Rover designs for duna

[AndrewUpchurch]

Please help me, I have achieved great things in ksp from space stations to mining bases on dres. The only thing left is to send a rover to duna. I already have a small exploration base there, but I want a rover to explore the north pole for future bases there. I have tried many designs but all seem to have there own problems. Please help me because Jeb's life depends on it.

[Snark]

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

Building a rover for Duna's not really much different than building one for the Mun... you just get less oomph from solar panels, is all.  And flipping/tumbling is somewhat less of an issue.

When you say "problems", what sort of problems do you mean, specifically?  And got some screenshots of your attempted designs?  It's easier to provide suggestions when there's something to work from.

[bewing]

Try giving this one a spin, and see how you like it:

http://www.virtualrealitytoursllc.com/pix/nuke_rover.craft

 

[Warzouz]

Here is a probe rover I did back in 1.0.5. The atmospheric skycrane is now dangerous but Duna don't need one. The rover should be modified to handle the increased power need of the new wheels.

 

[Geschosskopf]

12 hours ago, AndrewUpchurch said:

I have tried many designs but all seem to have there own problems

In general, Duna rovers are the same as Kerbin rovers as far as general design of body and wheels goes.  You want something fairly low and wide, same as anywhere else.  Also, you should probably set the wheel traction control to zero so they don't just die trying to climb minor slopes and set friction to taste.  The main thing about Duna rovers is figuring out how to power them.

Since 1.1, wheels now have max power consumptions about 6x what they were before.  The good news, however, is that they don't always need that much.  They use lots when accelerating and when going up big hills, but hardly use any when cruising along at high speed on relatively level ground.  This means that for much of your long-distance runs, you only need about 1/3 to 1/2 the max amount per wheels.  This is fortunate because it's hard to supply the total max amount with solar panels, especially on Duna where solar panels only work about 1/2 as well as they do on Kerbin.

However, you still need the max power to climb hills of any steepness or height.  If you stay in the gullies, then you don't have hills to climb, but you also miss seeing 80% of the planet.  So assuming you want to go out in the main dune fields, you need extra power from somewhere.  You can do this with batteries and/or fuel cells.  Batteries are the simplest, but their size limits how high you can climb before you have to stop and recharge.  Also, you need enough solar panels to slowly recharge while still driving at high speed, to recover what you spent accelerating from a stop and for when you meet a hill..  Or you can have fuel cells.  These provide plenty of power when you need it but consume fuel, so it's a good idea to turn them on and off as needed instead of using them constantly.

Thus, I like to have a significant amount of solar power, about 2000 EC worth of battery for most hills, and a fuel cell array and small fuel tank for when I need full power for a fairly long time.