I drove 240km on Duna. Here's my feedback about the current implementation of ground vehicles and their issues.

[BlackholeKS]

The route:

Spoiler

The vehicle (including some battle scars from crashes I didn't both to revert):

Spoiler

Valentina, previously stranded, is now safely back in orbit, and I have a new in-depth insight into the KSP 2's quirks and issues involving ground rovers, typical surface glitches, and save/load mechanism.

1. The journey took me in excess of 7 real world hours, I didn't count exactly.
2. Using the distance measurements to my vessels as an approximation, I drove approximately 240km, or 120km there and then back.
3. Most of that time was spent loading quicksaves. (The game should really not just infinitely generate new quicksave files; I have had to delete several hundred manually to stop them piling up).
4. The KSP 2 kilometre-floating-zero-reset glitch with rovers is loveing awful and makes long distance ground vehicle journeys like pulling teeth. Every 1000m your rover will spin around, and there's a 30% chance you won't be able to recover.
5. Loading in KSP2 is weird. It often takes a while for the loading quicksave bar to even appear. It happens a lot faster if you load after getting the "vessel crashed" screen. I don't know why this is.
6. The orphaned particle glitch affects rover wheel dust as well as rocket plumes. It is also tied to the local coordinates instead of world ones. When I eventually took off again, I managed to carry the perpetual wheel dust of my rover into the upper atmosphere with me, with it warping back to my lander every kilometer, falling behind, then reappearing again.
7. There are some terrible performance issues with ground rovers. This got better over time, but only after time warping to night for the first time. This was irrespective of graphical settings or other craft being loaded in. Initially I was getting 10 fps.
8. Even with decent 1x framerates, they absolutely tank when using timewarp.
9. Because of the low framerates, even 4x timewarp resulted in the game only running approximately realtime per the in-game clock, so I did essentially the entire drive in "realtime".
10. I am a maniac, but devs, please fix the ground rover bugs next patch, I shouldn't have to be as much of a maniac as I proved to myself I was by stomaching the worst glitches doing this.

Oh, and doing all this somehow entirely broke the KSC! Look, it's all dark now, and my rover wheel dust from Duna has followed me back!

Spoiler

Additionally, attempting to load the rover again on Duna after seeing this broken main menu revealed that it had been turned into a mess of square textures covering the screen, and Valentina was somehow aboard the rover, despite actually being in orbit.

Thankfully, starting the game and loading the most recent save resolved all of this.

Edited January 8 by BlackholeKS

[Periple]

I drove about 2.5 km on Tylo and didn’t encounter the 1000 m bug. I wonder what triggers it exactly?

[Kerbart]

18 minutes ago, Periple said:

I drove about 2.5 km on Tylo and didn’t encounter the 1000 m bug. I wonder what triggers it exactly?

Agree, I've done a couple of 20 km drives in For Science. I did encounter some rollovers but I suspect that was just due to terrain, they didn't seem like the "random" 1000m glitches I encountered before.

[Vortygont]

I agree that devs must pay more attention to rovers, they are very important for serious exploration and will be much more important in colonies update I believe. Based of feedbacks it seems that 1000 physic spin/kick bug happens not in all locations and not with all crafts, maybe physic kisk affects mostly small mass crafts. But I encountered it on Duna and Moho with first small wheels different rovers. I believe devs must fix this bug as soon as possible

 

[Mikki]

1000 meter bug exists on Eve aswell. with smallest rover wheels. 

[bigwhitey95]

You poor stand-up guy. I did a probably 180km return drive from the Duna ‘point of interest’ to the North Pole and back, just to see what the North Pole looks like as you approach it (was actually pretty cool), and yes literally half of the time spent was on reloading quicksaves and backtracking progress because the rover would just randomly spin out.

I landed another rover probably 80km away from a point of interest on Eeloo, and that whole experience with the Duna rover has absolutely discouraged me from trying to reach that point of interest.

[Oak7603]

I've got a mun rover going and my mileage has been different to the OP. I've driven about 20km so far but I've not seen the bugs as above at all. There has only been one time I've had to reload a save and that was due to me seeing how fast the rover could get to and not noticing the edge of a crater.

My issue with the mun rover experience is that it just doesn't feel like you're drivng on a surface. It feels like you're just gliding on ice with no sense of terrain contact at all. In all honesty I've never driven on the mun so I can't say it's not how it would be but I don't think it's right in KSP2. With the medium size wheels and a heavy ish rover, even in low gravity I think a vehicle would turn on a mun surface. If you watch the moon rover driving footage, it turns a lot easier than our rovers do. Our rovers have the right looking motion as they move along, for me it's just the turns and making it feel like we're driving on the a surface.

Does it feel like that on Duna?