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Greetings! My name is Andrii and I'm Italian. I discovered this fantastic game years ago and I'm happy to be here on this forum. To start I have a couple of questions: Where can I post an announcement here in the forum to introduce the new Italian community created by the players and make it known to my compatriots? When I get over 5 published posts I can finally put my profile picture up, right? :D

My latest effort has been to re-create the suspension on the Mars Curiosity rover in stock. I've gone through many versions and further tweaking lately isn't adding anything so it's time to publish. This one's for you, @Majorjim! K, it's not quite a replica, but we're focused on the suspension. The rover splits into many (13? 15?) separate craft. Here's a terrible drawing of the relationships of the different craft. Pairs of elevons push and pull on the wheels on each side via RCS balls. It's the only way I could think of to control a craft that's detached. When the wheels are pushed out, landing legs glitches them forward, center is neutral, and sucked in is glitched reverse. The wheels had to be big enough to keep the gear teeth off the ground. The legs had to be positioned to not touch the ground AND follow the wheels as the suspension moved. All the pivots had to have tight tolerances to function properly. Making the craft larger/heavier also was working against me as stuff flexed in an unwanted way. I did have to add weight to the rear wheels to keep from dog-legging from weirdness I couldn't figure out, which was only amplified by the low gravity. The rear suspension is independent and detached from the front to realistically mimic Curiosity. So how can it be manipulated? When the front end is shifted left/right a separate craft in the rear is also pushed and THAT pushes and pulls the rear 4 wheels. And those wheels have landing legs that follows them. I tried to make a terrible diagram but couldn't. So essentially, stuff floats in tubes that rotate on an axis and that stuff is shifted left/right by elevons. The rover turns by making one side go forward, the other reverse. I took an early version to the Mun to test. It did not go well. qzgy and selfish_meme suggested testing on Kerbin by lowering gravity. Fantastic! I'll design it specifially for Duna like Curiosity. A week or two later I took a version to Duna. Duna is not Mars. The two places I visited where very flat. But getting to Duna was an awesomely difficult challange for me. Highly recommended. This version I took had probe cores on every craft. I was hoping I could switch to other craft and return. Nope. This is one-shot kinda thing . I don't actually recommend taking it to Duna, but here's a video so you can see the suspension in action. Gravity set to .31, which I think is close to Duna's. Not sure how enjoyable this craft is going to be to others, but it's available for reverse-engineering on KerbalX

can someone make a curiosity mod like DSL pandora that's up to date with a working skycrane

Inspired by Nova's images of the new Mars like plannet and some posts refering to the August 9th Mars Curiosity landing I decided to branch from the KSP fantasy world and check out some NASA videos on the subject. Now for all of your viewing pleasure I present the most Kerbal thing NASA has ever attempted. The Mars Curiosity Rover: - $2.5 billion US dollars - 8 month transit time - Powered by plutonium - The size of a mini cooper - 4 Stage untested powered descent with a "Sky Crane" to lower the rover the last 21 feet. (I repeat "Untested") - Oh and one more thing.... The landing is done completely in the dark under computer control. In short one of the coolest things NASA has created since Tang. I hope this inspires some new part designs from the community. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=146903741

Hi everyone. A tribute to the awesomeness that is the Curiosity mission! This is a result of about 10 hours of work and testing. No mods, stock parts. On the launch pad: After liftoff: On our way without the booster stage: Starting landing procedure: Coming in: Watch the sycrane fly away: Speed around and EVA CRAFT file: [ATTACH]31501[/ATTACH] The craft is not in perfect balance so here are some quirks you need to know: 1. Start the launch on full throttle and with SAS on. The skycrane arms sometimes go into a vibration feedback and tear the craft apart at ~7000 meters if you don't. I think I mostly fixed this issue with added struts, but you never know. 2. After the booster phase detaches you'll need to make a decision about conserving RCS fuel. If you don't turn it on the craft will become unstable even with ADV SAS above ~1/2 thrust. With RCS on it will be stable but it consumes disgusting amounts of fuel. 3. The rover legs aren't the most stable things even with the reinforcement they have. When you come in for a landing make sure you are coming perfectly straight down, or are aproaching either forward or reverse from the rover's perspective. Aproaching from the side will likely tear off your wheels. 4. The rover can survive a good 10 meter drop, but make sure you are almost on the surface when you release the skycrane. 5. When using the rover's horizontal thruster be careful with the throttle. A miniature bump can tear you apart or send you into orbit if you put the pedal to the metal. I recommend short bursts of no more than 1/4. Also, you'll need to use the RCS manually while cruising to stay on the ground, brake and turn. 6. The rover has a bottom thruster on the last stage because I wanted it to be able to return to Kerbin, but because it's not balanced perfectly it's very difficult to do so and even on manual RCS control I couldn't fly it back. Feel free to try though. PS. If you feel like it you can use it to jump around doing somersaults. I only tried flying this to the Mun. It probably has enough fuel to get to Minmus. The frozen lakes would be a great candidate for some high speed fun.