Something has Happened on Bop - A Rover Circumnavigation

[Sp1f]

Bop.

On the morning of Friday, the 24th of February, 2023 CE (or 000y, 000d of the Kerbin calendar), an event occurred on Bop that changed everything.

Nobody observed it at the time. The astronomers of the KSC tracking station were all at Valentina's KSP2 launch party. When they staggered in the next day, still reeking of Bob's bathtub hydrazine cocktails, and trained their telescopes on the moons of Jool, they were all like "OMG". 

Bob hypothesized that the changes to Bop's surface were the result of a large asteroid impact.

He was laughed out of the room. Everybody knows that there's no such thing as asteroids. They might exist someday, but not today. However, little green men are all too real. The only reasonable explanation is...

AN ALIEN DOOMSDAY WEAPON.

The survival of the Kerbal species depends on learning more about the Bop Event. The bold Kerbonauts of the Kerbal Space Force have been tasked with a perilous mission - to travel to Bop, circumnavigate the moon by rover, and search for anomalies which could explain the Bop event.

 

Hello fellow KSP fans! I'm sooo exciting to finally be playing early access KSP2. For my first significant interplanetary mission, I will be attempting a rover circumnavigation of Bop. Realistically, I do not expect this to be successful in the current build of KSP2, but what the heck, I'm going to try. And when I probably find myself thwarted by bugs or poor wheel performance or whatever, I will continue to make attempts in subsequent game builds as updates come out, until this works. Along the way I hope to identify the challenges to this sort of admittedly niche playstyle and report lots of bugs. Hopefully this is both helpful feedback for the developers and a fun series of experiments for me. Oh, and when I am ultimately successful, I hope to qualify for completion of the Elcano challenge, assuming that the challenge carries over from KSP1 with similar rules.

So without further ado, let's begin this journey...

 

Coming soon - Chapter 1 - Low gravity rover tests on Minmus...

[obney kerman]

40 minutes ago, Sp1f said:

AN ALIEN DOOMSDAY WEAPON.

Spoiler

You know, just last week I was talking with a friend about how funny it'd be if the Kraken on Bop was alive again in KSP2. I fear we may have gotten what we wished for.

Good luck with the rover! Looking forward to seeing where this goes!

[Sp1f]

Chapter 1 - Testing Rovers (and being thwarted by the Kraken)

So I've been having a great time playing around with rovers on Kerbin. It's been fun, but also definitely frustrating. 

The first thing that needs to be said is that, unfortunately, the rover wheels all perform much worse in KSP2 than the same wheels did in KSP1. They are all extremely slow.  As with many things, I'm not sure if it is intended for the sake of realism, or simply that they haven't been fully developed. I have heard some folks on the forums praising the slow wheels with the realism argument. for my two cents, a lot of people who play KSP and other sims are looking for realistic gameplay, and I respect that. But a lot of us just want to use rovers to have races in multiplayer, or do stunts, or scale mountains or crater walls. We want wheels that go fast and have good traction and suspension. There's room for both options in KSP2. So wheels could use some work.

Fortunately, in Bop gravity I am not looking to go super fast, or I end up doing spectacular jumps and crashing spectacular crashes off every bump in the landscape.

The only wheel that seems halfway worth using without a method of propulsion is the new RoveMax TR-4 Truck wheel. I was able to get to speeds around 30mps on flat ground with these wheels. They are super wide, which is nice. They look cool. But they, too, could barely handle even slight slopes on Kerbin with the traction level cranked up.

My first semi-viable seeming rover was Rover 5.

This was a fun bug where the ground painted over me for awhile. I ignored it until it went away.

Rover 5 could also pop wheelies. A trippy effect happened while driving around the KSC where flowers would pop out of the ground and grow in front of me, everywhere I went.

I built a skycrane, thinking I would take it to Minmus to see how it would handle in lower gravity before sending it on to Bop.

I launched it on a lovely evening from the KSC. 

And then, at 21500m above sea level, disaster struck. At that altitude, regardless of ascent profile or speed, every launch attempt was either destroyed outright or the ship broke in half. It was like hitting a wall.  I tried over and over again, to strut the joints that were failing, to approach that altitude differently, to change various things about my build that I thought might be causing it. Finally I managed to not be destroyed, but a jolt still ran through my ship, and I lost all steering control, and the camera could no longer focus on my ship. 

So, disappointing, to say the least. I launched a simple rocket and confirmed this doesn't happen necessarily with other stuff, just with Rover 5. So I decided to build a completely different rover from scratch. This is rover 6. The ruggedized wheels, as I said, only can get up to about 10 m/s on Kerbin, their acceleration is abominable, and they are completely incapable of climbing even the slightest slope. Which is a let down, because they were probably the nicest wheels in KSP1. But I figured I'm going to be going slow on Bop anyway, and added an Ion engine in hopes that it would help with acceleration up hills. Its also a more compact design, a bit lower part count, and easier to get to orbit.

The launch vehicle was much more streamlined than Rover 5's.

A beautiful night launch. Rover 6 was much more stable in the ascent. She banked into a nice gravity turn with geometric precision, and then, at 21.5km...

So as of my first report, no luck whatsoever even getting a rover into orbit. My next plan is to send a rover up in 3 separate launches, One for the rover, one for the sky crane, and a third for the transfer stage. Then dock them in orbit. And I won't be screwing around on Minmus testing either. If I can get a rover in space, it's heading straight to Bop for the first attempt.

I'm going to take a step back from beating my head against this wall for a bit though. In the next chapter I will send a minimalistic ship to get eyes on Bop and hopefully spot some anomalies from low orbit.  Got to keep an eye out for those evil space aliens while we work through the problem of how to get a rover there.

Edited February 28, 2023 by Sp1f

[Sp1f]

Chapter 3 - 1st Rover Landing on Bop

As of my last entry, I had been ready to give up on getting a rover into orbit, due to  the devastating 21.5km bug. I was planning on just sending a minimalistic. rocket there just to at least take a look at the moon. I changed my mind, though, and decided to try one more rover design. Rover 7 I guess. This time I took a different approach, trying to minimize my part count, rather than trying to build a nice rover. If I could get any rover to Bop, I figured that would be progress.

My final launch vehicle was 42 parts (or something like that).

This time, the 21.5km kraken attack did not happen, although the rocket was oddly unstable between 8-20km or so. Not sure why, and think it may be due to a bug as well, as the build was straightforward. After several attempts, i managed to get to orbit, where things got easier (for awhile).

Getting a Jool encounter was easy peasy. I even had a trajectory on the map after the SOI (huzzah!). This made me briefly consider attempting a gravity assist off Laythe or Tylo, but in the end I decided not to tempt the kraken.

Ditching the ascent stage and burning for Jool.

Jool is really something else in KSP2. Mind blown.

More KSP2 porn. Love that new large nuclear engine.

One of several maneuver nodes I created to make the transfer to Bop. Here is where bugs started making things difficult. As long as I did not load a save, things behaved as they should, but when loading saves my inclination would change, making it difficult to get an intercept. Unfortunately, I had to reload several times before I managed it, making repeated plane changes, It wasn't a mission ending bug, but a frustrating one.

Burning for Bop

And getting an orbit.

After ditching the transfer stage, peering into the giant crater. No sign of any little green men yet.

Circularizing. Unfortunately was a waste of fuel, as my orbital stats began wildly and apparently randomly began changing every time I loaded a save or came out of timewarp. The game also would randomly decide I was in a landed state and cause my trajectory to disappear. I intended to land in the big crater with some precision, but I realized quickly that that would be unfeasible.

Surface detail on Bop. Very pretty.

Valentina was pleased to be there.

Setting her down nice and easy.

After landing and jettisoning the sky crane, my rover began tumbling end over end down the slope. The controls were completely unresponsive, and the roll could not be stopped. If I had had the patience, maybe I could have circumnavigated the moon like that. At least p.a.i.g.e. acknowledges it as a successful landing.

#KSP2WeeklyChallenge complete! This was my first landing anywhere btw (other than Kerbin).

I observed this weird phenomenon on Bop. These little puffs of gas would appear, poof for a minute or so, then disappear. Valentina is off to investigate. Related to the alien doomsday weapon? Perhaps...

Location of the first landing for reference.

So I think this will be the last update before we get a patch or two. Just getting a rover to Bop was very challenging due to the bugs, and the surface seemed pretty unstable in general. Also I don't know why I couldn't control my rover on the ground. I expected my first effort to fail, so no biggie. Later, when the game is in a little better state, I'll give it another shot and continue to update this post.

Until then, fly safe everyone!

Edited March 1, 2023 by Sp1f

[Sp1f]

A little more on Rover 7 and the troubles she had. And her ultimate fate.

Rover 7's wheels were fine, if slow, in testing on the launch pad. But  during the flight they jittered around annoyingly all the way from the launch pad to Bop. I assumed they would stop when we landed, but that didn't happen. See the video below for the example.  After landing, it tumbled slowly down the hill like this for about 2km. I couldn't control it at all - which I think I have figured out. The RoveMate probe core may not have a reaction wheel in KSP2. I thought that it did in KSP1. I'll definitely need a reaction wheel for Bop.

Valentina, after exploring a bit, followed Rover 7 down the mountainside, attempting bravely to stop it's roll so she could at least try to drive it a bit. Then when I hit > to try to speed up the process, the rover just vanished. RIP Rover 7.

Valentina looks at the spot where Rover 7 used to be as she contemplates what it will be like to spend the rest of her life on Bop with only a third of a tank of EVA propellant left.

On a positive note, I will say that I do find the surface beautiful. The bigger rocks look cool, the landscape looks interesting. And EVAing around in a jetpack in low gravity feels so much smoother and more intuitive, even though the controls are the same.

[Sp1f]

Chapter 3: Rover Testing

I'm still waiting for a few bugs to be patched before I make another run at Bop, but I'm still working on this project by trying to build better rovers.

One idea that I played around with for awhile was that since the rover wheels are all so bad, maybe I should make a rover without wheels. Look at this magnificent beast.

Elegant in it's simplicity, no? This thing could go 30 m/s no problem  and climb hills as if they weren't even there. In many respects it was my best performing rover yet. The one thing that it could not do, unfortunately, is steer.

So I went back to the drawing board and made Rover 11. This is my first nuclear rover. She could handle nicely at speeds up to 40 m/s on Kerbin. Here I let her rip on the runway. 

Sadly, she couldn't handle the steep slopes near the KSC even under full throttle. Sorry, it was dark and Rover 11 was wearing her camo paintjob.

I was ok with that, though. This rover was intended for Bop and I figured it would perform much better in low gravity. So I headed off to Minmus to try it in a lower gravity environment.

The landing went pretty well. The only bug I experienced on the way over was the thing where the trajectory disappears from the next SOI. My sky crane didn't jettison successfully either, but that was my own bad design. I was able to shake it off.

Rover 11 performed quite well on Minmus. She could climb fairly steep slopes decently even without the engine.

The extra acceleration was really nice though. Even just twitching the throttle gave a nice boost.

And it could do flips! First controlled rover flips in KSP2!

This was the first rover design that I have really been pleased with in KSP2. I expect to take  some variation of it to Bop after we get some bug fixes. After making decent time for 10km or so, I realized that I hadn't EVA'ed anyone to plant a flag. So I put her in park and Bill climbed out the hatch. He descended the ladder to the surface...then through the surface, to a different plane of existence.

It was dark and Bill was scared.

He was slowly falling through layers of unbeing, expecting to be consumed by the Kraken at any moment. But that didn't happen, and after awhile he got the idea to  turn on his jetpack. He was able to climb back up into normal space, but when he got there, he saw Rover 11 being thrown up from the surface by some unknown force.

Well, this situation clearly called for a quick load, right? Bill thought so too. Big mistake, as it turns out. The wheels fell off Rover 11. Every save going way back to orbit did the same.

So, long story short - I'm really pleased about Rover 11, and I think I'm starting to understand some of the principles of rover building in KSP1.

1. Little rovers and little wheels are meant for noodling around the landing site a bit. They are probably meant to be slow and useless.
2. Expedition style rovers need to be big, use the new truck wheels, and have a source of propulsion adequate to the situation in which they are expected to be used.

Fly dangerously my friends.

[Sp1f]

Chapter 4 - Back to Bop after the first patch

Patch 1 has been out for a little while and the reports seem good. I was thinking I would wait for another patch before my next run on Bop, but then I saw that NaughtyMonster had completed the first recorded KSP2 rover circumnavigation of an orbital body by driving around Minmus. Congrats to @NaughtyMonster.

Anyway, this convinced me that my mission is probably feasible now. I hopped to the VAB and created Rover 14.

The design is similar to Rover 11, as you can see. With great difficulty, after many attempts, I managed to get Rover 14 into orbit. I kept losing control and flipping around uncontrollably or just spontaneously exploding on the way up. It was very frustrating, because I have no real idea what was going on, or if it was due to bugs or features. Anyway, I finally got up there and headed off to Bop. I didn't take any screenshots of the launch, unfortunately. But here's Jeb making his transfer burn.

And getting a Jool orbit. The transfer went very smoothly and I did not encounter any bugs up to this point. Although my retractable solar panels wouldn't open for some reason. They said they were blocked. I had some RTGs too, so no worries. And I've heard a rumor that electric use isn't even in the game yet anyway.

Matching Bop's inclination. I had a bug here where I could not see the ascending and descending nodes. I had to reboot the game to fix this.

Getting an encounter.

There she is again.

Decelerating into orbit.

Mirkwood Crater (yes I named it) looms off to the side.

Apparently,  parts of the surface are holograms. The sun shines right through them. Evidence of little green men? Surely. But what does it mean?

I circularized in a high orbit. One annoying thing about Bop is that you can only time warp to 4x unless you are quite high up. 50km, I believe. Also, when I dropped out of time warp at a low altitude, my wheels spontaneously fell off, and I had to go back to an earlier save. So I set a 115km orbit to be as safe as possible and to be able to timewarp at a reasonable pace.

After timewarping until I got a little sunlight on that side of the moon, I went in for a landing on the rim of Mirkwood Crater. At this point, I realized my sky crane was missing. I designed this rover with a sky crane for a nice horizontal landing. At some point though, it disappeared. Whether I accidentally removed it in the VAB without realizing, or whether something happened to it during the mission, I do not know. Anyway, I still had plenty of delta vee in my transfer stage, and Bop is pretty forgiving. I was just afraid to timewarp on the way down, because I didn't want my wheels to fall off again, so I had to do the whole thing in 1x.

I don't know why my command module is highlighted, It just did that on its own, and there didn't seem to be any way to turn it off. Anyway, the landing went well.

Here's a video of the landing for anyone who wants to see it. The scenery was nice on the way down.

Of course, Jeb immediately had to send it into Mirkwood Crater.

Oh no! Mirkwood Crater has many hidden dangers, it seems. Perhaps, it would be wiser to go around.

Anyway, my next step is to press F9. Will my wheels immediately fall off, ending the mission? Or will I drive onwards to victory? Tune in for the next chapter to find out!

[Sp1f]

Progress!

After my last update, I got a little distracted by everything else in life and didn’t play KSP for a few months. Last night, I finally got around to loading up my save and checking whether Rover 4 was still functioning in the current build.

It was right where I left it, on the rim of Big Crater. I had pretty much decided that descending into the crater in one piece was unlikely to work, but decided to give it another shot just for fun.

To my surprise, I was successful. I started out riding the brakes, but before long I was accelerating out of control. After launching off a bump I was more or less in flight, so I spun around and used my nuclear engine to decelerate until I got the wheels back on the ground. In this manner I was able to roll backwards down the 26km near-vertical cliff face into the crater without exploding.

Next objective is to find the lowest point and commune with the kraken there. Then, hopefully, drive back out in one piece and complete my circumnavigation.

More updates (and pictures) coming soon!

 

 

 

Edited July 28, 2023 by Sp1f

[Sp1f]

Regrettably, I didn't get any screenshots or video from the first half of my descent into Big Crater. I only started recording after I started believing that I would survive. 

I had to keep giving it a little gas to keep the wheels on the ground.

Catching a little vacuum as things start to level out.

Stopping on the first real ledge, still rolling backwards

Group photo. Big mistake. Had to F9. It's dangerous to leave the ship. Strange things happen down here.

Seeing some odd looking rocks on the crater bottom.

Doing some flips near a cool mini-crater

Camp 2. About halfway from Big Cliff to the impact site.

Bop is fun to drive on when you get the hang of it! Quite challenging too.

 

[Sp1f]

I'm a novice at making videos but decided to try to put together a video of my drive so far. 

 

[Astroneer08]

On 3/1/2023 at 10:38 AM, Sp1f said:

although the rocket was oddly unstable between 8-20km or so.

I've been having this problem too.

It would just flip over and over.

[TwoCalories]

I really wonder if there's anything in Bop crater. The developers did say that there were more Easter Eggs we haven't discovered yet.

[Sp1f]

Chapter...uh...let's call it 5 - Mirkwood Crater

Some of this was already covered in my video, but to catch us up in this thread's original format I'm going to share some screenshots.

Soo..... in our last episode, Jeb and friends descended Big Cliff and then proceeded from Camp 1 to Camp 2.

They then proceeded towards the Black Spot, the apparent epicenter of the calamity.

The terrain remained rugged.

There was a weird green structure looking thing in the Black Spot area that looked like it might be an anomaly, so Jeb laid in a course.

When the arrived, it appeared to be a strange green crevice. Elbro theorized that the green coloration might be evidence of enriched kerbonium, suggesting that the blast was caused by a kermonukular weapon of immense power. Clearly, cause for concern. Gilgee thought it was reflected light from Jool. As we have already established, Gilgee is dumber than a bag of rocks.

As you can see, the Green Crevice is a notable feature of the crater.

Unfortunately, after pausing there for a moment, our heroes were mysteriously assaulted by the Kraken, and Rover 14 spontaneously exploded.

Good thing for the F9 key. Next, our heroes proceeded to another spot that seemed likely to have a hidden anomaly - the crater at the center of the crater at the center of Mirkwood Crater.

Jeb caught some wicked vacuum on the way there.

Upon arrival at the Divet, there were no apparent anomalies. The area was fairly nondescript other than a few boulders.

But then something weird happened. Rover 14 fell through the ground into a weird nether space below the space-time continuum. Jeb gunned the engines to try to climb back to reality, but they had no effect. Rover 14 sank uncontrollably.

Anyway, F9. I will say that other than these two situations, Bop's surface has been free of any serious bugs. It has been stable, But it is weird that the two occasions when the game broke happened exactly in the two spots that I specifically investigated because they seemed like logical locations for easter eggs. I can't even begin to speculate what that might mean but it is weird.

After this I began the climb back out of the crater. There were more flips.

Eventually I reached a rim of sorts, but the terrain continued to slope steeply up.

Eventually I climbed over a mountain ridge to the dark side of Gilly. I have been heavily, heavily dependant on my nuclear engine for this entire journey. Rover 14's wheels have very little traction here. To accelerate, I need the engine, To brake, I need the engine most of the time. This adventure is probably not going to qualify as an Elcano Challenge because of the use of upward facing engines, but oh well, it's still fun regardless. Maybe someone more clever than me can figure out how to make a rover work on Bop without a rocket engine, but honestly I can't see any other way to do it. I do try to keep things in the spirit of a rover expedition by using my engine only when the wheels are on the ground as much as possible, but nevertheless it sometimes feels less like a rover and more like a spaceship with wheels.

Point being, I'm burning fuel. Just at the point where I crested the mountain ridge, I have 5 delta-vee left, but I'm pointed downhill.

Route so far:

I think I'm about a 3rd of the way around Bop. In the next chapter, I'm going to see how much further I can get on gravity alone, as I'm all but out of fuel. When I need to climb again, I'm probably going to need a new rover.

 

 

 

 

[Socraticat]

On 8/5/2023 at 8:08 PM, Sp1f said:

Maybe someone more clever than me can figure out how to make a rover work on Bop without a rocket engine

I don't know if I'm more clever, but I do have a rover for low gravity moons. It managed Gilly, so now I'm curious about whether or not I could conquer Bop. 

[DylanSP]

10 hours ago, Socraticat said:

It managed Gilly, so now I'm curious about whether or not I could conquer Bop. 

That's what I was thinking when I saw your video.

[Socraticat]

So... I finally managed to get to Bop.

The same craft I used to reach Gilly is now infested. Disassembly on decouple, excessive wobble on the rover (so strange), fairing glitches, parts shifting on warp...

I finally landed on Bop and escaped the larger side of the big crater. It took forever because I was getting a feel for the settings the rover needed and I forgot about setting the SAS to prograde, so It wasn't as smooth as it could have been until I remembered to set it. Probably because I was too worried about getting up the dang hill first. I used some methalox to get there with my downward engines since my biggest issue was managing wheelies up the hill. Really should have set the prograde sooner, then I could have used less, or zero methalox.

It will make it, but the vessel needs tweaking since the last release. After taking all day just to get to Bop I'm not sure I want to finagle the circumnavigation until after the next update.

I did have fun though.  Joolshine is so pretty. I'll post some pictures in the daily later.

[Socraticat]

On 8/5/2023 at 8:08 PM, Sp1f said:

I'm going to see how much further I can get on gravity alone

So I did rework my Gilly Rover. Rolling all the way around helps you consider some modifications... I also had to smash a few bugs that were too much weight to carry.

 

I certainly hope you get back to this. I'm curious about the rest of your saga! Keep going!

[Astroneer08]

Maybe you could try engines that forced the rover into the ground for maximum traction, maybe it could help climb cliffs.

They'd have to be efficient though.

Edited August 9, 2023 by Astroneer08

[Sp1f]

Chapter 6 - The Last Ride of Rover 14

With a last puff of fuel, Jeb got Rover 14 rolling downhill.

I was actually able to drive for a surprisingly long distance. Again, it's hard to be sure exactly how long. It would be so nice to be able to plant flags and see them on the map as placemarkers, with coordinates and stuff, like in KSP1.

Anyhoo, the light was getting a little spotty as our heroes rounded the curve of the moon away from the sun.

The driving was still really fun. I haven't kept up with the details of every patch, but each time I come back to this, I feel like my rover drives a little better. I honestly don't know if improvements have been made or if I'm just getting better with practice, but either way. Rover 14 handled beautifully while coasting down this long descent on zero fuel. I was able to keep speed under control , do some flips, and had a great time.

I don't remember this for sure, but were there always dust plumes behind the wheels while driving? Maybe the low angle of the sun was making them more noticable. Cool feature, (tracks would be nice though)

They got about to here.

Then unfortunately, while I zoomed out to take this screenshot...something bad happened.

Rover 14 was in small pieces. Whether she crashed into something while I zoomed out, or whether the kraken attacked, I cannot say, but the expedition had come to its end.

Jeb probably could have just used his jetpack to land safely, but as mission commander, he was determined to go down adjacent to his ship.

After falling in a leisurely fashion for several minutes while our heroes contemplated the inevitability of death, Rover 14 crashed into the surface and exploded. Kerbonauts Elbro and Gilgee Kerman were killed instantly in the blast.

Then Jebediah too crashed into the ground and perished. RIP the crew of Rover 14. The first losses of the Bop Program... unless you count Valentina who is believed to have been transported to an alternate universe, where she remains alive, out of jetpack fuel, and extremely bored on an alternate version of Bop. 

Thanks for reading! I've been taking a break from KSP2 but still having fun with it. Just had to come back and wrap this expedition up before the For Science update. After that one drops I plan to make a serious effort to bring this project to its conclusion. Until then o/

Edited November 4, 2023 by Sp1f

[Sp1f]

...cough...ahem...

Uh hey devs. wouldn't it be really cool if the For Science update included a really cool easter egg for me to discover in the Big/Mirkwood Crater? 

Just saying...

 

[stephensmat]

(Ahem) I believe I have the answer:

 

 

[DylanSP]

On 11/3/2023 at 7:16 PM, Sp1f said:

but were there always dust plumes behind the wheels while driving?

No. They are new after the recent major update. But it's a nice detail for the roving experience.