Rovers...what for?

[LordKael]

1 hour ago, Steven Mading said:

One of the things that's nearly impossible to do with manual controls with rovers is to steer mildly with the keyboard.  If you don't use a joystick, it's nearly impossible to do the sort of steering needed to keep a KSP rover from flipping.You can't hold the controls steady at a mild amount.  The longer you hold in the key, the tighter and tighter you turn.  Trying to hold it at, say, 10% deflection and KEEP it there unmoving for several seconds just isn't in the user interface.  You can use capslock to slow it down but that still doesn't change the fact that the longer you hold the key the more you deflect - it just changes how long you have to hold it to move the controls the same distance.  Holding it at a constant deflection that isn't 100% isn't something the controls support.  You can try doing the tappy-tappy-tappy technique but that doesn't really hold it in one place, it still wiggles it back and forth across the point you want to hold it at. 

This tends to cause rover flipover, because what you want to do to avoid flipover is to steer by deflecting gently and carefully and the keyboard controls defeat every attempt you make to do this.  Imagine trying to drive a car along an highway on-ramp where you want a mild but constant turn, if you weren't allowed to hold the wheel in place at a mild deflection from center, and instead had to move it tighter and tighter, then let go and let it recenter, then move it tighter again and then let go an let it recenter, etc. At best you'd be all over the lane, and at worst you'd cause it to skid a lot.  This is what you're doing when you rover drive by keyboard at high speed.

One of the reasons I go with a kOS script for rover driving is the mere fact that a script *can* hold the controls steady at a given deflection and keep it there in a way the stock controls deny to you.  I can make it micro-correct the steering to keep things straight on and thus it allows me to drive faster before it gets dangerous.  I can drive rovers with the balloon tires on Duna at about 20 m/s before it starts getting flippy, and there's no way the keyboard controls let me do that.

It helps alleviate some of the boredom of visting more than one biome, although even with that I still won't want to do more than just two or three biomes per rover landing.  I tend to use this driving script to hit the locations in one of those alpha/beta/gamma contracts where they're within a few kilometers of each other.

 

I've been looking at KOS a lot the last couple days, and I'm running into issues programing a rover autopilot that will do what you described. Any chance you could post some help?

[Mikki]

On 22.12.2015 at 0:56 PM, kerbyourenthusiasm said:

With the holidays right around the corner I'm looking forward to further expand my little carreer game in the interplanetary sphere...

....Looking forward to some ideas on how to actually use rovers in the game then.

Cheers!

I had some more time these days and fleshed out my roverdropping capacitys, had lot of fun building atmospheric reentry rigs for off Kerbin colonization.

A test on Kerbin for a Duna Research/ISRU Truck drop:



After reversing my career from a earlyer point due to a bad glitch in the Astronautcenter i began to take it serious .

[SR]

Rovers can be used to allow you to land on the highest peaks of Eve, and get sea samples.

There also needed to build bases.

[suicidejunkie]

There are two things I see as a must-have for rovers:

1) Remap the gas/brake keys from W/S to +/-, and the steering from A, D to /, *

2) A 6-sided die on the + key and a wallet to hold it down while cruising.

 

Remapping the keys allows SAS independent of driving.  First up, it stops wasting electricity, and it also allows the SAS to actually hold your course instead of being continuously reset by the command inputs.

Zoom out to find a reasonable heading, quicksave and then go for lunch or read the forums, and occasionally make course corrections.

 

Having an unaerodynamic vehicle helps keep the speed under control on the downhill without preventing you from climbing hills.  An actual cruise control setting would be much nicer, but it works.

[Francois424]

I really wish for throttle for wheeled rovers sometime in one of the future patches.  Right now the only work-around (beside smashing an object on the accelerate key) is to put one or 2 ant engines and carry an ISRU with you.
When you run out of fuel, break and mine.  Ants have good gimbal too, and with reaction wheels can help a lot keeping steady...  but the heavier the rover, the lower the control authority.

4 minutes ago, suicidejunkie said:

An actual cruise control setting would be much nicer, but it works.

Indeed.   That's why I use Ion/Ants/Nerva in the meantime on heavy rovers.

[suicidejunkie]

By cruise control, I meant like in a car;  automatic throttle adjustment in order to maintain a fixed speed.

 

For reduced power, you can disable some of your wheels in an electric rover, although that is quite granular depending on the wheel layout.

[Fearless Son]

I generally disable all rotational torque on my rovers whenever I take them out.  If they ever do get flipped though, having some extra rotational torque that you can manually activate can be handy for getting it upright.  

[RocketSquid]

I use rovers far more than I use biome hoppers, simply because I'm bad at landing and like the precision a rover provides. Also, rovers are good for way more cargo than biome hoppers are.

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

I've only built one rover seriously, the Munokhod 1, in sandbox mode. It crashed less than 5 kilometers away from the landing site... I went off a cliff and didn't have enough SAS to flip over.

[psychogre]

6 hours ago, suicidejunkie said:

There are two things I see as a must-have for rovers:

1) Remap the gas/brake keys from W/S to +/-, and the steering from A, D to /, *

2) A 6-sided die on the + key and a wallet to hold it down while cruising.

I accidentally found another solution to this.  When trying out a rover awhile after reinstalling, I was rather puzzled why they were always stuck in full reverse.

Rechecking my input configurations, I found that I had set the rover speed controls to the joystick throttle.  So when the throttle was all the way down to zero for a rocket, it was actually in full reverse when controlling a rover.  Getting the throttle to be exactly zero may be a bit tricky, but for cruising at a speed of your choosing, it's great!

[jonrd463]

Even with Scansat's slope mapping, it can be hard to find nice, flat surfaces. I use unmanned rovers to scout out locations that are flat and have a decent amount of ore where I can establish a landing zone.

[ExtremeSquared]

Same reason for surface stations in stock. It alleviates the guilt that is caused by leaving a solo kerbal in a tiny landing pod for 10 years.

[Fearless Son]

Yesterday's Devnote Tuesday update looks like they are addressing some concerns relevant to this thread.  Apparently part of the reason rover's currently flip during high speed maneuvers is because the lateral friction from their tires is absurdly high, so the moment you start a high speed turn it is like hitting a sudden speed bump and they go flying.  Squad is addressing this in 1.1 by reducing the lateral friction so rovers are more likely to "spin out" during a high speed turn than they are to flip over (assuming a low center of mass.)  Also apparently they simulate the effect of low-gravity driving very well (less weight means less friction means acceleration is more difficult) but part of the reason it was more challenging than it had to be was because the wheels do not scale their torque relative to the local gravity.  Effectively, they spin real fast in place while only having minimal purchase.  1.1 will have rover wheels automatically reduce their torque relative to the gravity of the planet they are on to avoid spending excess power trying to move without gain, and this should make controlling them a bit easier (though they note that they would like to have a way to manually disable this feature if the player so desires.)  

[moogoob]

I've been making a lot of rovers recently, for something to do until 1.1 What I like is that they are a DIFFICULT payload, and force you to really think.

First you need to make a car. That works. Preferably at night as well. AND you need to test it.

Then you need to somehow make your car fly, usually with a simple skycrane setup. I use them as I can then just land the rover on its own wheels, no flipping the rover off the top of a landing stage or anything, then just fly them away to a safe distance once your cargo is on Luna Firma.

THEN you need to somehow attach this (often off-balance) contraption to a transfer stage.

THEN you need a big enough rocket to lift it, and not flip out because rovers are as aerodynamic as a piece of toast and fairings are broken in the current version.

So yeah, I like them as a challenge to get anywhere. THEN you get to drive ;em, and that's a whole other set of challenges.