How to land rovers?

[DDE]

Why is this field even required?

[NoMrBond]

You're missing the option for rovers to be their own decent mechanism

[septemberWaves]

I tend to make a dedicated dropship with a cargo bay. That being said, I've also used Lithobrake cargo bays on landers, but those don't allow for particularly large rovers.

[Blaarkies]

30 minutes ago, eloquentJane said:

I tend to make a dedicated dropship with a cargo bay. That being said, I've also used Lithobrake cargo bays on landers, but those don't allow for particularly large rovers.

Lithobrake , you mean like the Mars rovers in those cushion balls...but instead with girders in KSP? 

[Francois424]

none of the above ?

I box them in

Engine-Fuel-Engine
Beam - rover - Beam   (or fuel instead of beams)
Engine - Fuel - Engine

The side engines (thuds?) are good for this... plus you can put parachutes on top of your fuel tanks if landing on eve/duna.
You can attach a stack separator underneath the rover if you need a heatshield and/or a rocket to bring the boxed rover to where you want.  A jumbo 6400 + a nuke goes a long way.
This usually does the trick.

[septemberWaves]

16 minutes ago, Blaarkies said:

Lithobrake , you mean like the Mars rovers in those cushion balls...but instead with girders in KSP? 

No, I probably should've clarified. Cargo bays from the mod Lithobraking Engineering Technologies.

[foamyesque]

How I land rovers depends an awful lot on where I'm landing them. Solutions for Eve are very different than ones for Minmus.:p

[DDE]

7 minutes ago, Francois424 said:

none of the above ?

I box them in

Engine-Fuel-Engine
Beam - rover - Beam   (or fuel instead of beams)
Engine - Fuel - Engine

The side engines (thuds?) are good for this... plus you can put parachutes on top of your fuel tanks if landing on eve/duna.
You can attach a stack separator underneath the rover if you need a heatshield and/or a rocket to bring the boxed rover to where you want.  A jumbo 6400 + a nuke goes a long way.
This usually does the trick.

That's a skycrane.

[Francois424]

okay.  Never called this contraption by that name, but in that case it's my favored method.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Francois424

[DDE]

1 hour ago, NoMrBond said:

You're missing the option for rovers to be their own decent mechanism

Presumably because I fat-shame my rovers.

[p1t1o]

Did anyone else read the thread title like "How to land-rovers?....How to land-rovers what?"

 

Spoiler

 

[Sharpy]

1. Don't screw symmetry. Always send two.

2. Mount them on the side, in a self-righting way.

 

part 2 goes like this:

Build rover (with the root part). Attach structural pylon or small hardpoint as far towards one end of the rover as possible. Attach cubic octagonal strut to the other side of pylon. Set the strut as root. Save this as subassembly.

Clear, new project. Build a decent vertical landing stage with a fuel tank through the center. Load the rover subassembly. Symmetry 2x, attach it with the hardpoint towards the bottom, but with some clearance. Strut the top (from lander to rover).

When the pylon is staged, it ejects the bottom part of the rover outwards, making it land on its wheels,

Also, for low-grav worlds: Give the rover a reaction wheel, screw other concerns.

Yesterday I landed five rovers on Minmus. Two "small cranes" were mounted using the pylon trick. A storage truck was just allowed to fall over from the height of about 1.5 orange tank, onto its side. No problem, not even a scratch. Decoupled it tumbled a bit but it righted itself using reaction wheel just fine.

Two flatbed trucks? They have small cranes too, in form of a gate above the flatbed, to pull payload directly beneath it. They were literally threaded onto the landing stack through that gate. I just used the shortest 2.5m tanks as their attachment points. Since I couldn't put them in mirror-like geometry, they were mounted one facing up, the other down, on two ends of an orange tank. And there was a decoupler, a reaction wheel, an engine (Poodle) in that stack too...

So how do you free a truck threaded onto the landing stack together with another? You send an engineer with a screwdriver. I landed it on one truck's wheels, then Bill simply sliced the stack strategically, then the cranes pulled the top truck to wheels-down position. Then both trucks drove away to the junkyard 3km away from the base carrying the two slices of their landing stacks and assorted other junk from other landings, to dump it outside of the base's physics bubble.

[T-Bouw]

Ehh, just on top like a satelite. Preferably with a shroud.

When landed, wiggle/RCS it off the landing stage.

[KerikBalm]

2 hours ago, NoMrBond said:

You're missing the option for rovers to be their own decent mechanism

Exactly...this is often the simplest and most straightforward solution. Depending on the side of the rover, some 24-77s and a LFO tank (in my case, mostly for diameter rovers where there is a horizontal 1.25m stack with wheels on the sides), or some puffs and some monoprop tanks.

A couple engines and some empty tanks don't matter much to a rover. Its not like mass or drag matter much to them.

With that said... cargobays cna work pretty well, and allow you to pick up and move your rover by rocket/plane

Spoiler

 

But 2.5m diameter rovers have their "roving" capabilities severely hampered by putting them in a mk3 cargobay... I consider them mobile base modules more than rovers.

Tiny wheels, low ground clearance, narrow track, makes for things with poorly suited to driving around rough terrain.

In contrast... my self landing rovers do so much better...

Spoiler

Although I haven't tested that rover post 1.1 ... I think the wheels can often get pretty funky in 1.1 when placed out on the ends of angled I-beams or girders

 

[Sharpy]

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

Did anyone else read the thread title like "How to land-rovers?....How to land-rovers what?"

 

 

Spoiler

The actual answer is gratuitous abuse of excessive torque of magical reaction wheels.

The first thing Bill did after five minutes of (terrible) driving of the flatbeds on Minmus? He stripped the landed junk of all the reaction wheels and mounted them on the flatbeds.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Sharpy

[Kertech]

I think I got this off a Scott Manley video. I tend to build a lander/skycrane assembley, then use a kas winch to lower and re-attach my rover. My mission profile is crew shuttle to station in low lunar orbit, transfer to lander, Do stuff, return to station, return to kerbin. yay for way too much orbital infrastructure! 

[eddiew]

Back in 1.0.5...

But then wheel blocking happened, so it tends to be mk3 for buggy wheels or mk4 for ruggedized - and neither makes for a good dropship, with the result that I'm doing a lot of spaceplanes.

[lodger]

5 hours ago, NoMrBond said:

You're missing the option for rovers to be their own decent mechanism

Exactly what I decided to do: pack some "Twitch" or "Thud" engines to the rover and that's it.

 

[DunaRocketeer]

Rovers are delivered the same way as any other surface cargo - either via service bays, or if it's too big, by building a ramp up to a cargo bay:

This is an old image, and I have since created a more substantial 'roving ramp' that can be wheeled into place.

One of many reasons why KIS is a great mod.

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, NoMrBond said:

You're missing the option for rovers to be their own decent mechanism

Yes, this is my favorite, an small rover with 3x45 liter tanks and two sparks works nice, nice for exploring biomes and contracts on Mun and similar bodies, no need for pinpoint landings.
In short anything who has an reason to contain an fuel tank also have engines. 
Other than this an top based skycrane works well for smaller rovers, for larger rovers having two side or end rocket modules is better. 

Note that its no issue launching rover upright inside fairing then switching to wheel down once you are out of the atmosphere. 
You can always offset the rover so center of mass is trough center of fairing, an drop tank between the wheels will also help balancing, remember to make it center of mass in both horizontal and vertical orientation. 

landing rovers on Eve is a bit more complex. Her you need an transfer stage, optional deorbit stage for accurate landing prediction with inflated shield, aerodynamic control during decent, heatshield eject, parachutes and optional braking engines or landing leg structure for larger rovers.

[Diche Bach]

LOL, I made an airplane with a rover strapped to the bottom with parachutes: called it the Seagull-104-MaRovaThonPara

I'd post a KerbalX file but can't be bothered right now to go in game and get the screen caps.

Didn't work so hot really . . . Seems those command seats lack straps or something to keep the Kerbals from flying off into the sky when their rover decouples and parachutes from the mother ship . . .

[LN400]

The method totally depends on the rover. Some are landers as well as rovers, especially if they are designed to re-orbit to dock with say, a space lab, others might have a small tank/engine strapped to them that they just drop and wiggle off after landing, other big ones can have a dedicated sky crane, and some micro rovers are attached to the manned lander.

[Corona688]

I don't know what you're all talking about, I use rockets!

[John FX]

OK, it seems I have lost the ability to post an Imgur album.

Could someone remind me how please?

Edited September 9, 2016 by John FX

[Majorjim!]

42 minutes ago, John FX said:

OK, it seems I have lost the ability to post an Imgur album.

Could someone remind me how please?

Albums cannot be posted at present. Single images can just copy and paste the url. It should be the one ending with the image type.