Has anyone figured out an elegant way to carry a rover to the surface of another planet?

[Kerbital]

12 hours ago, System Error Message said:

using only stock parts i have by making a very slim rover to fit into the mk3 cargo and landing on another part of kerbin. My spaceship already does every task so the only thing i actually need to carry are satellites with data relay and communication.

How do you make your rover stay inside the cargo bay? I use docking ports so I can put the rover back if needed. But when I undock the rover it gets thrown out of the bay or explodes if it hits something. Example, this rover went flying hundreds of meter up. There was no damage since the roof was opened but if this happened inside a cargo bay with roof, the rover would be tossed around the bay and torn to pieces. BTW, this happens to tiny rovers too, not just large ones.

 

10 hours ago, kermand said:

I like to use KAS and build my rovers on site. If you think ahead and cut your design in pieces manageable by one or two kerbals ( < 2 tons ) you can carry the rover in a streamlined shape, land it without a sky crane and rearrange the pieces once there. I usually assemble my bases with huge cranes I build this way. For nthe counter weights, I use ore tanks Bille Kerman can carry when empty, fix them to the back of the crane and fill them. And here you get a crane able to lift 20 tons without tiping, hand made!

KAS also comes very handy to put back on their wheels rover less than 1 ton when they tip over.

Another approach I used successfully was inspired from Mars Pathfinder: using infernal robotics, you can put your rover in a box, have it land quite roughly on difficult terrain, fall on any side but get back on the correct orientation when it opens. It's still a sky crane design, but much less delicate to land. 

 

I find KAS, KIS and IR to be very complex. Way too much to enjoy. And Kerbals are such a pain to control in EVA. I'd be perfectly happy if I could land a rover and build a small base without Kraken attacks. I may just stick to one-way spaceplane flights.

Edited April 17, 2017 by Kerbital

[GoSlash27]

Years ago, I used to make the rover the lander.

The rovers contained the fuel and engines, and docked together to carry payloads.

With that, I had the ability to use them as fuel trucks, cargo carriers, ascent/ descent stages, and bulldozers for colony construction. I used to send them up in great big stacks.

 Again... this was years ago and the game was a lot different then. Just offering it as food for thought.

 

Best,
-Slashy

 

[System Error Message]

if your rover is wider rather than tall you can rotate an mk3 cargo bay. One thing you can do is have the rover into 2 parts and combine them as you deploy them using only stock parts. This means an 8 wheeled rover too with a short wheel base between each rover.

[fourfa]

I am greatly looking forward to misusing these new parts from the upcoming expansion/DLC:

to make rovers that integrate into cargo bays more elegantly.

[WanderingKid]

I've taken to slapping a Docking Port Jr. on the back of the rover, slapping an Oscar or three on with a spark, and landing it independently tail down.  Eject the engine with a separator and the rover has a reverse node to work from!  This has worked for me for anything not pushing over a few tons.  This should work for pretty much any non-atmospheric body.

I've not had the issues you seem to describe (detaching a port in a Mk3 cargo bay, for example) but it's been a LONG time since I used those, so my experiences are woefully out of date for the state of possible bugs.

[Kerbital]

Thanks all. A mod could also be responsible for this but I remember this happening a long time ago when I was playing with very few mods. The only way that works for me is attaching the rover outside of a craft.

[Virdin]

I'd actually use fairings to de-accelerate Aerobrake! through the atmo. When it slows down enough, I pop off the fairings. I drogue parachute down until I activate my main chutes.

I land, and I'm on my way! Then F5 real quick so I don't have to redo everything when my rover flips over 10 seconds from when I landed. 

Edited June 27, 2017 by Virdin
Apparently, litho means stone...

[Dafni]

48 minutes ago, Virdin said:

I'd actually use fairings to de-accelerate Lithobrake! through the atmo.

I may be missing a joke or something here, but just to avoid confusion: There is no Lithobraking in atmospheres, as it requires solid gound per definition. (litho = greek for stone)

[Virdin]

2 minutes ago, Dafni said:

I may be missing a joke or something here, but just to avoid confusion: There is no Lithobraking in atmospheres, as it requires solid gound per definition. (litho = greek for stone)

Thank you for correcting me. The changes have already been made. 

[Dafni]

1 minute ago, Virdin said:

Thank you for correcting me. The changes have already been made. 

ah okay, I see now. easy mistake to make.

did not want to nitpick, just thought I point it out, not to confuse new players or something.

[Virdin]

Just now, Dafni said:

ah okay, I see now. easy mistake to make.

did not want to nitpick, just thought I point it out, not to confuse new players or something.

I actually have over 700 hours in the game. I just don't aerobrake often and I kinda get the two confused sometimes.

[Dafni]

2 minutes ago, Virdin said:

I actually have over 700 hours in the game. I just don't aerobrake often and I kinda get the two confused sometimes.

Its all good mate, easy mistake. And by new players I meant other forum visitors or members, who might have read it and got confused.

[Virdin]

1 minute ago, Dafni said:

Its all good mate, easy mistake. And by new players I meant other forum visitors or members, who might have read it and got confused.

Alright. Thank you again.

[Spricigo]

My two most recent Mun rovers: Magallean is transported inside a 2,5m fairing on top a fuel tank+engine .  The lander touchdown,  tip over and deploy the rover. Roach do the same but without the fairing. 

 

Mind you, those are fairly small, respectively 1,8t and 0,4t.

[Loren Pechtel]

Has anyone played with the Kolonization mod's kits to haul a rover and some machinery to unpack it on site?  (This would require it to be manned.)

[Guest]

The Mk3 spaceplane parts are certainly big enough to hold a decent-sized and capable rover. Kerbfleet's KSS Intrepid carries a small rover in the forward ramp, under its two Jooldiver survey probes:

...this was of course on Pol, which has low enough gravity for Sarge to park the rover by flying it into the dock on RCS thrusters. Certainly a larger rover will fit into the Mk3 bay if other equipment isn't in there cluttering things up, and you could probably rig a docking system that doesn't require levitation. Beeping while backing up is a tradition of the KSMC (Kerbfleet Surface Mobility Corps) and not required, though a general understanding of one's surroundings is highly recommended. Professional pilot, closed moon. Your kilometerage may vary.

[Kerbital]

The thing for me was that when I docked a rover (using standard docking ports inside or outside a carrier vessel) it would "explode" when detached later. As if the detaching force was great and shot the rover with great speed. If this happened inside a bay, it usually resulted in explosion. If the port was on the outside of the ship the rover would fly away really far and this also resulted in damage.

I've built many cargo vessels, both with various bays to carry the rover inside or with external attachments.

The only way it worked for me was if the rover was attached to a crane style carrier with a coupler. No problem. But that was a one way trip. I wanted a solution that would allow me to load up the rover to fly it to other locations.

It's possible that some mod was to blame, but I'm pretty sure I tried this on pretty vanilla game with same results.

If you look at the image I posted above:

The rover is actually flying at great speed out of the bay. I had to be quick to take this shot. It ended up kilometers away from the ship and in pieces.

[Kurld]

I haven't played with rovers in a long time. At one point the wheel physics was totally jacked up. Did they ever get that sorted out?  Even before that, though, the things were so prone to flipping, I hardly saw the point.

 

[Kerbital]

1 minute ago, Kurld said:

I haven't played with rovers in a long time. At one point the wheel physics was totally jacked up. Did they ever get that sorted out?  Even before that, though, the things were so prone to flipping, I hardly saw the point.

 

Yeah, VERY prone to flipping over, in partricular in low gravity, in my experience, almost too much so some solution was needed to prevent flipping and to recover a flipped rover. I added a reaction wheel code to the rover body .cfg files to add stability control and, in low gravity, such wheel is enough to flip the rover back over. I disliked using landing legs as recovery mechanisms for flipped rovers.

Another thing that bothered me about this is that a rover will take damage when flipped and the lack of any field repair pretty much made rover missions very precarious and prone to failure because of flipping related damage or immobilization. You have to be super careful when operating a rover. The Feline rover is very prone to flipping due to high center of gravity. I designed my rowers to be flat, low and wide and used structural elements to create sort of roll cages to protect elements such as solar panels from damage when filliped over. I regret that I don't have any images.

Overall, combined with the difficulties of transportation, I gave up on rovers.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

As an interesting side note that perhaps some of you already know, there is a trick to push the COM below the body of the rover and indeed even below the surface of the ground if you want.

Just take any air breathing jet engine, and place it upside down on the top of your craft, pointing at the sky, then use the translate tool to sink it into the body of the vehicle.

Jet engines center of mass is actually well behind the physical model to account for the extra weight of all the piping and tubing and such you don't see. By rotating the engine to face up we are pushing the vehicles entire COM down with every engine we add in this way. It's easy to make Rover's that are absolutely immune to flipping like this. Although obviously the less gravity you have the less pronounced this effect is.

Here's a quick example, you can see how low the COM is from just 3 Juno's.

 

 

To answer the original question, I'm not sure I'd call it elegant but this is how I (and I assume most people) do it. By just slinging it underneath and using 2 side mounted engines. Simple and easy, nothing flashy.

Edited July 14, 2017 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Kerbital]

I used hacked, i.e slightly overpowered RCS thrusters for that. I'd fire the upwards facing ones during turns or if the rover lost grounds contact. Also, front firing thrusters aided in braking, while rear and downward facing ones help with jumps, although that was risky unless the rover had a reaction wheel to keep it level.

Ah, found some pictures. This was before I learned how to edit cfg files to add internal reaction wheels. The top-side mounted thrusters helped with leveling up the rover if it flipped. This one did not have front and rear facing thrusters.

I later used quint-thrusters for more flexibility

 

Edited July 14, 2017 by Kerbital

[Kerbital]

1 hour ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

To answer the original question, I'm not sure I'd call it elegant but this is how I (and I assume most people) do it. By just slinging it underneath and using 2 side mounted engines. Simple and easy, nothing flashy.

Yes, It works fine. I used 4 engines for larger rovers too. But again, this is a one way trip. I was looking for a reusable solution.

This was the most successful design. Rovers did not explode every single time, but still often enough to discourage use.

 

[Alchemist]

Well, I managed to pack an entire mobile base inside a shuttle

The most important problem is packing the wheels - if you put them wrong, they tend to either pop or kick the rover up on undock. It took plenty of fine-tuning to make it work, but here it is. Interestingly, these yellow wheels turned to be a bit better suited for the job than the black ones (and if a wheel pops, it at least doesn't get you stuck), but it's still kinda tricky to put them under 1 m parts so that they fit in the bay.

If you are interested to investigate how it's packed, here's KerbalX link

[Kerbital]

22 minutes ago, Alchemist said:

The most important problem is packing the wheels - if you put them wrong, they tend to either pop or kick the rover up on undock. It took plenty of fine-tuning to make it work, but here it is. Interestingly, these yellow wheels turned to be a bit better suited for the job than the black ones (and if a wheel pops, it at least doesn't get you stuck), but it's still kinda tricky to put them under 1 m parts so that they fit in the bay.

I wonder if that's what was happening to me: "kick the rover up on undock" sounds like it! I made sure to engage all wheel brakes before takeoff but I never used the yellow wheels.

[nascarlaser1]

If your willing to use mods, you can use the Hanger or KAS/KIS mods. or extra planetary launch pads

KAS/KIS lets you build and then disassemble your rover onsite, allowing to just have to carry the individual parts inside a container (which can fit onto a regular lander). Nvm just read the actual posts and realized you don't like that mod lol.

Hanger gives you different sized hangers that let you pack your rover inside of them, then spawn them where ever you are, and then pack them back up again. This also saves on part numbers because the rover inside the hanger isn't actually loaded into the game until you tell it to.

EPL lets you build vehicles off site and launch them from there. All you need is a mining set up in order to refine metal, and a small group of engineers and either a mobile Launchpad or runway to build on. The Launchpad and runway unfold to allow for easy carrying.

Edited July 15, 2017 by nascarlaser1