Landing a rover

[MPDerksen]

Breaking ground has given me some missions that are best by a rover.  I can easily build both a lander, and the rover, but I can’t seem to figure out how to put them together.  Anyone willing to share some pictures of the assembled craft that touches down on Mun and/or Minmus?  I’m not looking for Uber-builds.  Just simple craft to get some mobile science with about half the tech tree unlocked.

Michael

[James Kerman]

I always deliver rovers via skycrane. The idea is you have the rover slung underneath the lander and build around the fuel tanks/engines. Be warned that this arrangement costs a lot of dv in drag so build your lifter accordingly.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Lot's of ways! Here's some examples:

 

Inside a bay: (Be forewarned, this can be a bit awkward to unload and may cause your rover to spaz out. The rover itself will have to be very small of course.)

On the back: (You will need to balance the center of mass with other parts, or bring a lot of reaction wheels to offset the torque.)

Slung underneath: (This is an unmanned rover, but you get the idea.)

Underneath again: (Because it's the simplest way! All you need is some longer landing legs for clearance.)

 

 

Edited July 7, 2019 by Rocket In My Pocket

[HansAcker]

Another option is to make the rover a lander, too. Some of my early rovers are basically just wheels on a FL-T400 tank with two Twitch engines attached radially (plus, of course, a probe core, science instruments, antenna and electrics). Just make sure to line up Centre of Thrust through the Centre of Mass. It's pretty heavy with a full tank but it can land on the Mun by itself and hop around to several locations to fullfill survey contracts.

Caveat: You need to switch probe core orientation between roving and flying or maybe add a docking port on top to "control from here" during hops.

Edited July 7, 2019 by HansAcker

[Tonka Crash]

For small rovers I'll use many of the ideas presented here.  For larger rovers, I just put the engine on the rover. Land on the engine cone and just rotate over to land on the wheels after contact. This lander has a reaction wheel and RCS. It works fine in low gravity like the Mun and Minmus. Once down, just decouple the engine and tank. 

 

[Aegolius13]

This was a proof-of-concept project for deploying a vertically-stacked rover from a regular lander.  Can be pretty tippy unless your lander is heavy and/or wide, but otherwise worked well.

 

 

[bewing]

For small rovers, it's easiest to first get the CoM lined up with the attachment point. Then put them inside a fairing on the booster/lander. Blow the fairing above 68km altitude.

For medium sized rovers, I just say "to hell with my launch aerodynamics" -- and simply center the rover over the booster and launch it with no fairing. 99% of your journey is done in vacuum anyway. You need to do a much more vertical (non-gravity turn) launch to maintain stability.

For large rovers, I just turn them into spaceplanes, and do a standard spaceplane ascent to orbit. Once in orbit, you can decouple all the extra spaceplane bits to conserve mass.

 

Edited July 8, 2019 by bewing

[Guest]

I have two words for you @_@!

Sky Crane

Spoiler

 

[vossiewulf]

The Wild Blue Buffalo MSEV rover comes with a part to mount it inline on a 2.5m stack. I give it a couple of its fuel tanks with monoprop and mount four large monoprop engines on the sides pointing in the wheels-down direction (RCS Build Aid helps to get them positioned correctly) and I land it on its wheels. That is always fun as it's not a small rover. Also the Packrat and the Buffalo at least can also be shipped in parts and assembled on site. However I always find that assembly process really annoying and lengthy, particularly on the Buffalo, so I try to avoid it.

[Geschosskopf]

On 7/7/2019 at 10:37 AM, MPDerksen said:

Breaking ground has given me some missions that are best by a rover.  I can easily build both a lander, and the rover, but I can’t seem to figure out how to put them together.  Anyone willing to share some pictures of the assembled craft that touches down on Mun and/or Minmus?  I’m not looking for Uber-builds.  Just simple craft to get some mobile science with about half the tech tree unlocked.

Michael

@Rocket In My Pocket showed most of the options.  I especially favor the "slung underneath" method he shows in the center of the 4-legged lander.  This has long been my go-to configuration for lander/rover combos.  Just stage the rover off (using a stack separator, not a decoupler) and drive it out from under between the legs.

Another option is to land the rovers separately, such as here:

In this case, I have a stack of 4 probe rovers on a carrier to prospect for Ore and good landing zones in widely scattered places on Vall.  Each rover has its own radially attached descent engines which it then stages off on the ground.  All were originally surrounded by a fairing with the "interstage nodes" enabled but NOT the truss framework as that seriously gets in the way of deployment.

Note that if you land the rover separately like this (or the rover IS the lander), you have take navball orientation into account.  Back in the old days, this required 2 separate "control from here things" (pods and/or probe cores) oriented in different directions.  You used the one oriented "up" for descent so the navball functioned as in a normal lander, then used the one oriented "forward" for driving on the surface.  Nowadays, though, you can change the orientation of a single pod or probe core with the PAW.  So land with the control point "up" and then switch it to "forward" for driving..

[Guest]

One method I’ve used (other than what’s already been listed) is to stick a detachable Oscar with a down-pointing Ant or Spark at each end. This if I only want to deliver the rover and it’s a one-way trip. Works well on all airless bodies including Tylo.