Must have on rover?

[nascarlaser1]

Hi guys!

 

I want to build an exploration rover for Kerbin. What are some must haves when building an exploration rover? (This is sandbox mode but it does include some science role play)

[James Kerman]

Wheels.  Just kidding, I always like to have a surface scanning module on my rovers.  Saves you a lot of mouse clicks when trying to find biomes or looking for ore..

Edited November 11, 2016 by James Kerman
edited for grammar

[bewing]

Kerbin is fairly large. To explore it you will need to maintain a fair amount of speed. If you maintain a fair amount of speed, your rover will crash and flip. So one thing that is nice is that you need wheels at all 8 corners, to make sure that it will always land on its wheels, no matter how it comes down. You also need an extendable something-or-other that can flip the rover back upright when it lands upside down (if you care). Having plenty of reaction wheel is nice, because you can turn on SAS when you go flying off a cliff -- it may help you land upright. To do all this you need lots of battery power, and a powerful energy source. Maybe a gigantor that you only extend every once in a while when you are stopped, plus a couple RTGs?

[Magzimum]

Bare minimum (must have):

1. Wheels
2. Solar panels
3. Batteries
4. Seat, pod or probe core
5. Some structural bits to hold #1, 2, 3, 4 together.

I would add (nice to have): 

1. Lights 
2. Narrow band scanner and scanning module, for Kerbnet access. 
3. Antenna (not really sure you need one on Kerbin)
4. A little more structural bits, to make it more stable / nicer

Note: if you want to rove around with a external command seat, you should use another command pod, EVA the Kerbals into their seats, then disconnect the pod (since you probably don't want to bring that along). 

[nascarlaser1]

6 minutes ago, bewing said:

Kerbin is fairly large. To explore it you will need to maintain a fair amount of speed. If you maintain a fair amount of speed, your rover will crash and flip. So one thing that is nice is that you need wheels at all 8 corners, to make sure that it will always land on its wheels, no matter how it comes down. You also need an extendable something-or-other that can flip the rover back upright when it lands upside down (if you care). Having plenty of reaction wheel is nice, because you can turn on SAS when you go flying off a cliff -- it may help you land upright. To do all this you need lots of battery power, and a powerful energy source. Maybe a gigantor that you only extend every once in a while when you are stopped, plus a couple RTGs?

THanks for you advice guys! 1 quick question, how does a rover have 8 corners? I thought it was a rectangle/square?

[bewing]

17 minutes ago, nascarlaser1 said:

THanks for you advice guys! 1 quick question, how does a rover have 8 corners? I thought it was a rectangle/square?

Three dimensions! A cube, not a square.

Four on the bottom, and four on the top. It's gotta land on its wheels whether it's right-side-up or upside down. Because it's gonna end up upside down A LOT.

Because if it doesn't land on its wheels and its going more than 7m/s, parts are going to fall off.

Edited November 11, 2016 by bewing

[nascarlaser1]

3 minutes ago, bewing said:

Three dimensions! A cube, not a square.

Four on the bottom, and four on the top. It's gotta land on its wheels whether it's right-side-up or upside down. Because it's gonna end up upside down A LOT.

Because if it doesn't land on its wheels and its going more than 7m/s, parts are going to fall off.

ohhhhhh.. lol...

Thanks!

[sdj64]

2 hours ago, bewing said:

Three dimensions! A cube, not a square.

Four on the bottom, and four on the top. It's gotta land on its wheels whether it's right-side-up or upside down. Because it's gonna end up upside down A LOT.

Because if it doesn't land on its wheels and its going more than 7m/s, parts are going to fall off.

As an alternative, on Kerbin or elsewhere with an atmosphere you can borrow a design feature from real world race cars and use wing parts angled down to create downforce.

I like to have enough cabin space for everyone on board if they are going to spend more than one day in the rover, but for short trips seats are just fine (more of a roleplay consideration).  Mk2 and Mk1 cabins work great for this.  Mk2 parts are also good for making a durable rover that can survive flipping at basically any speed that rover wheels can reach.  On low gravity planets I like to have rockets to jump over steep obstacles.  On Kerbin you might want a jet to cross water and also to improve your speed and hill climbing ability.  Definitely also have headlights so you can see where you're going.

[Foxster]

19 hours ago, nascarlaser1 said:

What are some must haves when building an exploration rover?

Wings. 

Seriously, Kerbin is pretty huge (despite being small compared to Earth). I'd be surprised if you didn't get bored touring it. You can easily make a pretty good smallish aircraft that if you lower the landing gear drops the craft onto some powered wheels for local exploration. 

But I usually make some small science rover early in a playthrough to hoover up the science around the KSC...

 

Edited November 12, 2016 by Foxster

[The Aziz]

I'd say science experiments. Because surface exploration contracts seem to be common now, and they're fun when you drive a rover there, and not just do few landings.

[Clipperride]

I tend to build larger rovers based on a Cupola attached to a Mobile Processing Lab. It isn't going to survive rolling over, so frequent quicksaves are the order of the day. When building for a Kerbin tour, I also like to add some liquid fuel and a jet engine, for adding some speed on the flatter stretches.

The picture below shows my recent Mun Rover, which doesn't have jets, but shows the basic concepts.

Spoiler

Happy Touring

 

 

[Geschosskopf]

On 11/11/2016 at 10:50 AM, nascarlaser1 said:

I want to build an exploration rover for Kerbin. What are some must haves when building an exploration rover? (This is sandbox mode but it does include some science role play)

Hmmm.  If you're really committed to long-distance driving instead of flying, then you need several things:

• A low, wide design to avoid flipping over as much as possible.  This is not nearly as much of an issue post-1.0 as it was before, but having a wide stance and a low CoM is still very helpful.
• An engineer to fix the inevitable flat tires.
• A spare engineer for when the 1st one gets eaten by the Kraken while fixing a flat (not as much of a problem in 1.2 as in 1.1.x, but it can still happen).
• Headlights.

Next, you need to decide how fast you want to go.  Your choices are essentially relatively slow (30m/s or less) using electric rover wheels, or fast (over 100m/s) using airplane wheels pushed by jet engines.  Going fast has the advantage of covering more ground before you get bored with the project, but OTOH you crash more often and the rover ends up being huge due to needing fuel tanks and some way to refill them eventually.  Going electric keeps the size and complexity down and can, at least for relatively small rovers, eliminate the need for refueling.  It's also safer (usually you don't go fast enough to flip) but it takes forever to go any real distance.  Still, this is my preferred option so I'll discuss that a bit.

Rover wheels post-1.0 are interesting things.  They only need their max amount of EC/sec when accelerating or when climbing hills.  When cruising along on relatively flat ground at max speed they only draw a fraction of their max EC/sec.  This is the key to electric rover design because it's very hard these days to put enough solar panels on a small-ish rover to provide the max EC/sec of all its wheels simultaneously.  So what you do is have solar panels able to provide cruising power and then have several thousand EC storage in the battery to provide the extra oomph to get over hills.  Once you get over the crest, the solar panels will gradually recharge the battery so it's ready for the next hill.  The amount of solar power, the number and type of wheels, and the size of the battery determine how much of a hill you can climb.  If you run out of battery on the way up, you'll have to stop for a while until the solar panels recharge the battery.  Which means you need good tire friction so as not to slide back down the hill while recharging, and that brings us to the subject of wheels stats.

Wheels have a bunch of tweakable stats, although some are more important than others.  Here are some tips on how to set them.

• Traction Control:  This works just like in real life, decreasing power to the wheel when it loses traction.  Unfortunately, KSP seems to think that climbing a hill is a loss of traction so will throttle down the wheels and you can't even climb a 5^ slope.  Therefore, this should ALWAYS be set to ZERO for a cross-country rover or you'll never be able to climb a hill.  Traction Control is only useful for race cars trying to do laps around KSC buildings (IOW, lots of hard turning at high speed).
• Friction Control:  This should be left at default as much as possible, or even reduced for long runs on flat ground.  Increasing friction makes it harder for the wheel to move in any direction, even the one you're trying to drive in, so decreases speed and increase the EC/sec draw of the wheel.  Increased friction also increases wheel stress, which makes it more likely you'll get a flat.  HOWEVER, increasing friction is often necessary to climb steep slopes and also to stop on steep slopes without sliding down.  Fortunately, you can tweak this in flight so use it when you need it and just drive slower and more carefully on the steep slopes.
• Spring and Damper:  This is the suspension.  They default to a rover of average weight for the type of wheel in Kerbin's gravity.  Normally they should be left at default on Kerbin, although they should be changed to reflect the gravity of other planets.  Also, if your rover is very heavy or light for the type of wheel, you might change them.  Normally, you want spring and damper to have the same value so they balance each other, but there are some really strange situations (such as 500m/s dragsters) where you need them very different.  In general, however, I would leave these alone for a Kerbin exploration rover.

 

[nascarlaser1]

3 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

Hmmm.  If you're really committed to long-distance driving instead of flying, then you need several things:

• A low, wide design to avoid flipping over as much as possible.  This is not nearly as much of an issue post-1.0 as it was before, but having a wide stance and a low CoM is still very helpful.
• An engineer to fix the inevitable flat tires.
• A spare engineer for when the 1st one gets eaten by the Kraken while fixing a flat (not as much of a problem in 1.2 as in 1.1.x, but it can still happen).
• Headlights.

Next, you need to decide how fast you want to go.  Your choices are essentially relatively slow (30m/s or less) using electric rover wheels, or fast (over 100m/s) using airplane wheels pushed by jet engines.  Going fast has the advantage of covering more ground before you get bored with the project, but OTOH you crash more often and the rover ends up being huge due to needing fuel tanks and some way to refill them eventually.  Going electric keeps the size and complexity down and can, at least for relatively small rovers, eliminate the need for refueling.  It's also safer (usually you don't go fast enough to flip) but it takes forever to go any real distance.  Still, this is my preferred option so I'll discuss that a bit.

Rover wheels post-1.0 are interesting things.  They only need their max amount of EC/sec when accelerating or when climbing hills.  When cruising along on relatively flat ground at max speed they only draw a fraction of their max EC/sec.  This is the key to electric rover design because it's very hard these days to put enough solar panels on a small-ish rover to provide the max EC/sec of all its wheels simultaneously.  So what you do is have solar panels able to provide cruising power and then have several thousand EC storage in the battery to provide the extra oomph to get over hills.  Once you get over the crest, the solar panels will gradually recharge the battery so it's ready for the next hill.  The amount of solar power, the number and type of wheels, and the size of the battery determine how much of a hill you can climb.  If you run out of battery on the way up, you'll have to stop for a while until the solar panels recharge the battery.  Which means you need good tire friction so as not to slide back down the hill while recharging, and that brings us to the subject of wheels stats.

Wheels have a bunch of tweakable stats, although some are more important than others.  Here are some tips on how to set them.

• Traction Control:  This works just like in real life, decreasing power to the wheel when it loses traction.  Unfortunately, KSP seems to think that climbing a hill is a loss of traction so will throttle down the wheels and you can't even climb a 5^ slope.  Therefore, this should ALWAYS be set to ZERO for a cross-country rover or you'll never be able to climb a hill.  Traction Control is only useful for race cars trying to do laps around KSC buildings (IOW, lots of hard turning at high speed).
• Friction Control:  This should be left at default as much as possible, or even reduced for long runs on flat ground.  Increasing friction makes it harder for the wheel to move in any direction, even the one you're trying to drive in, so decreases speed and increase the EC/sec draw of the wheel.  Increased friction also increases wheel stress, which makes it more likely you'll get a flat.  HOWEVER, increasing friction is often necessary to climb steep slopes and also to stop on steep slopes without sliding down.  Fortunately, you can tweak this in flight so use it when you need it and just drive slower and more carefully on the steep slopes.
• Spring and Damper:  This is the suspension.  They default to a rover of average weight for the type of wheel in Kerbin's gravity.  Normally they should be left at default on Kerbin, although they should be changed to reflect the gravity of other planets.  Also, if your rover is very heavy or light for the type of wheel, you might change them.  Normally, you want spring and damper to have the same value so they balance each other, but there are some really strange situations (such as 500m/s dragsters) where you need them very different.  In general, however, I would leave these alone for a Kerbin exploration rover.

 

Thanks for your help guys! I also want to get one of the stock mining expansion mods, that comes with a smaller refiner then the stock one. This way I can have an electric rover with a monopropellant engine for speed boosts on flat ground. I won't get bored with this, since its going to be an easter egg hunt vehicle.

[Palaceviking]

Juno + isru

[Geschosskopf]

15 minutes ago, nascarlaser1 said:

Thanks for your help guys! I also want to get one of the stock mining expansion mods, that comes with a smaller refiner then the stock one. This way I can have an electric rover with a monopropellant engine for speed boosts on flat ground. I won't get bored with this, since its going to be an easter egg hunt vehicle.

ISRU is not the answer for an electric rover.  The ISRU plant needs more EC/sec than the wheels, and the weight and bulk of it all (plus the solar panels and radiators) overloads the electric wheels.  And what is the ISRU providing anyway?  I mean, you're trying to run electric wheels so the only way to make EC out of stuff you mine is with a fuel cell.  And that's not the best way to run an electric rover, either (compared to solar + battery).  So if you're going to bother with ISRU, it would be better to use airplane wheels and jet engines.  Also be advised that all ISRU parts smaller than 2.5m have rather terrible efficiencies so are usually more trouble than they're worth unless the gravity is really low.  And they also need 2.5% Ore in the ground to work at all, which really limits where you can use them.

Also, few Easter Eggs are on the same landmass as KSC and rovers aren't great at crossing oceans.

[Palaceviking]

Isru purely for fueling the jets, rockets etc. 

With enough thrust oceans could be doable,  but insanely boring. 

[Sharpy]

For Kerbin that doesn't matter so much - but for low-grav worlds a reaction wheel is a must.

[nascarlaser1]

Thanks for your help guys!

 

1 quick question. How do you make a rover go through water?? The idea never occurred to me that the landmasses don't all connect together with tiny bridges....