage and had pretty much all the fuel I wanted in the "space crane" tank, so I redesigned ot to be a lander with science intruments and antenna on it to visit different parts of Minmus wth both the rover and the lancder. The most difficult part is to not lose them in such relocation maneuvers; requires a lot of time to move a rover to another biome as a fully loaded lander can visite three or four places wtth its fuel capacity and can carry more instruments (obervation science bay)
I just used one of your rocket designs from the demo tutorial video and threw my rover on top of where the pod would be, added a pod to the rover (so you could control the rocket), latched everything down using struts and took off, 3 seat rover about the size of your first rover in this video. Landed it with minimal problems on the Mun.
I died when you just plopped the Kerban off the lander. This is quite literally the funniest thing I've seen all day. He just slams into the ground. =D
The Kerbal Attachment Systems mod comes with a winch. You can attach your rover under the craft with a winch as part of the connection, and with reasonably precise piloting (kill horizontal velocity and then have any mod with an autopilot aim you "UP") you can easily drop it with the lander or skycrane at a safe altitude. If you also use Infernal Robotics and Tweakscale - the latter is immensely helpful for rovers and small probes - you can attach the wheels to hinges and make a rover small enough to fit on the underside of a 2.5m lander, such that the craft can land with the rover still attached. You then lower it partially by the winch if needed, deploy the wheels, lower it the rest of the way and then decouple and rewind the winch. It isn't nearly as hard to design rovers this way as it sounds - it's actually easier than any other approach I've tried.
Hi Scott, awesome video. You can edit the brake action group in the VAB and make it so only the back wheels will apply braking force. This prevents rovers from flipping over at the cost of brake speed :) I've also found that disabling steering on the back wheels gives better handling.
I suggested a slope indicator on the ksp forums for when you're in surface mode and < 3000 m. It would only have to be a dot on the navball that would tell you the magnitude and direction of the surface slope directly below you. It wouldn't clutter up the navball any more than the maneuver node indicator.
For help with balancing a rover hanging off the side (or any other non-symmetric components), I've found the "RCS Build Aid" plugin to be extremely helpful. It gives you a lot of info in the VAB to help you get parts positioned where they won't make your ship torque when thrusting with main engines as well as RCS.
Considering the lander is upside down and on fire at the end of this video; the new tagline should be " Fly safe, and drive crazy" Many thanks for all the great KSB videos. I have learned a ton of fun things and my experience with the game has been much less confusing.
There's wierd ghosting due to a bad interaction between my video editor and my video capture app, Unfortunately there's no way for me to fix this without re-recording and re-editing the whole video.
Congrats :) for me rendezvous and docking was the hardest hurtle in the game i have faced, it took me weeks and many attempts and multiple video tutorials, i even landed and returned from Kerbins moons before i could dock. once you can the game gets really epic, :)
The second lander I ever made was also a rover. I used the two man lander can and attached the the rover body to the bottom with the inflated wheels. It worked ok on kerbin, but tended to pitch farward on mun. I also put the small lander legs on it for the landing. Wheels still popped on landing. Thats when I discovered you could repair them.
I build a pathfider-soujourner system. The rover contains all the wheels and mobile stuff, and the counterweight is fuel storage, solar power, and transmitters. The rover travels around and takes some scans, then returns to base, transfers the experiments, refuels, and heads out again.
Most of my designs are usually turning a fuel source sideways, placing landing legs in such a way that they reach just a bit further than the wheels I like to use, then thrown a command module onto the front. All power management is on top, so the center of gravity stays in the exact middle. Powered descent isn't too hard either, since the large radial engines can be connected in the exact middle. Combined with the leftover fuel from a orbital/de-orbital stage, landing is actually easier for me.
My usual tactic for one-man rovers is to attach them on the bottom of the lander so it's just a hair above the ground when the legs are deployed, making sure the legs leave a big enough gap for it to be pushed out. For larger rovers, I just send it on a different rocket and try and have it land somewhere nearby. I've toyed with the idea of dropping them onto the ground while hovering, but I'm not quite good enough yet to do that reliably. Once I build a Mun base, I'll have a few in a garage.
A slope indicator would be really nice...especially if it had a "visual component" as well. I've done the lander/rover combo before, it works out really well as long as you keep to low speeds and don't try and do wheelies!
I made a heavy rover and landed it on the Mun a few months back. It took a massive skycrane and a dual rocket of Kerbuclean proportions. . . Where was this vid when I needed it Scott? :P
Actually, on the Apollo 11 landing, the autopilot on the lunar module was about to drop them into a crater with tons of rocks and uneven landscape, until Neil Armstrong made the decision to switch to manual and stay in the air for a little bit longer to move over to a more flat surface. They got on the ground with barely a few seconds left of fuel.
Rover on the side is also possible. You just have to align centre of mass with the centre of thrust more or less, make sure that fuel is also more or less balanced and you can get a controllable lander.
Sorry Scott, I know you're just being modest, but those rovers are BOSS ! The Range Rover style one is amazing and I love the NASA ATHLETE style rover (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) is equally fantastic !
I once had a design using infernal robotics, which was basically two landers with a rover between them that would be lowered down on a little platform by winches. It worked pretty well, apart from the fact that the decoupler I used shot the rover so high in the air that it broke upon landing. But after a few reloads I got it to work
You could have mounted the lander upside down relative to the parent launch vehicle when attaching the rover underneath to save adding any extra mass. Also on the lander/rover with wheels concept landing legs could have been added to the craft to sponge most if the impact and then could be folded away so the wheels would then touch the ground
By the gods, Scott. I've been playing KSP for nearly a year now, and until this day, I had no idea it was possible to simply right click and repair tires. I'll bet that eight wheeled rover I had a few versions ago, in which every wheel was attached via an interchangeable module consisting of a miniature docking port, a flat probodyne, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, and a rover wheel, looks pretty silly right now. Hell, it looked pretty silly back then, too. :\
I built a simple rover which was designed to be mounted underneath a specially designed lander. Basically its a lander can with fuel tanks and small rockets on either side, leaving room for the rover between them. Once you're down you just decouple it to drop it to the ground and drive it away. I'd show you pictures, but unfortunately TH-cam won't let me post links.
Thanks for this! I was able to build my first rover. I used similar approach as visible in 12:40, but I do not know how to attach it to the lower stages of the rocket. A bit more detailed explanation would be great!
What i tended to do was to put my rover in the horizontal way under my lander, then attach the long wings to the lander, and then attach the long 2.5(?) meter tanks to that. If i then put the landing legs on the tanks, it gave it enough clearance to driveaway. One of the cons was that you had to put the launcher stages under those tanks, meaning that if you didn't strut it, the wings would fold in on the lander.
That's the flight engineer, it's a mod which gives you information about your craft such as delta V. (It will also give you your AP and PE without you needing to look at the map)
ITs quite easy to stop the wheels spinning like that without action groups. Simply go into the settings and remap the keys. I have it set so that rover wheels are controlled from my numpad which then stops any command pod rotation from interfering too.
Checking the terrain slope of a landing site in KSP would not necessarily be a trivial matter, however I think the best way would be to simply store the planetary height map as a grid of gradients and reference it based on landing coordinates.
Hey Scott, when you are in flight with Rovers attached to your ship, turn on the Parking Brakes and they will at least keep your wheels from spinning at Ludicrous Speed, causing your rovers to land and launch off going Plaid!
Wouldn't the docking mode system make controlling the final rover possible without putting on probe bodies. The problem with normal WSAD is that it rotates the craft, which is a problem in low gravity situations. As far as I know the docking mode doesn't have the problem. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
One of the things I do for my rovers, even in 100% stock mode, is stick some of the reaction wheels on there. I know it's essentially extra (quasi) useless mass; but! should you ever flip one over, you can engage the reaction wheels and (not so) gracefully plop it into it's wheels again if it's not overly wide. I also include clean (meaning free of equipment) "top armor", the 1x1 panels work well to keep things from exploding all it's critical components. Lol; I generally assume that what ever I don't want my rover to do, it will 100% do, thusly resulting in some seriously over-built heavy contraptions. But at least they work ... as long as the isotopes last :D
with the inline rover, use a decoupler rather than a docking node so you can drop it with a quick space bar press rather than having to find and click a part
I think he was looking for something that would indicate the surface slope so that you knew what angle you were landing on (or to find nice flat landing sites).
Scott Manley For the final idea, the rover/lander combo, could you not have lander legs as well, land on them, then pull them back into the craft and settle neatly onto the wheels?
I hope they devs will add more data collecting instruments to the game soon. Like the ability to collect topographical maps and have support to have an overlay in game while you land.
* Dramatic voice * After 5 long years of struggle and engeneering the program managed to send the gardeners to the strange strange alien world of the KSC weedy garden!
The other two ways are obviously to use a skycrane, which is also a great way to land unmanned rovers, or to use a lifter design like that fuel tank carrier you made for the reusable space program series, with engines off to the sides like stilts.
I believe you forgot an option, on low gravity bodies I have found attaching light rovers to the top of my lander works. They won't break when they decouple and fall down.
"Isn't this a magnificent design?" ... Yes. Yes it is :-) As soon as I've picked Robin up from Gilly I'm heading home to make one! Hell, let's make two!!
You should try doing a crash rover--a shell made of struts and beams that you can literally drop and, for the most part, let it smash into the ground, using the armor to keep the rover intact. Then just jettison the debris using small SRBs, and your rover's ready to go. (plus it works well for the in-line design)
I've managed to make one that can crash into the ground at up to 70 m/s, leaving the rover totally unscathed. They're wicked fun to test and build.
Almost 10 years and still the best content creator for this game
Do the Kerbals make all their gear out of explodium?
yes
You wouldn't?
Why the hell not!
***** wazzup
They use an explodium-kerbite alloy
Clearly you're roverthinking this
Kristian Grane OHHH MANNN
Kristian Grane I see what you did there.
I wheel-y saw that coming...
WillTheConqueror lol stahp!
That was a really shippy pun
Scott,your videos are immensely helpful, thanks for all the work you do in putting these together!
4:37 *Predicts Hopper starting a grass fire*
Thank you for this tutorial, I'd say! I did a lot of things in KSP. Landed nearly on all landable targets, planing to build a station around Kerbol and have a lot of fun going nuts. But I totally can't handle rovers to bring them up to some places, I would love to have some.
I appreciate this.
I wish there was an action replay that would let me re-record that in super high time resolution.
Protip: Rovers do not always have to be big! If you can design a fairly compact rover with, of course, the necessities for driving and performing science, try mounting the engines of a lander on the side, and attaching the rover to the bottom, making sure the wheels do not go below the landing gear. This tactic not only allows re-usable rovers, but you can air drop them onto a planet using parachutes. If you are going to a planet without an atmosphere though, I suggest landing, or giving it a separate propulsion system.
I haven't gotten nearly this far but I still love watching your videos for learning purposes.
I insta-subscribed because of your "We woulda had to hire a gardener ... but with all these spare rockets just laying around we figured we could just burn them off...
Great informative videos and funny too... I'm having quite a hard time figuring this game out but you're making it TONS easier.
"It all just worked."
First time I've heard that in association with a KSP experience.
That's the kerbal engineer plugin, gives me some more in flight data.
I also want to thank you for all the info I have learned watching you. I never would've gotten as decent as I am now! I am doing things I never thought possible, this game makes me feel smart, and it's soooo rewarding. Keep up the awesome videos!
Targetted for 0.22 release.
7 years later, and now we're at the point you can load the parts of a rover into a normal ship and build it live, on-site with tools.
I love this game.
Too bad the building tool on site is bugged and makes the rover zoom into space when placing things on it.
this video became grainy for me (like an after image when the camera moves) is that the actual video or is that just a bad internet connection?
+attack125 Same for me so it is probably the video.
There's some encoding glitchiness in here, clearly. Either that or TH-cam mucked it up during processing-but I've never actually heard of that happening, so it was very likely a production issue.
attack125 same
I actually made a big mistake in my staging, I de-coupled my main Engines/boosters when i was orbiting Kerbin. So thus i had a speeding rover in space! so since i had only a rover now i had to perform Maneuvers and burns with the onboard RCS and the LV-1R Spider engine, with the amount of fuel i had left, i managed to reach and land on the Mun.
*I was like "GET THE CAMERA!!"*
Top kek ksp-stuff right there :D
Ksp moment
These videos are 6 years old and I still love watching them!
It also displays orbital and surface information.
When I landed my first rover I used the radial engine approach, and that's what I've been using since. The only difference is that my rovers were controlled by an unmanned pod, which allowed the above "lander" part to be lighter.
Thanks for the "fuel transfer trick". I think I'll find applications for that. I also had no idea you could repair the tires, thanks again!
I've sent ships to other planets, landed one kerbal on both moons then taken him home; but for the life of me these space stations confound me!
Good work man.
Nah, it's just like parking a car.
I usually place a single lander leg on the top of my rovers so it can right itself if it rolls.
A couple days ago I made a successful landing at my Mun base. I now have 7 Kerbal Crew and 2 base modules! Not quite ready to dock yet, but I was VERY proud of myself!
I'll give you a virtual high-five for that docking!
Right that's the hard part, you need struts everywhere.
Took me a very long time and many tries to land a rover! I did it in a similar fashion to Curiosity and it was tough getting it too balance properly. Really like the video :)
Scott, thank you so much for this video, I have so many problems and more problems trying to land rovers on another planet... Thank you and please keep the great video's coming!
I just discovered your videos and I love how you explain so many things in this game, it's really helped me fall in love with KSP.
If I may request, I see a lot of mods and some of the instructions seem to be written for an engineer. Would you consider a quickie explaining how some of the mods are worked and more importantly, how, when you build, you manipulate parts so easily? I cannot seem to get things to attach at angles and things as clean as you do.
Thanks again for your videos, wow! great stuff, I'm glad Game of Thrones is done, I have a new Scott Manley show to watch now!
-X.
Im so proud of myself.. Today for the first time I docked a ship onto my space station above the planet :)
Gave myself a high five :D
Love your videos Scott :)
About the "build the rover around the lander" method you mentioned at the end of the video, I do almost the same thing, but I start with the rover and add fuel tanks and engines to it to get it to the surface. If I'm building a rover for Minmus, I'll usually just integrate the two functions into one, so I end up with a small rover that has enough fuel in it to get from Minmus orbit to the surface with some reserve to be able to control my decent if I end up going off a cliff or something of that nature. I also try to include enough RCS blocks to be able to self-right the thing if it gets flipped, and at least one of the spherical monopropellant tanks (placed so it doesn't throw off the rover's center-of-mass _too_ much)
For the record, the writers of Kerbal-Engineer did end up including a slope at target status to the interface. I usually just build thrusters into my rovers as well as resource processing so I can fly them around long distances and replenish them in situ.
I like how scott calls these designs terrible. they are way better than anything ive been able to come up with lol. wtb creativity skills.
2:00 I have my wheel controls on the arrow keys, as well as RCS translation controls. It works great. Just make sure to remove the camera rotation, which is binded to the arrow keys by default.
I made a little rover Sojourner-like that I put inside a 2.5 m service bay which acts as bottom to a mobile lab, with a fuel tank between the two parts and radial engines and landing legs. There is a little blue decoupler set to minimum expulsion force to 1 to make the rover be rooted inside the service bay. Found out it works pretty well. The rover is composed of a small white probrover part, with a 4x2 solar pannel on its top, an antenna just beside the solar pannel six small wheels, three on each side. Two mysteryy goos on each side just above the wheels and temperature, pressure and sismic sensors just beside the antenna and ore scanner on the front with a head light and atmospheric analysis on the rear. The most difficult part of rover missions is not to make it flip over when turning or breaking too hard in descending slopes.
Another consept was the same rover attached to the bottom of the fuel tank, the fuel tank equiped with radial engines as you did, ditch the rover when just above the surface and fire up the engines to make the craft land elsewhere. I initially though of a disposable delivery system but it is kind a waste of resources where I over engineered the rocket and had to use the third stage as a descent stage and had pretty much all the fuel I wanted in the "space crane" tank, so I redesigned ot to be a lander with science intruments and antenna on it to visit different parts of Minmus wth both the rover and the lancder. The most difficult part is to not lose them in such relocation maneuvers; requires a lot of time to move a rover to another biome as a fully loaded lander can visite three or four places wtth its fuel capacity and can carry more instruments (obervation science bay)
I just used one of your rocket designs from the demo tutorial video and threw my rover on top of where the pod would be, added a pod to the rover (so you could control the rocket), latched everything down using struts and took off, 3 seat rover about the size of your first rover in this video. Landed it with minimal problems on the Mun.
Oh, have I been having trouble with rovers... Thanks a bunch, Scott, you have saved me.
Your KSP videos are amazing!
I died when you just plopped the Kerban off the lander. This is quite literally the funniest thing I've seen all day. He just slams into the ground. =D
The Kerbal Attachment Systems mod comes with a winch. You can attach your rover under the craft with a winch as part of the connection, and with reasonably precise piloting (kill horizontal velocity and then have any mod with an autopilot aim you "UP") you can easily drop it with the lander or skycrane at a safe altitude.
If you also use Infernal Robotics and Tweakscale - the latter is immensely helpful for rovers and small probes - you can attach the wheels to hinges and make a rover small enough to fit on the underside of a 2.5m lander, such that the craft can land with the rover still attached. You then lower it partially by the winch if needed, deploy the wheels, lower it the rest of the way and then decouple and rewind the winch.
It isn't nearly as hard to design rovers this way as it sounds - it's actually easier than any other approach I've tried.
Hi Scott, awesome video. You can edit the brake action group in the VAB and make it so only the back wheels will apply braking force. This prevents rovers from flipping over at the cost of brake speed :)
I've also found that disabling steering on the back wheels gives better handling.
3:00
"It's the good ol' boys..." BOOM!
Ha ha ha, nice Dukes of Hazard jump, Scott!
I suggested a slope indicator on the ksp forums for when you're in surface mode and < 3000 m. It would only have to be a dot on the navball that would tell you the magnitude and direction of the surface slope directly below you. It wouldn't clutter up the navball any more than the maneuver node indicator.
For help with balancing a rover hanging off the side (or any other non-symmetric components), I've found the "RCS Build Aid" plugin to be extremely helpful. It gives you a lot of info in the VAB to help you get parts positioned where they won't make your ship torque when thrusting with main engines as well as RCS.
Considering the lander is upside down and on fire at the end of this video; the new tagline should be " Fly safe, and drive crazy"
Many thanks for all the great KSB videos. I have learned a ton of fun things and my experience with the game has been much less confusing.
I love Kerbal Space Brogram
There's wierd ghosting due to a bad interaction between my video editor and my video capture app, Unfortunately there's no way for me to fix this without re-recording and re-editing the whole video.
Congrats :) for me rendezvous and docking was the hardest hurtle in the game i have faced, it took me weeks and many attempts and multiple video tutorials, i even landed and returned from Kerbins moons before i could dock. once you can the game gets really epic, :)
The second lander I ever made was also a rover. I used the two man lander can and attached the the rover body to the bottom with the inflated wheels. It worked ok on kerbin, but tended to pitch farward on mun. I also put the small lander legs on it for the landing. Wheels still popped on landing. Thats when I discovered you could repair them.
but.... how would i get my Tiger tank to Eve? (why did i even say that, i haven't even landed on Eve normally!)
+EpicSmileyMan64 chutes
patricio torre yeah but i don't even know how to get there, but it' pointless now, my good ol friend hyper edit has assisted me.
+EpicSmileyMan64 Cheating loser
Kash Kash plenty of people cheat, hey, t least i have made it to the moon unlike a lot of people who play this game.
+Kash Kash i did used hyper edit, now i changed my plan, no more hyperedit.
I build a pathfider-soujourner system. The rover contains all the wheels and mobile stuff, and the counterweight is fuel storage, solar power, and transmitters. The rover travels around and takes some scans, then returns to base, transfers the experiments, refuels, and heads out again.
Most of my designs are usually turning a fuel source sideways, placing landing legs in such a way that they reach just a bit further than the wheels I like to use, then thrown a command module onto the front. All power management is on top, so the center of gravity stays in the exact middle. Powered descent isn't too hard either, since the large radial engines can be connected in the exact middle.
Combined with the leftover fuel from a orbital/de-orbital stage, landing is actually easier for me.
My usual tactic for one-man rovers is to attach them on the bottom of the lander so it's just a hair above the ground when the legs are deployed, making sure the legs leave a big enough gap for it to be pushed out.
For larger rovers, I just send it on a different rocket and try and have it land somewhere nearby. I've toyed with the idea of dropping them onto the ground while hovering, but I'm not quite good enough yet to do that reliably.
Once I build a Mun base, I'll have a few in a garage.
A slope indicator would be really nice...especially if it had a "visual component" as well. I've done the lander/rover combo before, it works out really well as long as you keep to low speeds and don't try and do wheelies!
I made a heavy rover and landed it on the Mun a few months back. It took a massive skycrane and a dual rocket of Kerbuclean proportions. . . Where was this vid when I needed it Scott? :P
Actually, on the Apollo 11 landing, the autopilot on the lunar module was about to drop them into a crater with tons of rocks and uneven landscape, until Neil Armstrong made the decision to switch to manual and stay in the air for a little bit longer to move over to a more flat surface. They got on the ground with barely a few seconds left of fuel.
It gets so much easier after you get over that hump. Good job!
In the action groups, if you delete the front wheels from the "brakes" group you can reduce possibility of flip over. :)
Rover on the side is also possible. You just have to align centre of mass with the centre of thrust more or less, make sure that fuel is also more or less balanced and you can get a controllable lander.
Sorry Scott, I know you're just being modest, but those rovers are BOSS !
The Range Rover style one is amazing and I love the NASA ATHLETE style rover (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) is equally fantastic !
This is a fine method if you want pilots on the ground. If you use probes you can just drop the rover from orbit with a small throw away tank & jets.
Hush, Scott. Your rover is magnificent.
This is very useful, I crashed about 4 rovers on Duna before landing one... and even that one got severely damaged.
that is the coolest rover/car i have ever seen in ksp
I once had a design using infernal robotics, which was basically two landers with a rover between them that would be lowered down on a little platform by winches. It worked pretty well, apart from the fact that the decoupler I used shot the rover so high in the air that it broke upon landing. But after a few reloads I got it to work
You could have mounted the lander upside down relative to the parent launch vehicle when attaching the rover underneath to save adding any extra mass. Also on the lander/rover with wheels concept landing legs could have been added to the craft to sponge most if the impact and then could be folded away so the wheels would then touch the ground
By the gods, Scott. I've been playing KSP for nearly a year now, and until this day, I had no idea it was possible to simply right click and repair tires.
I'll bet that eight wheeled rover I had a few versions ago, in which every wheel was attached via an interchangeable module consisting of a miniature docking port, a flat probodyne, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, and a rover wheel, looks pretty silly right now.
Hell, it looked pretty silly back then, too. :\
Take a look at the curiosity lander. Hang the rover in the middle of X made of 4 engines pointed downwards.
I built a simple rover which was designed to be mounted underneath a specially designed lander. Basically its a lander can with fuel tanks and small rockets on either side, leaving room for the rover between them. Once you're down you just decouple it to drop it to the ground and drive it away.
I'd show you pictures, but unfortunately TH-cam won't let me post links.
Thanks for this!
I was able to build my first rover. I used similar approach as visible in 12:40, but I do not know how to attach it to the lower stages of the rocket. A bit more detailed explanation would be great!
The challenge now is to get it back.
Nice, first time in 2 Month that I learned something on this channel!
What i tended to do was to put my rover in the horizontal way under my lander, then attach the long wings to the lander, and then attach the long 2.5(?) meter tanks to that. If i then put the landing legs on the tanks, it gave it enough clearance to driveaway. One of the cons was that you had to put the launcher stages under those tanks, meaning that if you didn't strut it, the wings would fold in on the lander.
That's the flight engineer, it's a mod which gives you information about your craft such as delta V. (It will also give you your AP and PE without you needing to look at the map)
ITs quite easy to stop the wheels spinning like that without action groups. Simply go into the settings and remap the keys. I have it set so that rover wheels are controlled from my numpad which then stops any command pod rotation from interfering too.
The graphical glitch at 6:47 makes the Mun look incredible
Checking the terrain slope of a landing site in KSP would not necessarily be a trivial matter, however I think the best way would be to simply store the planetary height map as a grid of gradients and reference it based on landing coordinates.
You can repair wheels in IVA? That would have been useful a while ago.
No you can't. You still have to EVA
Thanks for the information Scott!!!
Hey Scott, when you are in flight with Rovers attached to your ship, turn on the Parking Brakes and they will at least keep your wheels from spinning at Ludicrous Speed, causing your rovers to land and launch off going Plaid!
Wouldn't the docking mode system make controlling the final rover possible without putting on probe bodies. The problem with normal WSAD is that it rotates the craft, which is a problem in low gravity situations. As far as I know the docking mode doesn't have the problem. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
3:02 Michael Bay approves
and 6:19
On his lander/rover hybrid, you could put shot landing legs on the diagonals, between the wheels. Land on the legs, then retract them and drive.
One of the things I do for my rovers, even in 100% stock mode, is stick some of the reaction wheels on there. I know it's essentially extra (quasi) useless mass; but! should you ever flip one over, you can engage the reaction wheels and (not so) gracefully plop it into it's wheels again if it's not overly wide. I also include clean (meaning free of equipment) "top armor", the 1x1 panels work well to keep things from exploding all it's critical components. Lol; I generally assume that what ever I don't want my rover to do, it will 100% do, thusly resulting in some seriously over-built heavy contraptions. But at least they work ... as long as the isotopes last :D
with the inline rover, use a decoupler rather than a docking node so you can drop it with a quick space bar press rather than having to find and click a part
I think he was looking for something that would indicate the surface slope so that you knew what angle you were landing on (or to find nice flat landing sites).
Scott Manley For the final idea, the rover/lander combo, could you not have lander legs as well, land on them, then pull them back into the craft and settle neatly onto the wheels?
I hope they devs will add more data collecting instruments to the game soon. Like the ability to collect topographical maps and have support to have an overlay in game while you land.
* Dramatic voice * After 5 long years of struggle and engeneering the program managed to send the gardeners to the strange strange alien world of the KSC weedy garden!
I forgive you for tireless, amazing and instructive video.
P.S.: Whisper something about Part Catalog mod on your channel. :)
Sure, but that's extra mass, my OCD says its wrong.
I stick mine on the top, cover with fairings from mods to make it look better and either use chutes or a sky crane depending on atmosphere :)
just realized you spelt it 'death start', which is a fairly accurate description of most my rocket launches :p
The other two ways are obviously to use a skycrane, which is also a great way to land unmanned rovers, or to use a lifter design like that fuel tank carrier you made for the reusable space program series, with engines off to the sides like stilts.
Yeah that last one was more or less deliberately designed to show the problem, you can do a lot better.
nah just get the heights +- 10m in every direction and use the differences to compute a gradient
Although i can do and know all this shit, i always learn more and love watching these. :D
There are so many useful/value added payloads you could use to counterbalance a rover. :D
I believe you forgot an option, on low gravity bodies I have found attaching light rovers to the top of my lander works. They won't break when they decouple and fall down.
5:43 - Hey, that's what we have quicksaves for!
I loved the last example of the lander/rover
"Isn't this a magnificent design?" ... Yes. Yes it is :-) As soon as I've picked Robin up from Gilly I'm heading home to make one! Hell, let's make two!!