How are ROVERS meant to be played?

[felcas]

I am just starting with rovers and I thought that I could somehow launch my rover and go back to KSC and just keep doing my things, like other missions while the rover keep going in a straight line, very mch like the things we launch into space. Eventually I thought that I would need come back and check  position to see if it was near the place I expected it to be or if I needed to make some maneuver to put it back on track or to deviate from a mountain range. But...I made 2 rovers with stock parts and mods but I can't just leave it in a straight line and go back to KSC.

Soo how is Rover meant to be played? Because if I need to be in constant command, I don't see how much usefull it is, for example making a paralel to Mars rovers  which traveled tens of miles.

If I am supposed to just use it around, isn't it best to develop a ship that can just fly around?

[Kyle Worden]

While there are mods that allow the rover to follow a path programmed to it, namely Kerbal operating systems, in stock you should have your rover as the active vessel while it is moving. I could be mistaken, but the reason why your rovers at the KSC were able to move at all without being the active vessel is because you were within the 2.2km range where physics loads.

 

Not quite sure what else you are asking however, I personally use rovers on smaller bodies where I can have them perform science experiments on different biomes and transmit them back to help fund or develop a manned operation to that body.

[Weywot8]

Stock KSP requires you to always be in command of your rover while it moves on the surface of a planet/moon.  You can always install the mod below for an "autopilot drive to target" behavior that works while the rover is not the active vessel.

 

 

[felcas]

31 minutes ago, shadoxfilms said:

While there are mods that allow the rover to follow a path programmed to it, namely Kerbal operating systems, in stock you should have your rover as the active vessel while it is moving. I could be mistaken, but the reason why your rovers at the KSC were able to move at all without being the active vessel is because you were within the 2.2km range where physics loads.

 

Not quite sure what else you are asking however, I personally use rovers on smaller bodies where I can have them perform science experiments on different biomes and transmit them back to help fund or develop a manned operation to that body.

Yes, but one thing came to my mind while planning for multiple biomes.

How can you get to biomes that are very distant like 100km or 1000km or even more beatween each other manually piloting it? This is HOURS if not DAYS of manual piloting.

???

I can't start a trip near KSC, I tried but as I press ESC the menu apear and the option to go to KSC or Tracking Station are orange and if I click on it, then it says it will have to go back to last saved game.

 

[qzgy]

40 minutes ago, felcas said:

Soo how is Rover meant to be played? Because if I need to be in constant command, I don't see how much usefull it is, for example making a paralel to Mars rovers  which traveled tens of miles.

Yup! Depressingly, this is how rovers work. On the upside, people have made mods like the ones above to help with the tedium. Also, the mars rovers only went about 40 to 50 km... Not that far, and over about 13 years.

Rovers aren't great for Kerbin, planes are better.

[felcas]

23 minutes ago, Weywot8 said:

Stock KSP requires you to always be in command of your rover while it moves on the surface of a planet/moon.  You can always install the mod below for an "autopilot drive to target" behavior that works while the rover is not the active vessel.

I guess I will have to resort to mods but isn't that strange? Because to go from one biome to another the player have to spend hours and hours on a booooring game just to get there to another biome.

Then I conclude that rovers are to go around on close distances only. For example a contract that ask to take ground temperatures of 3 sites but they are all near each other, within 10km distance of each other.

 

23 minutes ago, Weywot8 said:

 

 

[qzgy]

3 minutes ago, felcas said:

Yes, but one thing came to my mind while planning for multiple biomes.

How can you get to biomes that are very distant like 100km or 1000km or even more beatween each other manually piloting it? This is HOURS if not DAYS of manual piloting.

Don't use a rover, biome hop. Literally, take your lander with an engine on it, chuck it into a suborbital trajectory, and aim for the desired biome.

[Weywot8]

Yup, agree with @qzgy, pack lots of extra dV and biome hop. Alternatively, have a refeuling tanker parked in low orbit. 

[HebaruSan]

1 hour ago, felcas said:

Soo how is Rover meant to be played?

Rovers are not really coherently designed into the current stock gameplay. They're included because it would be fun to fly a rover to another planet and drive it around, but there's little gameplay benefit to using them.

1 hour ago, felcas said:

If I am supposed to just use it around, isn't it best to develop a ship that can just fly around?

Yes. If you want to advance effectively in Science or Career mode, a lander with a spare fuel tank in orbit will be able to cover far more ground in far less player time.

[Spricigo]

. To be fair,  it's not really rovers that are broken.  The problem is that funds are so easy to obtain, there is not enough reason to take a cheaper option. 

[bewing]

If you think that 4 hours of driving a rover around is an unbelievably long time -- then yes, rovers are not for you.

There are people who spend the time to drive rovers all the way around the Mun, or Ike, or Duna, or even Kerbin -- see the ElCano challenge.

[elektron2kim]

"The easy way" is to fly a rocket with a rover attached to it to a position nearby the destination where you drop off the rover.

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

I don't know if you've begun mining operations yet, but you'll find them extremely useful in that regard. Throw some drills, a converter, and a Klaw on wheels, and it becomes a mobile refueler. You can connect it to your fuel shuttles (to bring into orbit to refuel your ships), or directly refuel one of your landers for the journey home. If you make use of your mining network (and you don't mind the docking and refueling you'll need to do), you can actually launch smaller (cheaper) rockets; knowing they're going to be out of fuel when they reach their destination. They're sort of like one-way designs; but you actually bring them back home.

And also, since you're using rovers in vacuum, there's no reason you can't have rockets on them. Or, if you prefer, think of it as having wheels on your rockets. If you can get multiple uses out of something in your space program, it's definitely a plus.

[Weywot8]

27 minutes ago, Cpt Kerbalkrunch said:

And also, since you're using rovers in vacuum, there's no reason you can't have rockets on them. Or, if you prefer, think of it as having wheels on your rockets. If you can get multiple uses out of something in your space program, it's definitely a plus.

As a bonus to this, if you can plan your landings on very level ground, you can save upto a few hundred dV as well by using the brakes to get rid of the remaining horizontal velocity on the ground while your rocket and wheels deal with the vertical velocity. Rover wheels have much, much, more impact tolerance (20 to 150m/s) than landing legs (10-12m/s).  Taking off from Minimus flats horizontally is also an option.

[qzgy]

2 hours ago, Weywot8 said:

Rover wheels have much, much, more impact tolerance (20 to 150m/s)

Well, true, but they'll break and become useless unless you have an engineer. Better to just use landing gear in this regard.

[HvP]

Well, in real life rovers are only used to travel very short distances.

If the EVA jet pack wasn't so overpowered on the surfaces of the Mun and Minmus then rovers would fill their niche of giving you a faster way to travel between bases and biomes without the ability to just fly over there.

And of course they still travel much much faster than any autonomous rover ever did. So it's entirely possible to drive farther in a few minutes than any autonomous rover has in its entire mission.

Edited July 8, 2017 by HvP

[Loren Pechtel]

On 7/8/2017 at 1:49 AM, bewing said:

If you think that 4 hours of driving a rover around is an unbelievably long time -- then yes, rovers are not for you.

There are people who spend the time to drive rovers all the way around the Mun, or Ike, or Duna, or even Kerbin -- see the ElCano challenge.

There are two rover autopilots that I'm aware of.

MechJeb will hold speed and bearing but requires keeping an eye on it and periodic quicksaves in case you don't see hazardous terrain in time.  I have once used it to visit all the biomes of Minmus--the game running while I did something on another screen and kept an eye on how my rover was doing.

Bon Voyage simulates rover driving.  It's done entirely in the background (you're free to use timewarp), it doesn't take keeping an eye on it but you should quicksave anyway as it will occasionally put you in a hazardous spot and I have on occasion seen inexplicable explosions.  It makes rovers quite viable for planetary exploration.

[Vanamonde]

As a matter of perspective, keep in mind that the farthest any real rover has so far driven is 43kms, and it's taken 13 years for it to do so.

[bewing]

Unless you count automobiles as  Earth rovers.

[Spricigo]

 

3 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

As a matter of perspective, keep in mind that the farthest any real rover has so far driven is 43kms, and it's taken 13 years for it to do so.

As a matter of perspective the farthest any stock rover has been driven in my career was the grassland near KSC.