accidental accomplishments

[king of nowhere]

Today I did drive my rover on Mun extensively for the first time. I tested it on the ground, but there were a few glitches I missed. One was, the wheels were not perfectly aligned (comes from being low in the tech tree and having to make a rover with parts never intended for a rover, attached at angles never meant to be attached). the rover would pull to the right, so that continuous course correction was needed.

While driving I hit a bump at high speed. the front left wheel exploded. I was about to reload the game, when I realized that this actually improved control. Now it pulls slightly to the left, but it requires less course corrections than it did before. And I still have 9 wheels left, so the rover is still as stable as before.

I also put some mechanic hinges to help the wheels. Two on the sides to right the rover when it flips, and they work fine assuming the rover does not explode. And one I put on the back underneath, I assumed it would help me climb over small obstacles. i figured I could extend it, move it over a small bump, and retract it, so it would pull the rover up over the obstacle. Turns out it's not all that effective for the intended use. However, I also discovered that the wheels won't stay braking once you abandon the rover for an EVA, and the rover will start slipping downhill (perhaps there is a command, but I missed it). Turns out, the robotic hinge opened at 90 degrees lifts the back wheels, and it ensures the rover stays still on a slope. I now think of it as the hand-brake.

Finally, I decided to move across half of Mun to reach some areas for a mission. I will have to rove for several hours. I won't take any such missions again in the future, but for now I'm having fun pretending I'm mark watney. It does get boring driving all the time, though... well, I discovered that if I stopped accelerating i still keep the speed up for a while, so I can safely reduce the game to icon and browse on the internet for half a minute or so before i need to get back to the game, accelerate and make course corrections. One of those times, I reopened the game to discover that the rover was moving faster than it ever did... I realized that the wheels are not braking at all if I don't give commands, so when moving downhill I keep accelerating. while instead, when I was manually accelerating, the wheels were trying to move at a fixed speed, and thus were braking. this has increased my cruise speed by some 50%

what are the things that you did by accident but turned out better than intended?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Yesterday I discovered that ore is the perfect ballast for rocket tests (and recording launches with KSTS for future automation) as it’s heavy yet compact and extremely cheap; previously I was using oxidiser only fuel tanks which are much more expensive and less mass dense making the rockets bigger and more awkward to build.

I also ‘discovered’ the sound made by 43 engines producing over 2MN of thrust each (about 100,000kN total thrust ).

[king of nowhere]

driving rovers on a low gravity world always has a risk of capsizing. so all my rovers are built with a mechanism to put them straight again.

my first rover was a small one for exploration and it had two mechanical hinges that could push it off the ground (it still ended up running around 800 kilometers on mun to chase objectives, though).

my second rover was made to transfer fuel between a fuel production facility and various shuttles that could land nearby. it needed to carry lots of fuel, so it was much bigger, so the small hinges would not work anymore. the largest hinges are very heavy, so i figured, since this is a fuel tank anyway, it would be easier to just strap a terrier engine on one side, to provide enough angolar momentum to turn it over. Nice! however, being big, landing it was a serious problem. it got stuck in the landing gear of the sky crane, lots of problems involved.

i was studying an updated version for minmus. for start i transferred all the science equipment on top of it, so i don't have to use two rovers. science equipment is light anyway. then i was studying ways to land. i simulated a landing with the sky crane, it was doable but hard. the normal coupling point did not work, and the alternative coupling point caused it to wobble too much.

then i realized: i already have a rocket on one side, powerful enough to lift the thing in mun's gravity. I may as well strap a rocket on the other side to balance the push, and just land the rover on its own power.

now, since i have a rover that is a big fuel tank with small rockets, i can also use it for the cruise; i only need a rocket to boost it into orbit.

 

And so it was, that i accidentally designed a rocket car

earlier today, if somebody had suggested i built a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel that can then land and move around with wheels, and even take off again if the world is low gravity, i would have laughed and told them it was a ridiculous idea.

i put in a command module because, while the rover can work remotely, i wanted it to be able to carry around a scientist, since it also works as science rover. i decided to pick a cupola module to give the astronaut a good view outside. then i angled it down a bit to have a better view of the ground. now the rover can also be piloted nicely with in-cockpit view. it feels good to be able to drive a rover with a first-person perspective

[AviosAdku]

Impressive

Off the top of my head, I can think of one thing although it may be stretching definitions.

A couple of years back, I designed and launched my first craft to be reused several times: a 2-Kerbal Mun lander with a detachable Munar Transfer module. The idea was that the craft would take on crew and fuel in LKO before departing to the Mun (or Minmus) for a mission before returning (no aerobraking) whereupon the crew would be retrieved and taken back to Kerbin. Unfortunately, the Deep Space Utility Module as I called it was rather lacking in Dv and in the end, I had to ditch it during the return to Kerbin. However, I had also designed a disposable bulk tanker craft but by coincidence, the design was functionally similar to the DSUM (a big fuel tank with docking ports at both ends and twin LV-909 engine nacelles) so I got the idea of using one of those (with a few modifications) as a replacement. As it turns out, the Tanker was better at the job than the specially designed piece of hardware, with a more generic purpose, the fuel load was significantly larger and, being designed to manoeuvre independently, it had its own reaction wheels and a much more effective RCS layout. As a result, the lander/tanker stack was much more manoeuvrable (especially when the parts were detached) and had a significantly improved range. Not only that but for another Mun mission, I needed to land a habitat or the like and no prizes for guessing what delivered the payload to Munar orbit. Designed as a crucial but specialised piece of deep space infrastructure, those tankers became my workhorse space tugs as well, arguably better even than the later nuclear powered reusable tugs I designed specifically for the role.

AviosAdku