The Road through Eve

[Jesrad]

Meet Marcel. Or rather: M.A.R.C.E.L, as in Mobile Auto-Refueling Circumnavigating Eve Laboratory.

Marcel was launched on a SSTO-duet of BIG rockets:

Marcel drove to Eve this way, rolling all over the stars.

Marcel tried to aerocapture naievely at Eve after transit:

So Marcel paused and thought: "I cannot enter Eve's atmosphere above 4 km/s and survive, let alone keep my wheels. I have to brake first then pass into the top atmosphere to drop my apoapsis down."

Then there was a dramatic pause for SCIENCE!

And finally, came the landing:

[Jesrad]

Then, it was time for MOAR SCIENCE:

And some refueling, too:

And now, CONTEXT: The last time I did a rover mission was back in 0.24, when I visited every biome of the Mun with the same science lab rover. Which took forever. I had landed near the creviced crater, then went north-west to the other crevice through the canyon and crater bottom, then up the "walls" and onto plateaus, circling between the procedural craters West then South to the polar region while passing more crater biomes. I couldn't do anything else in KSP for weeks, so much so that by the end of it I quit the game for month -, giving up on a promising Jool-5 challenge attempt.

This time was hardly different. Though I landed in a 3-biomed region, navigating halfway through the continent to the other 3-biomed zone took hours and hours and then more hours:

The most annoying part was having to stop after every downhill dash to repair the wheels:

Wheels in KSP are broken. They hardly have any traction in normal operation because otherwise they would have too much forward friction to get any speed (which is paradoxical), they have good traction while turning because of the huge sideways friction value they use to simulate being wheels and not skis, and you can't control those XLR-2 past 13.2 m/s: you lose accelerating, braking and turning abilities suddenly. In a slope, it means you can control your rover's descent by keeping "back" pressed while zig-zagging (so you get some traction from the wheels while pressing "left" and "right") until you reach 13.2 m/s, and then it's just a ski ride. And the wheels break at 30 m/s.

And there was the occasional slip-off:

So, excessively long rides and annoying quirks of the Unity 4 wheel stuff. Otherwise, some of the most beautiful vistas and the richest science harvest to date in any of my KSP careers.

Marcel still has to drive up the tallest mountain in decent range, for some yet-unplanned, future return mission.

[Geschosskopf]

Congrats on getting this beast down safely. The reentry shot gives new meaning to the term "hot wheels" . And I admire your dedication to driving this thing for so long.

As to the wheels, there's Claw's Stock Bug Fix Modules, one of which deals with wheels. Highly recommended. It's a bunch of separate modules so if you don't want them all, just delete some.

[Jesrad]

Thank you for the suggestion, I will look into this