Help me land my Mun Rover :(

[Azamorn]

I wouldn't call it the kraken but for whatever reason my game is currently bugged beyond comprehension and I've no idea what is going on.

Here I am just about to come in for a landing with my Mun Rover, I've left a satellite in Orbit to relay the signal and I've got plenty of fuel, SAS and gimbal to successfully to do the landing, everything *should* have been good to go, the probability for success was 99%.
But you know that 1% really bit me in the ass this time.

For whoever is interested, I'll share my save file, if you load it up and load up Quick save #4 you'll be about 3 km from the Mun Surface, plenty of fuel but have a completely dysfunctional control system, it's neigh impossible to land and I've attempted many things to try and rectify the issue to no avail

Any help would be appreciated as I cannot for the life of me figure out what I've done wrong to make the SAS completely dysfunctional.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=15vXKpJ4dEq6PaoQCv73KUD5ys-hkDdVo

PS this is complete stock, no mods, trying out a complete stock playthrough for the first time.

Edited November 6, 2019 by Azamorn

[The Aziz]

Can't play right now, so I can only guess what the problem is: you left the relay in orbit, but do you have functioning receiving antenna on the rover? Or you run out of electricity?

[Streetwind]

Yeah, the description is super vague, but this does sound like the rover has no antenna and/or the relay is very weak. Losing connection to Kerbin will put an uncrewed probe into limited control mode, where only SAS modes can be used to control the orientation, and only full throttle or no throttle is allowed. Or, if the difficulty setting "require connection for control" is activated, an uncrewed probe without connection becomes completely inert.

A lot of new players make the mistake of thinking the integrated antenna in pods and probe cores will be fine if they have a relay nearby, because it always reaches back all the way to Kerbin too. And they make the mistake of thinking that a small relay dish that has a bright green connection to Kerbin will do just fine for connecting to a nearby craft that is much closer than Kerbin.

Thing is, though - the ability for two antennas to make a connection is dependant on the signal power of both antennas. On Kerbin, the tracking station is an antenna with its own signal rating. And it is extremely powerful. Orders of magnitude above what your ship-mounted antennas can do. In any given earlygame antenna pairing, the tracking station completely dominates the ship-mounted antenna to the point where it hardly even matters what you have on the ship, you can phone home from the Mun just fine anyway. A level 2 tracking station can talk to a probe-internal antenna on the Mun, and to a single communotron-16 anywhere in the entire SoI of Kerbin. Nevermind the level 3 tracking station.

And then the player builds their first relay satellite with an HG-5 antenna, and discovers that the probe-internal antenna of the craft trying to use the relay loses connection a mere 158 kilometers away. That is the difference in power between early ship-mounted antennas and the tracking station.

Learn more here: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/CommNet

Recommendation: add a Communotron-16 or -16S to the rover. That'll boost the connection range to a single HG-5 relay to 1,581 kilometers - more than enough, unless the relay is in an extremely high orbit (in which case you can lower that orbit, if the relay has fuel left).

[AHHans]

Well, ECs and commnet connection are there. (Not a good connection, but good enough, there is a communotron 16s on the rover).

But what it also has is full downwards manual pitch trim! You can see this by switching off SAS: the craft will start to rotate. With SAS on this will be countermanded by SAS. But you cannot manually pitch upwards anymore. (Which is the direction you need to go in the situation on that quicksave.) With <R-Shift> - <X> on Linux (afaik <R-ALT> - <X> on Windows) you can reset all manual trim, after that the craft becomes more controllable.

Also: we don't need the full save-file directory! The single file "quicksave #4.sfs" is all we need! (In other words the zip file makes it harder for people to help you.)

And I'll suggest to the moderators to move this to the Gameplay Questions and Tutorials subforum.

Edited November 7, 2019 by AHHans

[James Kerman]

Topic moved to gameplay questions.

[Azamorn]

1 hour ago, AHHans said:

Well, ECs and commnet connection are there. (Not a good connection, but good enough, there is a communotron 16s on the rover).

But what it also has is full downwards manual pitch trim! You can see this by switching off SAS: the craft will start to rotate. With SAS on this will be countermanded by SAS. But you cannot manually pitch upwards anymore. (Which is the direction you need to go in the situation on that quicksave.) With <R-Shift> - <X> on Linux (afaik <R-ALT> - <X> on Windows) you can reset all manual trim, after that the craft becomes more controllable.

Also: we don't need the full save-file directory! The single file "quicksave #4.sfs" is all we need! (In other words the zip file makes it harder for people to help you.)

And I'll suggest to the moderators to move this to the Gameplay Questions and Tutorials subforum.

Thanks a lot!

So it wasn't a bug after all :)

Going to attempt landing it now with your suggestion, you saved my rover ^^,!

[Streetwind]

...Trim? Wow, I'd never have thought that. I keep forgetting that that is a thing that exists  

[Dafni]

2 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

...Trim? Wow, I'd never have thought that. I keep forgetting that that is a thing that exists  

Ya, same here. What's more: the hotkey to reset all trim! Thanks for reminding me @AHHans, I'll have to write it down somewhere.

[Azamorn]

8 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

...Trim? Wow, I'd never have thought that. I keep forgetting that that is a thing that exists  

It's used mainly for airplanes right?

First time it's ever given me a problem and the first time I've ever encountered it.

PS Successfully landed my rover

[AHHans]

4 hours ago, Streetwind said:

...Trim? Wow, I'd never have thought that.

Yah, well, it also took me a few tries. It steered really strange, roll and yaw worked O.K. but pitch didn't, then it did, then it didn't... Then I noticed that the control-input indicators for roll and yaw moved fine but the one for pitch didn't move (when I pitched up). That's when the light-bulb went off.

4 hours ago, Azamorn said:

It's used mainly for airplanes right?

It is mainly useful for airplanes, that's true. (Especially if you only have keyboard+mouse and need fine control.) But in my experience it is mainly used on rovers, e.g. when someone wants to go somewhere fast and - in addition to pressing <W> to drive forward - activates physics warp. (I've had a rover doing somersaults as soon as I deactivated SAS one time.)

Edited November 7, 2019 by AHHans

[Fierce Wolf]

1 hour ago, AHHans said:

it is mainly used on rovers

This. Never actually used it in planes

[AHHans]

2 hours ago, Fierce Wolf said:

Never actually used it in planes

Well, I did. E.g. when counteracting the torque of a single engined prop plane, or when trying to push a prop plane to its maximum ceiling on Eve. In these situations SAS just doesn't cut it.