GPS Coordinates, and NavBall reading is like getting a Tarot card reading. :P

[Sitting Duck]

So I've finally manged to place a lander down near the north pole of Minmus without destroying it on landing (alas, the lander itself was doomed). I even managed to find and sample some green sandstone. Woo.

My contract goal, though, is to take temp readings in four locations, but I don't get any nav points either on the surface or on the nav ball. I can tell this because I've been IN two of the four zones, with navigation activated, and have seen nothing but the usual text notice at the top of the screen. Now I'm having to drive up and down sherbet hills at a snail's pace hoping I'll run across the other two.

Also I can see GPS data for my rover when I hover on the rover icon, but there doesn't seem to be any reference to help me find what good this knowledge is or where the desired nav locations are.

It doesn't help that the navball is still a Mysterious Mystery of Mysteries to me.

Any help you can offer would be much appreciated. Thanks!

PS: Screenshot shows the rover just "below" the nav marker, and navigation is enabled for that point, but nada!

Edited October 14, 2019 by Sitting Duck

[Superfluous J]

The big problem is that waypoints only show up in map mode. It's a ridiculous oversight and I personally believe Waypoint Manager is an essential "it's stock to me" mod.

Going further, your rover appears to be aimed uphill, so the direction on your navball that has the "overhead" point on it (to the right) shows you forward. Essentially, you built your rover poorly You may be able to fix it by changing the control direction (right click the probe core or rover body and try all options) but you also may have to just learn that "right is forward" for this rover and deal with it.

[Sitting Duck]

21 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Going further, your rover appears to be aimed uphill, so the direction on your navball that has the "overhead" point on it (to the right) shows you forward. Essentially, you built your rover poorly You may be able to fix it by changing the control direction (right click the probe core or rover body and try all options) but you also may have to just learn that "right is forward" for this rover and deal with it.

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any option to change the orientation that the core believes it's in. Oddly, the rover knows which way is forward/back and left/right based on my usual controls. That, coupled with my low level of understanding of the navball, means that I can't even see the problem at this point. I need to correct that more than anything at this point.

[AHHans]

Well, to me it looks like you have the control point pointing upwards not forwards. (And, yes, in this case the wheel control will work mostly fine.) It could be that you have the docking port on the top of the rover set as the control point. Do you have the RoveMate as the probe core? (It is hard to see, but it looks to me like that.) make sure that you "control from here" on the RoveMate, and have it set to "forward".  (When you turn the rover left and right, the coordinate grid on the navball should move left and right and not rotate around. Once you have that, make sure that navigation to a target is activated and turn the rover around until you see the target marker on your navball. Drive in that direction - the prograde marker should show up on top of the target marker -  as the terrain and you rover allows, and you should get there.

You probably already noticed that driving a rover on Minmus is not pure fun. The low gravity and bouncy wheel suspension make for an unstable ride.

[Sitting Duck]

15 hours ago, AHHans said:

Well, to me it looks like you have the control point pointing upwards not forwards. (And, yes, in this case the wheel control will work mostly fine.) It could be that you have the docking port on the top of the rover set as the control point. Do you have the RoveMate as the probe core? (It is hard to see, but it looks to me like that.) make sure that you "control from here" on the RoveMate, and have it set to "forward".  (When you turn the rover left and right, the coordinate grid on the navball should move left and right and not rotate around. Once you have that, make sure that navigation to a target is activated and turn the rover around until you see the target marker on your navball. Drive in that direction - the prograde marker should show up on top of the target marker -  as the terrain and you rover allows, and you should get there.

You probably already noticed that driving a rover on Minmus is not pure fun. The low gravity and bouncy wheel suspension make for an unstable ride.

Thank you very much for your insights! I really appreciate it, and I think it will all be helpful in making me design these things better in the future.

So, not a RoveMate but an RCS-001S. I wanted a few things the RoveMate didn't have. And when I powered up hill over a ledge on Minmus at 12KPH, I was surprised to see the rover catching a lot of air (well, vacuum) onto the plateau. I was able to influence it just enough with the reaction wheels in the core to - very surprisingly - not damage a bit of it as it tumbled for a good 30 seconds.

But of course the nav direction control on it is more limited than the RoveMate, and probably really is the main issue. I had swapped the thing back and forth between buildings and also pulled it from my Subassemblies, so the core just landed how it is in the pic below. I will be much more careful in the future.

Minmus is definitely not a great driving experience! But I built this thing like a tank and adjusted the steering and brakes, so it was mostly manageable. At 5-10KPH.

I did manage to find the other contracted points of interest. Honestly though, the real problem for me was the total lack of navigation aids. That alone made the entire exercise extremely tedious and grindy, and I won't be taking contracts like that anymore.

Anyway, thanks for your help.

Here's the rover, fully loaded and stripped/reversed. Yes it's totally over-engineered and I know it, but it was on Minmus. On the plus side, it survived through a lot. Until it didn't...

[Cavscout74]

A simple fix for future rovers rather than a complete redesign would be to slap a clamp-o-tron jr on the front of the rover & use that as your control point once you are on the ground.   if it ends up covered by that front solar panel, maybe set an action group to "control from here"

[Sitting Duck]

3 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

A simple fix for future rovers rather than a complete redesign would be to slap a clamp-o-tron jr on the front of the rover & use that as your control point once you are on the ground.   if it ends up covered by that front solar panel, maybe set an action group to "control from here"

Thanks, I gave that a test and it worked well. The navball makes a bit more sense. Now if only everything was findable by navigation marker, heh.

I don't really mind re-designing the rover, though: Gives me something new to do, to incorporate all of the things I've learned.

[AHHans]

7 hours ago, Sitting Duck said:

So, not a RoveMate but an RCS-001S. I wanted a few things the RoveMate didn't have. And when I powered up hill over a ledge on Minmus at 12KPH, I was surprised to see the rover catching a lot of air (well, vacuum) onto the plateau. I was able to influence it just enough with the reaction wheels in the core to - very surprisingly - not damage a bit of it as it tumbled for a good 30 seconds.

Well, O.K. This does make navigation quite a bit harder. () One advantage of having the control direction pointing upward is that you could set SAS to "Radial Out" in surface mode. That will make SAS (try to) point the the top of the rover straight up (away from the center of the planet / moon), righting your rover if it was tumbling.
I experimented with that a bit, but decided that it wasn't worth the problems with navigation. (I kept getting lost ... while driving around the KSC. )

Well, you sound like you're making progress, so: Good luck and clear skies.

[Sitting Duck]

15 hours ago, AHHans said:

Well, you sound like you're making progress, so: Good luck and clear skies.

Yeah I'm going to have to experiment with these cores until I find a happy medium on land, air, and space crafts. Thanks again for the assist.