Rovers are useless

[Urses]

My favorite rover is built around a Materialbay and Science container as body and Commandseats for pilot and sciencist. All instruments and power suply and you have with rcs a small buggy. Lastly i switched mono for Vernons and had probs on Minmus and Pol to do biom hopping without orbiral maneuvers... DragsterRover

Edited December 15, 2017 by Urses

[DoctorDavinci]

On 12/12/2017 at 5:13 AM, Crampman said:

Rovers are cool : they are complex to build, launch and land (and crash).
But they are useless.

.......

Spoiler

 

 

Edited December 15, 2017 by DoctorDavinci

[gilflo]

I never use Rover on non atmospheric planet, they are too fragile, not fast enough, I use this:

11479 DV, 42.3T, . - Lab, plenty of science features, SC 9001 Sc junior in hold, 2 mysterious goo, 1 pilot, 1 engineer, 2 scientist, 4 drillers, 1 converter, scan radar, 4 "lightbulb" nuclear engines from recycled parts from Tux industries mod moving on IR Rotatrons

COM and DCOM same place, perfectly balanced. Can be be used with TCA, but very easy to pilot without TCA - 2 preset position for vertical and horizontal flight - No speed limit, interplanetary transfer easy. 

Must be docked for transport to orbit and Re-entry... You can install your own science feature but you will have to be careful with COM and DCOM and re-balance the ship - Engines are tweakable to fit any gravity be tweaking engines means re balance the whole craft.

Here is a vid from the previous model. This one is very similar

 

Edited December 18, 2017 by gilflo

[Fearless Son]

On 12/13/2017 at 3:32 AM, Crampman said:

"useless" was a bit excessive, all I meant is that in a career gameplay, rovers only role is to go from a biome to another, wich can take a long time, and could be done by biome-hopping most of the time. And getting all the KSC science too.
Hence the suggestion : give them a specific, optional, bonus. Like the space stations were given one with the Mobile Processing Labs generating science from data.
Of course this would require some rework to the scatters, but that would no be a waste.

One of the contracts that I have done for which I found rovers extremely valuable is of the form "Take Science reading of [Type] while landed on the surface of [Planet] at points [X], [Y], and [Z]", where [X], [Y], and [Z] are a few kilometers apart from each other in a rough triangle.  It is a range that is short enough to manage in a rover in a reasonable time frame, while not being so far apart that "biome-hopping" is practical.  Because it requires a specific type of scientific reading, you cannot simply move a Kerbal to those points on EVA pack thrust, you actually need to transport the scientific equipment to the site.

It is entirely possible to do that kind of mission without rovers, and depending on the conditions of the [Planet] it might still be practical to do without them, but I find it to be both more fun and less stressful to use rovers in that capacity (trying to land a craft without it tipping over in low gravity is hard enough do to already, spending a bunch of fuel to do it several times over in one mission is nerve-wracking.)

Edited December 21, 2017 by Fearless Son
That'll teach me to use identifiers that can be interpreted as BB code in my posts. :p

[Mjarf]

One thing that I find funny about rovers in KSP is that you can relatively easily build a rover with a top speed of several hundred km/h. I do agree that their usefulness is quite limited.

[Wcmille]

Rovers are the best way to find a locally optimal flat slope or a locally optimal mining site. You could do these with kerbals or ships, but I find rovers much more optimal for this.

[Kerbal pancake]

with bon voyage i use rovers to visit monoliths and get those sweet free tech tree nodes

[marcello639]

From my point of view rovers are not reliable,  one mistake and it's ruined without chance of repairs. And second thing, which is even worse - no sense of speed,  no sound effects, could use some camera vibration at high speed.

 

Otherwise they are useful if u can find a purpose, since this is sandbox, everything is up to player. 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

32 minutes ago, marcello639 said:

From my point of view rovers are not reliable,  one mistake and it's ruined without chance of repairs.

As I said earlier, a proper roll cage can do wonders for survivability. (The entire outer skeleton should consist of structural parts with 80m/s impact tolerance) They'll be on the heavy side yeah; But I have seen some of my rovers survive full speed plane crashes into the sides of mountains.

The only vulnerable thing on your Rover should be your wheels. A level 3 Engineer can keep these repaired, and you effectively have an immortal rover.

Here's an example rover with a roll cage, no matter how or where it lands, it'd have to be going more than 80m/s to take any damage; which is very unlikely as it, (like most conventional rovers) can't even reach half that speed:

Spoiler

 

Edited December 30, 2017 by Rocket In My Pocket

[damerell]

I'm not faulting you (the peculiar behaviour of stock wheels means you're going to roll for no reason sometimes) but I try and avoid that kind of thing myself - it stretches plausibility to smack into the side of a mountain with no damage because the first thing to hit it was a steel plate...

[Rocket In My Pocket]

32 minutes ago, damerell said:

I'm not faulting you (the peculiar behaviour of stock wheels means you're going to roll for no reason sometimes) but I try and avoid that kind of thing myself - it stretches plausibility to smack into the side of a mountain with no damage because the first thing to hit it was a steel plate...

Meh, I see no issue with realism.

I took most of my inspiration from real world roll cage's after all, like you would see on Baja trucks and such; which do in fact protect the vehicle as it rolls over, as well as from impacts. Pretty much any off road vehicle like a 4-wheeler will have skid plates protecting the underside as well.

Spoiler

Ramming the side of a mountain while in a plane's cargo hold is a pretty extreme example yes lol; but I imagine we could write that off as the plane absorbing most of the impact like one huge "crumple-zone" ...after all, people live through airplane crashes in real life all the time, and they are hitting the ground very fast, some of that force is absorbed by the plane though. I suppose you could always build your cage out of something slightly less sturdy if it really bothers you? Personally my motivation to make an "invincible" rover stemmed from a realization that driving rovers wasn't terribly fun for me, although I loved designing them. I tried to think back to games I played as a kid were driving about and exploring open areas was fun, and Halo 1 stuck out in my mind...but why? Why is driving in Halo 1 so much fun? Because it is consequence free. You can roll, explode, shoot, flip, grenade, run-it-over-with-a-tank, and the Warthog is fine! This is especially important in a game like KSP were you may be far, far from home when you break something. The solution for me at least was to protect everything breakable, I get a lot more enjoyment and use out of rovers in general now as well. (Plus nothing is 100% unbreakable, I managed to bust the solar panels off my KerboHog one time, and even lost a whole tire once in a different non-mountain-involving plane crash, just poof, gone! No way to repair it. Lol.)

[damerell]

Real roll cages protect from impacts at a low closing speed (as any motorcyclist knows, there is a difference between hitting the ground moving sideways at high speed and running into an object directly at high speed); a hard outer shell is useful, but can't stop every internal component from suffering from deceleration in a direct impact. A KSP roll cage made of these 80 m/s impact parts is artificially too good. As I said, also, I'm not criticising you; it compensates for how KSP rovers are artificially overly prone to rolling.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

16 hours ago, damerell said:

Real roll cages protect from impacts at a low closing speed (as any motorcyclist knows, there is a difference between hitting the ground moving sideways at high speed and running into an object directly at high speed); a hard outer shell is useful, but can't stop every internal component from suffering from deceleration in a direct impact. A KSP roll cage made of these 80 m/s impact parts is artificially too good. As I said, also, I'm not criticising you; it compensates for how KSP rovers are artificially overly prone to rolling.

Fair enough, no offense taken, you play however makes you happy.

Meanwhile, I'll be ramping my all-terrain buggies off of Mun dunes at max speed in true Kerbal fashion.

[Daveroski]

If Squad turned the Rovermax the right way round and added a couple of nodes to the 'new' front and back, rovers would be more popular.

A tweekable which changed it's COM height would be cool too.

 

[Van Disaster]

Rovers need a point to spending time moving around on a planet surface - it's not the fault of rovers, it's a long-standing issue with the game. Once you add a point, then suddenly mobile bases become useful things.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

1 hour ago, Daveroski said:

If Squad turned the Rovermax the right way round and added a couple of nodes to the 'new' front and back, rovers would be more popular.

A tweekable which changed it's COM height would be cool too.

Couldn't agree more about the Rovemate, what a pita to use.

Have you tried upside down jet engines? That's my go-to for pushing COM down.

(They don't have to be on or anything, just being there pushes COM down as their model's COM is further back than the actual center of the visual model to represent all the piping and such that would be there.)

[Daveroski]

1 minute ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Couldn't agree more about the Rovemate, what a pita to use.

Have you tried upside down jet engines? That's my go-to for pushing COM down.

(They don't have to be on or anything, just being there pushes COM down as their model's COM is further back than the actual center of the visual model to represent all the piping and such that would be there.)

Yeah, I know, but it would be so much better if you could make a ground-hugger without losing all that space and adding all that mass.

It's funny really. for me it seems to be a case of setting out to design one thing and then changing course, designing workarounds for various insquadilities.