I sent my first rover to Duna on my new breaking ground career. After playing around with the lander design which I overengineered with way too many parachutes for such a small mass, I launched it on its way to the red planet. After a smooth journey and relatively easy aerobraking, I descended upon the planet. After several reloads due to the lander tipping over because of the stupid amounts of parachutes pulling it sideways at the last moments, I had my rover decoupled and ready to explore. I was excited to finally test out my robotic arm scanner on some interesting terrain features (I skipped doing these on the Mun and Minimus because I was eager to get back out into the system). Upon finding a nearby boulder ripe for scanning, I parked my happy little rover (Spirit) next to it to capture that juicy science data. It was there I discovered the error of my ways. Thinking the measly 120 EC of the rover core enough to power my probe and antenna, I missed that the robotic arm requires a full 249 EC or so to actually function, regardless of whether my solar panels were enough to charge the core back up or not. And so now Spirit wanders the red planet with little to no purpose, except the odd temp and pressure scans. Needless to say the next rover (Opportunity) will feature less parachutes and more batteries. I guess that's what I get for rushing my ground testing.
