Am I the only one who likes exploring surfaces?

[king of nowhere]

ever since my first weeks into this game i wanted not just to land on planets, but to move on them too. After less than one month, I already cruised halfway around the mun with a small rover, despite it being a fairly crappy design. My first major achievement was a large manned rover to roam freely on any moon. Even if I don't use them, I feel better if I can put wheels on my landers, just so I could move around if I wanted. And while I generally dislike planes, I took an interest in propeller planes because they allow roaming freely - and expeditely - on the planets with air and oceans.

 

I keep being surprised by how rare that attitude apparently is. I asked advice on improving the aerodinamics on my latest plane project, and I got a lot of answers that - while competent - clearly denoted that everyone who was answering had a single specific kind of plane in mind: something that starts on the runway, goes to orbit, flies back to the runway. Some even got to laythe, but without any intention of flying around the place, just land, plant a flag, and return.

"share your rovers" has been voted thread of the month, but few people posted on it. And except for my model, all of them were very small, clearly not intended for long distances. it seems nobody is interested in driving a rover on long distances. indeed, i got the record for most science on a jool 5 run because i did drive a rover on every single biome on tylo and vall, and nobody else did.

even in the "what did you do today" thread, rovers (or leisure, exploration planes) are virtually unseen. While the sharing of space stations and spaceplanes is very crowded - though each and every one of those space planes are only meant to be launched from the runway to orbit and back. i'm also, apparently, the only one who cares about putting in a crew module with large windows, so I can drive in first person perspective.

 

I'd like to discuss, is my passion for surface exploration really so rare? Or are there other people who like driving rovers for long distances, and they just never dared to make a coming-out? Why are there so few people who like exploring surfaces?

For me, exploring surfaces is a natural consequence of space exploration. sure, we got there and planted a flag on it. great acheivement, but it doesn't tell us all that much. going there and being able to move around, that a greater achievement. I feel that a lander that lands and moves around is inherently superior than a lander who lands and does nothing else. To the point that even when I don't want to explore, i still like it more if I have the chance. just because it makes my vehicle better.

It can also be very relaxing.

I can understand, though, that after a while the surface of any given body feels samey, and it can grow dull.

 

By the way, sometimes I also name places, especially when I like where I'm driving. On Vall I have mount godzilla, batman pass, the mohawk mountains, the shadar logoth trail. Am I the only one to name places?

[Just Jim]

Speaking as a player, and not a Squad employee... you are not alone!
I love driving and exploring in rovers, especially on the Mun. That's my favorite CB to drive around by far, and I even documented my circumnavigating it in my fan-fiction story.
I also name many features I see... but that's just me. It's not official canon or anything. 

[Guest]

It's half the game for me. Rovers for Mun, Ike, Vall, Eeloo, Moho, and Tylo, helicopters and prop planes for Eve, RCS-powered floaty probes for Gill, Minmus, Bop, and Pol, SSTOs and submarines for Laythe, VTOLs for Duna... so many ways to go about it! I just wish there was more to see and find there, at some point one cluster of blueberries looks much like any other cluster of blueberries...

Edited May 11, 2021 by Guest

[Caerfinon]

I like exploring surfaces so much, I rarely ever even leave Kerbin. So much to see and do from an aircraft! 

Edited May 11, 2021 by Caerfinon

[Guest]

I like the idea of exploring the surfaces and I have done it, but unfortunately the actual method of doing it doesn’t make it particularly fun or interesting.

Rovers are way too slow (realistic yes I know) and there’s no stock autopilot or auto “hold down accelerate” option, forcing you to use something like MJ. Then just as you’re getting somewhere the stupid rover flips over and gets destroyed. Of course you wouldn’t tour around Earth using an RC car so it’s not a criticism of the gameplay. 

The other point as mentioned is there isn’t much variety on the surfaces.

[Curveball Anders]

31 minutes ago, FruitGoose said:

I like the idea of exploring the surfaces and I have done it, but unfortunately the actual method of doing it doesn’t make it particularly fun or interesting.

Rovers are way too slow (realistic yes I know) and there’s no stock autopilot or auto “hold down accelerate” option, forcing you to use something like MJ. Then just as you’re getting somewhere the stupid rover flips over and gets destroyed. Of course you wouldn’t tour around Earth using an RC car so it’s not a criticism of the gameplay. 

The other point as mentioned is there isn’t much variety on the surfaces.

Ah, but designing a rover that isn't slow and lumbering (and doesn't flip over and die) is a "Challenge(tm)"

Just look at Ginny and Percy at Duna Mars today.

Like travelling ISRU (hrm, Moxie).

 

Edited May 11, 2021 by Curveball Anders

[Guest]

39 minutes ago, Curveball Anders said:

Ah, but designing a rover that isn't slow and lumbering (and doesn't flip over and die) is a "Challenge(tm)"

Just look at Ginny and Percy at Duna Mars today.

Like travelling ISRU (hrm, Moxie).

 

This is true. Actually a heli-rover would be quite good, although I doubt NASA had link the blade deployment angle to the throttle action to make it half useable, only to find to blades staying where they are and the rover spinning around instead.

[Curveball Anders]

12 minutes ago, FruitGoose said:

This is true. Actually a heli-rover would be quite good, although I doubt NASA had link the blade deployment angle to the throttle action to make it half useable, only to find to blades staying where they are and the rover spinning around instead.

This bordering on 'out of KSP' but, getting a heli on Duna is hard.
I managed with a quad and kind of cheated using the OP gyros and the KAL to level out the reaction.

(On Duna, not Mars)

I still regard it as "A Challenge(tm)"

 

[Dientus]

I like it, just am terrible at it. When I get home, if I get a chance I will show you my designs on your other thread.

 

The other part of my problem is patience. Running my sub-par rovers gets aggravating so I rarely have the patience to go far from the landing site.

 

Added.. heli rover eh?

Edited May 11, 2021 by Dientus
added comment

[king of nowhere]

the qeustion then becomes, if there are quite a bunch of people liking rover and surface exploration, why don't i see more of that in missions and spacecrafts?

[Superfluous J]

I like the IDEA of exploring the surface with a rover.

However currently there is almost no reason to and the mechanics for doing it are not enjoyable. Couple those and naaw, I'll land, science, and leave TYVM.

[Cavscout74]

I enjoy roving/exploring sometimes.  Some places are really nice looking, but others get too boring after a while.  Usually the bigger the rover, the better - up to full blown mobile bases:

This thing was pretty fun to drive on Kerbin & Mun.  Never got around to landing one on Duna, but I'm sure it would've been a lot of fun there as well.   On Kerbin, I actually broke off deployed solar panels from driving too fast

This one was also a lot of fun - test version was launched to Mun, then the "real" version was sent to Moho.  The landing cradle used a pair of BG joints and a clamp-o-tron jr to secure the rover, so it was actually capable of biome hopping if there was enough fuel.  It was built to protect crews from the intense sunlight on Moho - structure panels shield all the crew areas from overhead sunlight, even if there isn't any real game mechanic for it. 

[king of nowhere]

5 minutes ago, Cavscout74 said:

This one was also a lot of fun - test version was launched to Mun, then the "real" version was sent to Moho.  The landing cradle used a pair of BG joints and a clamp-o-tron jr to secure the rover, so it was actually capable of biome hopping if there was enough fuel.  It was built to protect crews from the intense sunlight on Moho - structure panels shield all the crew areas from overhead sunlight, even if there isn't any real game mechanic for it. 

 

 

have you considered looking up the kerbalism mod? among other things, it adds radiations, and those panels would indeed protect your rover from solar storms. though moho has a magnetic field that does the job. other places lack it

[OHara]

7 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

I asked advice on improving the aerodynamics on my latest plane project, and I got a lot of answers that - while competent - clearly denoted that everyone who was answering had a single specific kind of plane in mind: something that starts on the runway, goes to orbit, flies back to the runway.

It may have been only your title "Improving a spaceplane" that made people think of the classic spaceplane problem.  Local exploration vehicles are usually separate from the interplanetary craft. I think NASA has an aircraft on Mars, for example, but it was carried there in some other craft. 

In KSP, I think, a lot of the fun is the designing of craft that work in different situations.  So even if there is very little to see on Laythe, players find it rewarding to design a submarine and a craft to send it there --- and spend much less time exploring with the sub than they spent designing it.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

This one was also a lot of fun - test version

That’s an awesome design, although not so much a rover but more a rolling battle fortress 

[kerbiloid]

~40 km is currently the longest trip of any lunar or Martian rover irl.

At least two were dusted and got out of power, at least one has found a pit, several were used by the Apollo crews and abandoned.

At least one of them required a minor repair of the gear parts, and the selfies of at least one of them show wheels consisting of wire and holes.

The horizon at the Earth is at 5 km, on the Moon it's at 2.5 km.

40 km / (2 * pi) ~= 6 km.

So, irl one can just do a  victory lap around the lander, keeping it in field of view and evading pits and stones, then return back.

Also all known crewed rover trips were/are planned so that if the rover breaks, its crew can return to the base by foot before the end of the day, i.e. same 5 kilometers far.

The regolith is a very bad thing, unlike the Earth ground.

Edited May 12, 2021 by kerbiloid

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

~40 km is currently the longest trip of any lunar or Martian rover irl.

At least two were dusted and got out of power, at least one has found a pit, several were used by the Apollo crews and abandoned.

At least one of them required a minor repair of the gear parts, and the selfies of at least one of them show wheels consisting of wire and holes.

The horizon at the Earth is at 5 km, on the Moon it's at 2.5 km.

40 km / (2 * pi) ~= 6 km.

So, irl one can just do a  victory lap around the lander, keeping it in field of view and evading pits and stones, then return back.

So what? That's just what we've done so far irl.

irl we have limited money, building a rocket takes years, and we can't risk the lives of our astronauts and reload the game if something goes wrong. irl we never sent people past the moon, and even that was a titanic accomplishment that required a significant fraction of the gdp of a major nation.

in this game we routinely send crews to the farthest reaches of the system. I don't see why we can't have crewed rovers going around a planet.

[purpleivan]

I think I indulged my tastes for roaming landscapes all in one go when I set out on the Kerbin Sorta-Circumnavigation. That was a trip around the entire coastline of the mainland of Kerbin by boat, which is a far greater distance than it sounds.

62 legs (it was jet powered so needed refuelling by tanker planes and drops from orbit) over 3 months and playing it most days.

The boat carried a rover too, so there was land exploration as well, which was mostly Bob driving it up mountains near the coast.

Edited May 12, 2021 by purpleivan

[kerbiloid]

12 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

So what? That's just what we've done so far irl.

So, this is the typical maximum distance turning a realistic rover made of metal into a piece of scrap. The money and risk play no role here.

Of course, in KSP we have a magically unlimited lifespan of wheels and Kerbals.

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

So, this is the typical maximum distance turning a realistic rover made of metal into a piece of scrap. The money and risk play no role here.

no. i don't care how bad regolith is, we can move on rocky deserts on far greater distances. you are failing to take into account several factors here:

1) as we have limited funding, our rovers must be light. very light. this means thin wheels. if they made curiosity's wheels 1 cm thick instead of paper-thin to save weight, they would be barely scratched. of course, the rover would be unable to move for the weight. which brings us to

2) we have limited power, again because we can't afford many power sources. so we also have to make things light, and frail.

3) those missions lasted years with no maintenance. Seriously, this must be stressed. leave your car out, see how long it takes before it stops working. i guarantee, it will last much less than the mars rovers. and yet, you can stretch the operational life of your car well above 15 years with regular maintenance. We lost many rovers because they got dust on their solar panels, this would have been easily fixed by a a crew member with a broom.

4) those rovers moved very slowly. their top speeds were on the order of 100 m/day. not because they could not go faster, but because they were piloted remotely. which means that mission control instructs the rover to move forward 10 meters, the data is sent through the deep space network, then the rover moves, snaps some pictures, send them back to mission control. mission control looks at the pictures, run a risk assessment, then plan a new trajectory for the next 10 meters, which is as far as they can accurately see obstacles based on the pictures. and the process is slow. a pilot there would be able to drive as long as there is battery. also, mission control is driving a rover costing billions of dollars, so they have to be more careful than we are.

5) those rovers are not supposed to run, but to perform science. and performing science takes time, and causes them to stop for months in the same location. in ksp we don't have those same requirements, as science is done istantaneously. kerbalism changes that, and you'd need to stand still 90 days in the same biome to finish the measurements. i don't even try.

6) because of factors 5 and 4, those rovers are not going to move around much. so they will take several years to run a few km. and then they will stop working for other reasons. so, there's no need for big, sturdy wheels, and we can make them lighter. see again 1

 

there is absolutely no reason a large rover with a pilot able to run maintenance and a decent power supply could not cover thousands of kilometers. indeed, it's exactly what happens in the martian, and i've seen a lot of science reviews about that book, with detailed analysis of what can and cannot be done, nitpicking pretty much everything, and yet nobody among the many reviewers - all people with solid science credentials - ever raised any problem about the capacity of a rover to last that long.

Edited May 12, 2021 by king of nowhere

[kerbiloid]

20 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

i don't care how bad regolith is, we can move on rocky deserts on far greater distances

The Earth cliffs and deserts are even not close as bad as the nasty regolith.

The Earth sand particles are round and nice, they are polished by wind and water. They just slide along the parts.

The regolith particles are abrasive crystal hedgehogs which stick to any surface, clog any pipes and joints.
You can't just broom they by hands, they stick to any surface as a sticky mess and start corrupting the mechanical parts.

Also they are electrostatic (because they have sharp pikes), this makes they even more sticky and can damage electronics.

Very, just very bad the regolith is.

It's a natural rover eater.

And stones? Those sharp, unpolished stones, crashing the wheels.

Edited May 12, 2021 by kerbiloid

[king of nowhere]

5 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The Earth cliffs and deserts are even not close as bad as the nasty regolith.

The Earth sand particles are round and nice, they are polished by wind and water. They just slide along the parts.

The regolith particles are abrasive crystal hedgehogs which stick to any surface, clog any pipes and joints.
You can't just broom they by hands, they stick to any surface as a sticky mess and start corrupting the mechanical parts.

Also they are electrostatic (because they have sharp pikes), this makes they even more sticky and can damage electronics.

Very, just very bad the regolith is.

It's a natural rover eater.

And stones? Those sharp, unpolished stones, crashing the wheels.

i know that. still, what i said stands. our rovers last decades on mars, and that's how long they can last. if in those decades they only move a few tens of km, it's because of other constrains caused by weight, money, and mission profile. regolith is bad, but it's not some kind of magic superacid eating rovers.

as for the sharp, unpolished stones, that's exactly why i brought our deserts into the equations; they also have very sharp stones, and we drive over them at greater speed, and we drive over them with greater gravity, and they eventually wear down our tires, but we are not limited to 40 km

also, while regolith is often electrostatically charged and tends to stick to surfaces, it's again not as bad as you make it. martian wind can remove regolith, it can't be stuck that hard on the solar panels.

[kerbiloid]

11 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

our rovers last decades on mars

They are mostly standing still. And 40 km is all what they can do by moving before various reasons kill them.

And the Earth sand doesn't kill your transmission when you ride on stones.

***

(I would be glad to see a real rover trip along the Nergal Vallis or around the Olympus Mons, i,.e.  1 500 .. 2 000 km irl)

[256]

Dude, my Minmus base in my previous save was one giant rover, with three deployable special purpose mini-rovers. Safe to say, I like roving around.

 

[king of nowhere]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They are mostly standing still. And 40 km is all what they can do by moving before various reasons kill them.

if that's the case, how many rovers did we lose because of the regolith?

that's right, none. not one came ever close to be destroied by it. they all died for other reasons, and those reasons were either related to time, or to terrain traps. the closer to it is curiosity's wheels, which, as i mentioned before, could easily have been fixed by making those wheels thicker, at an extra weight.

i reinstate, there is absolutely no reason we could not make a manned rover for longer distances, except convenience. in ksp you've got to fish around for biomes. on real planets, you get enough stuff to explore close to you, there's really no reason to move too much. and a rover capable of it would be too heavy for our current budgets.

and consider this: we can launch a rocket through space and land it on another planet with a rover. do you think we couldn't make a vehicle capable of withstanding sharp sand for more than 40 kilometers if we really wanted?