It seemed like a good idea at the time...

[harby]

So I had a capsule splashed down at eve, and a contract to put a flag on eve, so I thought I'd swim to shore and take advantage of the fact that he's there. So for the last hour he's been swimming towards land at 4 x speed and he's a third of the way there.

I'm determined to see this thru, so my W key is firmly jammed and I'm watching some TV.

What's your "it seemed like a good idea at the time senario"?

The more pointless or avoidable the better!

[Alshain]

Building and exploration rover for Duna.

May be good in real life, but rovers in KSP are incredibly boring. Designing the skycrane was kinda fun but when I got there I realized I should have just sent an immobile probe.

[soulsource]

I once had the brilliant idea to use a munar base and a rover to finish ground based visual survey contracts, as driving a solar powered rover doesn't cost any funds. Well, the mun is small, but not so small that driving around a quarter of its circumference doesn't get terribly boring.

Ah, and on my first and only successful Eve return, there was a rover as well, to drive from the landing spot to the ocean, in order to get as much science as possible. That was, before Eve got biomes.

[harby]

So I had a capsule splashed down at eve, and a contract to put a flag on eve, so I thought I'd swim to shore and take advantage of the fact that he's there. So for the last hour he's been swimming towards land at 4 x speed and he's a third of the way there.

I'm determined to see this thru, so my W key is firmly jammed and I'm watching some TV.

What's your "it seemed like a good idea at the time senario"?

The more pointless or avoidable the better!

Finally, land!

[X-SR71]

3 OX-STATs will be more than enough to power this probe core even if its out there in jool's orbit - or so I thought.

[annallia]

Taking this to Mun...

Ok actually that part worked quite nicely once I found a good way to get it into orbit... Trying to use it to return to kerbin on the other hand...

[Red Dwarf]

Seems like rovers being mind-numbingly awful is a consistent theme here... I had a survey contract on Eve, and I thought a rover would be the best way to do it. The points of interest were on the equator, but I miscalculated my entry and landed on the south pole. It took forever, and in the hours it took to make it up to the mountains, I became intimately familiar with just how bad the current wheel physics are. Very often I would find myself tacking to compensate for bizarre phantom drifting, which would cause my rover to skitter all over the place like marbles on a glass table. After I finally made it to my destination, I vowed to never use rovers again. Good riddance.

[cantab]

I did the same swimming thing on Kerbin, after splashing down somewhere I thought was real close to the airstrip island. Yeah...not so close after all. Then on land the Kerbal kept going poof.

[Soda Popinski]

"I should go to bed. I'll just start up KSP to finish one last thing..."

[Johnny Wishbone]

"I should go to bed. I'll just start up KSP to finish one last thing..."

agreed, though it's after work for me.

i tend to think about problems or designs on my drive home from work. when i get home, i make a mad dash upstairs to start working on what i thought about, stopping only for a quick smooch from wifey and a hasty explanation of "i got kerbal stuff i gotta do before i forget." this usually ends with the wife tapping her foot in the office doorway several hours later (while holding back 2 screaming kids) and me quizzically looking at her and saying "what? i just got started."

thank God she loves me...

[TimePeriod]

Currently transfixed on building a rocket which will carry 1.1t of cargo into LKO(71-72km) for less then 7000 kredits.

Transfixed might be a misnomer - obsessed.

[Evanitis]

My first Mun (flyby) attempt in a horizontal launch only career game: It's one thing that it never even got near space (not to mention orbit, or Kod forgive - the Mun), but as I attached the lower wings to the jet engines, it got uncontrolable upon firing the boosters, and tore itself apart not much later. On top of that, I never managed to recover more than 30% of it - all the chutes and the full power of the engines weren't enough for even a relatively safe landing.

Well, Val survived, I re-acquired the funds and even unlocked struts for it's Mk II variant.

[WeirdCulture]

Guys... with the rover.. what exactly do you expected? Curiosity makes 5cm per second... that make 3m per minute and 180m per hour... or 4320m per day. Rovers are funnier with kOS. Send a command, wait and see what it does.. but yes.. that's are rovers

[xrayfishx]

Well, I did exactly what you did, only on Laythe. It took me about 20 in-game hours to get to the shore. I had fallen asleep a short way through and when I woke up, the kerbal was swimming parallel to the closest shore, not where I pointed him. I doubt there was any unintended mouse movement so I believe it may have been somehow caused by the planet's rotation or something similar. It was in 0.19 I think. This is, to this day, one of my most memorable moments in KSP.

Edit: Also, sorry for the necro. Noticed too late.

[Landwalker]

Had a ground-surveying contract on Kerbin at three sites near the southern part of those mountains "just" west of KSC. Since I can't land a plane for beans, I decided to just build a Science Mobile and drive there. It can't be that far, I thought.

Oh. Wow. It was that far. I think I got about 30% of the way there, after countless quicksaves/quickloads due to spontaneously shattering wheels (I mean, I was pulling 14+m/s downhill, so I guess the shattering wasn't that spontaneous, just annoying), before I said the hell with it.

[keeper]

Hehe yea, spending hours driving accross minmus with a full set of kethane tanks back in .25. Think I was close to 100 tonnes.

Crashing, re-loading.

again and again

Handed the reigns to MechJeb, thinking I could finally go to sleep.

Woke up to a crashsite. re-loading.

Spending the following evening messing around with Mechjeb controls and waypoints.

Crashing, reloading... etc etc etc

The next night i did the 90KM run in about 2 hours on and off. Some parts I did fast, some parts I left for MJ to do at a snails pace.

Landing there was a great idea, sure. Ah the things we do for Kethane. And the lessons we learn.

[Tourist]

Building an outpost on Minmus. However I was a little haphazard in the planning. Long story short, I had a hitchhiker module in place, with a docking port attached radially... decided it needed a science module attached... as well as the multipoint connector and structural fuselages. So in essence what came next was an attempt to dock the heaviest part of the colony, to the lightest part, on the surface of the planet. Geez it was difficult. Had a skycrane, with four nukes and a lot of RCS. Took so long, with so many quickloads after failure. Wish I'd recorded a fail reel.

[Wjolcz]

Playing without KER.

And rovers. I remember enjoying the ride with my first ever built rover. Back in the days when they were even more pointless than they are now. But then I got bored. Pair that with horrible wheel handling and you'll get from "it's fine" to "frustrated" in no time.

That's why I would rather have electric propellers to explore Duna than wheels.

[bonyetty]

Oh Mun arch is close by might wander over and give bill a closer look. 2 hours later wife suggests kids toy auto pilot on the W key and she will let me know when he gets there, while I cook dinner. 45 minutes later "Honey Bills at the arch". Fly Bill up to the top of the arch plant a flag. Wife, "so what do you have to do with Bill now?" Ummm walk him back to his ship. Wife "so what new parts dose that get you? Ummm none. Wife "So what do you get when you plant a flag there?" Ummm a flag on the Mun arch. Wife "do you get money for it?" Nup. Wife ">]¥{>}*|>|> you make me ^}¥{€}£ do that for nuthin?" NO, there is now a flag on one of the Mun arches how cool is that. One more to go.

[richfiles]

"I should go to bed. I'll just start up KSP to finish one last thing..."

'I just wanna get that Minmus base finalized...'

...

**at work**

Co worker: "You look like crap!"

"I know, I know... I got that stupid base landed on Minmus. Then I grabbed breakfast and ran to the car... You know the rest"

**gets home after work, falls asleep, wakes at 10:30 PM**

'Hmm... I was having problems maintaining power during Minmus's nights... I'll just launch a probe with extra batteries and solar panels to dock up at Minmus base'

...

"That Mun station is really nice... I... yeah, I can get 2 hours of sleep before work..."

[Hagen von Tronje]

Taking this to Mun...

http://i1184.photobucket.com/albums/z335/annallia92/screenshot13_zps9daa3lhh.png

Ok actually that part worked quite nicely once I found a good way to get it into orbit... Trying to use it to return to kerbin on the other hand...

I built something almost identical to this, but with lander legs. I tried a variety of engine configurations, and at one point had something that performed unimpressively but managably on Kerbin. I figured turn down the thrust and you have a Munar jumper, why send rovers when you can take this?

Apparently despite being a pancake, the atmosphere was key to stabilizing it, because even with RCS it spun wildly and was nearly impossible to control on the Mun, although it was so light it could survive hilariously hard landings. I also found it rather hard to keep it balanced given that most of its mass was fuel, and it drained that pretty fast.

[KerikBalm]

Rover slowness is why I absolutely had to add electric atmospheric propulsion... at least I can get around duna and eve at a relatively fast speed (85 m/s on duna, not sure what it will do on eve) and not worry about the terrain except at the destination..

[tomf]

The rover/walking/swimming ones are the reason I have hyperedit installed. Drive/walk/swim for a minute to prove that you can do it then hyperedit the rest of the way to avoid the long tedious slog.

[Bev7787]

How hard can flying to Moho be?

[Sharpy]

Guys... with the rover.. what exactly do you expected? Curiosity makes 5cm per second... that make 3m per minute and 180m per hour... or 4320m per day. Rovers are funnier with kOS. Send a command, wait and see what it does.. but yes.. that's are rovers

Come on...

I didn't pack enough fuel into the carrier and had to make a perfect suicide burn to land the two rovers near the Lunar Train. The problem comes with "perfect" entering from low Lunar orbit, and some very rough terrain. I managed not to crash them some 40km from the destination. (actually, I totalled the carrier but the rovers survived intact despite rolling over several times.)

Instead of landing upright, for a neat roll-off deployment, the carrier was lying sideways. One rover upon detaching fell upside down. I managed to set the other one upright after rolling it over right after detachment, then used it to bump the other one enough to set it upright. Then I started the trek.

The first leg went smoothly, roughly 8km on a relatively flat "bridge" between two steep craters. Then a hill to climb with what looked like a neat slope into a canyon at the end of which the train awaited.

The climb was long, arduous and I destroyed the rover at the end. Reload. Again, left the rover with a teaspoon stuck in the arrow-up key for the climb, went to read something, my attention was drawn to the explosion as it slipped down the side of the hill into one of the craters. Reload.

Finally, I dared to activate the ion engine, which provided me with a whole 1.08 TWR. And the sun just above the horizon wouldn't light up the panels on the rover enough to keep the batteries charged. Still, I managed to reach the top of the hill and the slope in the canyon. Now just to quickly roll down and continue ahead, right?

Well, nope. First, rolling down was catastrophic as the rover would jump and get destroyed on landing. Then the bottom was littered with deep holes.

Screw the canyon, I activated the ion engine again and tried to land on top of the area outside the canyon. It took some 6 crashes before I learned that if I switch the scanner off and angle the rover towards the sun (which was straight ahead over the target) the batteries wouldn't discharge during the flight.

So, again, watching my altitude, vertical acceleration and keeping the rover angled, I flew a length of the canyon reaching some 70m/s at the end.

Then, braking. SAS to retrograde, it turned the rover right, and... well, if my speed is 50m/s forward and 50m/s downward, the retrograde marker will be at 45 degrees... and that's far too little to keep the rover from falling at 1.08 TWR. Crash.

So, reload and flying again. Crash again, I had hoped that 30m/s downwards speed would be low enough to brake to 0 from 2000m altitude... it wasn't.

Again. Keeping my downwards speed around 10m/s after experimentally establishing I need 100m clearance to brake from 10m/s to 0. And still keeping the horizontal speed in check, and still running against the clock with the batteries...

Finally, I made a landing some 300m from the base (would have landed some 1km behind it, where I finished braking, but the rover kept sliding on descent, accidentally in the right direction) and drove the last bit over a relatively smooth terrain.

Some may think it was terrible. Well, for me it was an adventure