Two different solutions for a car-plane (simple and a VTOL)

[diegzumillo]

I set out to make a car plane. Something that drives like a rover and then takes off and fly. The challenge comes from the fact that these rover wheels are somewhat delicate, they break under too much speed and hard impacts, so I'm sharing my two solutions.

The simplest one consists of using both rover wheels and landing gear. When the landing gears are up the rover wheels touch the ground and vice versa, so it's very easy to switch from car to plane, but you need a runway to take off and land. Here's a video:

That was fun Quite useless though. It would be nice to not need the runway, so we could use it to find anomalies around kerbin. So that's my second design's objective! this vehicle has no landing gear, it takes off vertically with a toroidal engine beneath it, which also works for landing, there's also a couple of small rockets on the front for breaking. For the exploration purpose, I also made it with more fuel and turbo jet engines. I realized however that landing doesn't have to be vertical, you can get the horizontal speed low enough and use the toroidal engine to ease the touchdown, the rover wheels can take it. It's tricky to fly this thing, I set up 5 action groups for different stages of flight to help me out.

On the video below I illustrate the purpose by setting out to "investigate" some debris near the space center. Everything worked perfectly! except for the very ending, when I did something stupid but completely unrelated to my design. I had already landed and was working as a rover, then I underestimated my speed and the runway slope, breaking the front wheels... doh

I can upload the craft files if anyone's interested. Even though one of the designs has a mechjeb it can fly well without it. I use it in the video only for the kill rot feature, which makes it easier to take off, but it's also useful if you're making a long trip to somewhere, as these can cake up to an hour because we are unable to time-warp.

[Ori41]

The idea of these are awesome, may I ask, do the wheels use Nuclear generators?

[diegzumillo]

Just a handful of solar panels and batteries