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How do I make a rover sink?


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1 hour ago, MAFman said:

How do I make it sink?

There are a number of mods that can help you with this. They each approach buoyancy a little differently but you may find answer that suits you in one of them.

The list is not exhaustive and there are more if you search through CKAN, the forums, or SpaceDock.    

Edited by Caerfinon
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27 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

without mods, it's quite hard to make stuff sink. the best way is to put ore tanks inside a cargo bay. many ore tanks clipping into each other. this way the game does not model what's inside the bay as far as buoiancy is concerned, but it still does register the mass, which causes the rover to sink

I'm guessing the tanks in the cargo bay should be full, right? Just to make them denser.

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3 minutes ago, MAFman said:

I'm guessing the tanks in the cargo bay should be full, right? Just to make them denser.

That is a definite yes. The game uses what is called a drag cube to determine buoyancy ,and the larger the volume of the part the more mass it takes to counteract. The stuff inside a closed cargo bay won't contribute it's volume but will it's mass and so make you more likely to sink. But it takes a lot of full ore and should not be thought of as realistic, so just cram and clip many many inside.

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Take a look at a (semi-)stock solution in this: SWiS-Sub-1D.

Semi-stock because it uses a bit of manual editing of the craft file, but it loads and works in a stock+ game without requiring mods.

Monoprop is used as ballast. The key parts to look at (or copy):

  • The Mk1 Lander Can in the center, of which the MP tank was edited to hold enough MP to sink the boat when flooded. Saves spamming parts. For your own craft, any part that is conveniently centered mass-wise (needs to be) can be edited this way to serve as the 'ballast tank'. You'll have to experiment to figure out the tank size required to manage buoyancy for your craft.
  • The O-10 Puff monoprop engine clipped in the front section (zoom inside the front fairing, the top of it sticks out of the front hatch of the crew cabin. Its thrust limiter is edited to a high negative value, which means it produces MP instead of using it - but without generating any thrust. So it's basically a ballast flood pump now.
  • The pair of drain valves set to drain MP, visible port/starboard between front fairing and lander can. They just do their stock thing.

Check also the action groups configured for those parts.

(Ore would of course have been the preferable ballast since it's more dense, but there are no parts that can be hand-edited to produce ore. So MP got the job instead.)

Edited by swjr-swis
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