Rovers are not fun (yet) :(

[DailyFrankPeter]

I'm going down the list of missions in 0.2, and so far it's been entertaining.

However, rovers... between the precarious wheel physics*, XS trusses not decoupling/losing attached parts, lights not coming on, rover seats trapping Kerbals forever... this is one area of the game that feels frustrating. I can work around not being able to use a part or two on a rocket (there are plenty of others), but here it's too much and I would appreciate some sort of coordinated bugfixing effort looking at the rover experience.

Thanks!

*quite likely the most energy-dense part in KSP2, able launch a rover at ~20m/s with no fuel source at a Kerbal's touch 

Edited January 17, 2024 by DailyFrankPeter

[pg17]

Oh, I feel you!  In my opinion, rovers are a bit of a pain every steps of the way (building, delivering and driving).

In KSP1, driving a rover over something like 80km on Duna ended up so frustrating that it played the biggest role in the reasons I stopped playing the game for years...

Right now (and despite some improvements over KSP1), unless I want to toy with them, I tend to avoid rovers.
Especially for missions & science where I would rather send several landers or "hoppers" than a single rover.

I agree it needs to improve, because, down the road(...map), rovers will become more and more important gameplay wise :

• With colonies, they might become very important to move around site (especially if you consider how huge colonies can be).
• With resources taken into account, the avoidance strategies will become a lot less viable (like sending multiple landers).
• With multiplayer, people are bound to race each other around KSC very early on... and you can be sure it will escalate quickly . To avoid any misunderstanding: I don't think racing should be a gameplay focus for the devs. I think racing will be a consequence because good rovers are even more important for a good multiplayer experience (where you'll probably want to avoid reloading a lot more than in single player).

Also... Rovers are fun! 
Or at least they should be! Not just in theory but in practicality too!

[Superfluous J]

Odd. I basically swore off rovers in KSP1. Any world but Eve, they slipped and slid all over. I tolerated them on Kerbin but that was just to get KSC science.

In KSP2 I've used them on Kerbin and Duna and they were effective on both.

Edited January 18, 2024 by Superfluous J

[pg17]

I probably haven't been particularly lucky with rovers so far (as you can see in this bug report ) and I had bad experiences driving rovers on the Mun (even on the quite flat mares) and Ike (so lower gravity than Kerbin and Duna), but I haven't tried on Duna.

I'll agree that on Kerbin, asides from when bugs like above, issues with seats and EVA phantom forces arose, the driving handling felt better than in KSP1 overall.

[DailyFrankPeter]

11 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

In KSP2 I've used them on Kerbin and Duna and they were effective on both.

Oh, I'm not saying that I can't make them effective - I just slapped 4 wheels radially, upside down and the 'Wheeling and Dealing' mission is done - so I suppose that's effective. 

I'm saying that dabbling in rovers for any extended period of time, especially trying to recreate the likes of an Apollo buggy or Curiosity rover, one is in for a struggle with an unusual concentration of bugs. As compared to trying to recreate a Gemini or Saturn which works pretty much flawlessly. Or compared to dabbling in planes - experimenting with different engine count, wing proportions & angles, etc - which I just had great few hours of fun with and never really felt that anything unflyable is unflyable because of parts not working, not my design being bad.

Edited January 18, 2024 by DailyFrankPeter

[Guest]

I haven't had any significant issues either. I've used them on Tylo and Duna. 

I did notice the issue with the grumble seat -- it does seem to require a lot of space not to trap the kerbal. Fortunately I caught this in testing and was able to adjust my design, but I do think it should be addressed!

[The Aziz]

3 hours ago, DailyFrankPeter said:

As compared to trying to recreate a Gemini or Saturn which works pretty much flawlessly.

Objection, with current docking bugs. 

Mind you, the LRV didn't go that far from the lander, and Mars rovers are VERY slow. I just sent a tiny rover on Laythe, and aside from two minor issues - that stuck moment, which I resolved by turning on the reaction wheels and rolling out from the spot; and the old distance spin bug - it was working flawlessly at top speed (about 9m/s).

I'm guessing some people would like to go fast but... 10m/s is 36km/h, a car in city center speed. 30m/s (about the maximum you can go on medium rovemax wheels) is 100km/h, highway speed. On rough terrain. That is plenty.

I'm not sure what kind of fun people are expecting. They'll always be slower compared to jet/rocket powered craft, and limited to ground, and thus, prone to accidents if the driver is reckless. And on low gravity bodies, quite slidey, because of low gravity.

[ncw33]

I thought rovers in KSP2 were fun.

But then - I hit the killer bug on Tylo: 

 

My poor little Kerbal (Tim C) couldn't even walk at all anywhere that I could find on Tylo.

Based on my experience, if they can fix that one single I'd be happy with the rovers experience. As it is, I'm now scared to plan a mission that even involves walking.

[pg17]

2 hours ago, The Aziz said:

I'm not sure what kind of fun people are expecting. They'll always be slower compared to jet/rocket powered craft, and limited to ground, and thus, prone to accidents if the driver is reckless. And on low gravity bodies, quite slidey, because of low gravity.

In my case, what I'm expecting is rovers to be reliable and useful.

Let's take Opportunity as an example: it was planned to drive 600 meters away from the lander, and ended driving 45.16 km in roughly 14 years (this is overall time mission so if you took into consideration driving time only, it would be less but still very slow).

In reality, it can be scientifically interesting to drive just 600 meters away from your lander, in KSP not so much... unless you are very close to a biome boundary. So you need to drive farther away.
And so, for the same reason nobody wants to play in 1x speed for interplanetary transfers, I would like (in an ideal world) to be able to drive my "slow" rovers in 4x speed or more, in a reliable and stable way (meaning I should have issues only if I made a badly designed rover or if I tried to drive like Sébastien Loeb ). 

In short, I would either like to be able to drive a slow rover reasonably "fast" through time warp or to have "things to do" with my sluggish and frail rover in a reasonable distance from my lander (thus justifying I built it and brought it there in the first place).

Of course, low gravity bodies will always be hazardous to drive on (as they should!), but they should be hazardous because of the environment, not because of some incomprehensible wheel behavior, bugged parts, invisible bumps and pothole, timewarp changes or quick reload. That being said, I'm not saying this is an easy thing to fix by any means.

 

[DailyFrankPeter]

I listed the rover bugs which - for me - are the main culprit in my OP.

For example, I don't have a problem with it small rover not going above 9 m/s (because it doesn't look like it's supposed to anyway).

But I do with trusses losing parts by 'spooky action at a distance' (because it's a sandbox builder game, the very essence of which is 'sticking parts to other parts and them staying there unless acted upon' :)), trusses not decoupling (because player does not expect parts 'immune' to decoupling, neither from the description or by intuition), grumble seats saying they are blocked (because the size of visible model signals something opposite), lamps not emitting light (because the button says they are on). And so on... 

This is comparable to your example of docking rings not docking.

The purpose of this post was to suggest to devs - instead of going down the list of bug reports in a disjointed - to have a look at rovers as an experience.

Now if they would do that and not discover the same issues, then that would have to mean my rover designs must be somehow really eccentric. It's possible - every one has their taste and imagination - but do you think building a rover out of the first rover wheel unlock, grumble seat, XS trusses (which seem the most matching size to the wheels) plus lamps and decoupler (because you have to deploy it somehow, and decouplers are what the player knows from the start) is that? I mean, I'm not misusing the parts here, right? 

Edited January 19, 2024 by DailyFrankPeter

[Jeq]

Rovering needs better sounds. Wheel spin sound, and engine rev up sound and dirt hit surface sound. While all wheels are electric i would hope to be able make them sound more rough and violent. 

Rovering needs more dirt flying, especially at lower gravity bodies and loose traction surfaces. I would hope dirt would have approx correct flying curve for gravity.

I wanna rally with my friends in future KSP releases.

 

Edited January 19, 2024 by Jeq

[DailyFrankPeter]

I would love dirt effects*

*just not on solar panels

[Oak7603]

Rovers are not a great experience IMO although my experience is based on the Mun only and some testing on Kerbin. The wheel friction feels wrong, the sliding around feels wrong, the centre of gravity is wrong, there are issues with the springs as per my bug report, as well as the other bigs mentioned. However, this is early access so yes it's frustrating to have the bugs, but they will go.

The main reason that they are a poor experience right now is the lack of things to do. Even if you get them stable at 10m/s or more, driving between biomes is an epic undertaking filled with no interest. Science is a one button one location job for the entire biome and then thats it - this could be remedied with at least multiple scans giving diminishing returns. There is also no way to find POI's other than by 'cheating' by getting others to tell you where they are, so using a rover to find them organically is a lucky and long slog too.

If science was tweaked for rover gameplay, or POI's could be found by either Satellite scans, or even a rover based radar system, then they would have a purpose. Hopefully they won't just be used to take Kerbals between colony buildings.