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Sky Cranes and Rovers


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I would really love the ability to create and automate sky cranes. It would be great to be able to deliver a probe to a moon or planet using the sky crane concept. I can kinda sorta do it using KSP when I am piloting, but it would be a lot easier if we had a way to automate the sequence of getting close enough using a combo of parachutes and rockets and then gently lowering the rover to the surface.

It would also be really cool to be able to send small rovers, easily carried in bays.

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8 minutes ago, rben13 said:

I would really love the ability to create and automate sky cranes. It would be great to be able to deliver a probe to a moon or planet using the sky crane concept. I can kinda sorta do it using KSP when I am piloting, but it would be a lot easier if we had a way to automate the sequence of getting close enough using a combo of parachutes and rockets and then gently lowering the rover to the surface.

It would also be really cool to be able to send small rovers, easily carried in bays.

It would not be a bad assembly piece. Robers are neccessary for exploration, and the proper way to deploy them is by sky crane.

I usualy just do it the kerbal way.

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7 minutes ago, PlutoISaPlanet said:

I usualy just do it the kerbal way.

An extremely over engineered lander with the rover barely hanging on? Or is the rover stuffed into a service module?

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I usually give my rovers the ability to take off and land by themselves, so I can safely traverse at speed knowing I can reduce my speed mid-jump to avoid hard landings, and often they are able to fulfill the role of skycrane as well, as one of my main rover designs is with a large 3.7m fuel tank that supplies large ships and orbital refueling stations from a mining outpost in a low gravity body. Assuming this will more or less work similarly on KSP2 I don't see much of a need for it. If you're operating at a higher gravity I think those operations would be so infrequent it wouldn't be worth the effort from the developers, at least for an initial release.

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I know Kerbal driven rovers are shown as part of the game. If probes are still a think (not sure if I saw one), but if they are, then I can't see why rovers can't be supported.

On the concept of the "crane" part, robotics might cover it, but I personally believe robotics are a great after launch DLC. Even at that, I'm not sure if dev-time for "crane" physics is worth the time invested. Can't think of too many use-cases for that physics beyond this single landing mechanism... and building wrecking balls haha.

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13 hours ago, TLTay said:

Skycranes are neat and whatnot, but I'd really like an airbag landing option.

Why not both? A skycrane that, much in the Kerbal tradition, doesn't have (enough) cables to lower the hover to the surface, and thus just drops stuff high, which then need to be cushioned by airbags. :)

Overengineered? YES.
Fun? Very!

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The ability to do sky cranes might also give us the ability to do things like fire and forget landings of boosters. I'd love it if I could somehow set it up so my boosters could land back at KSC after boosting a big load to orbit. Currently I haven't gotten to 5m engines, so I'm using a cluster of  6 $18,000 engines for my heavy booster and would really love to get them back. :)

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/16/2021 at 3:54 PM, rben13 said:

I would really love the ability to create and automate sky cranes. It would be great to be able to deliver a probe to a moon or planet using the sky crane concept. I can kinda sorta do it using KSP when I am piloting, but it would be a lot easier if we had a way to automate the sequence of getting close enough using a combo of parachutes and rockets and then gently lowering the rover to the surface.

It would also be really cool to be able to send small rovers, easily carried in bays.

I use skycranes all the time to deliver rovers and base components. When designed well they're relatively easy to land. Rather than drop the payload I usually just land the whole thing, then raise the throttle until TWR is a little below 1.0 and decouple the docking port. The crane will lift off and I re-land it so I can re-use it later (or ditch it at a safe distance if I don't care). I do agree some fine-tune pilot controls to help hover and translate would be amazing though. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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