Some noobish rover questions.

[Panzerbeard]

Alright, hi, all; so, I built a small automated rover, very similar to the stock one, and managed to safely land it using a skycrane. It all works fine, and I managed to stumble across the Armstrong Memorial by accident. But I decided that my next project needs to be faster, and needs to be manned; after a bit of experimentation, I came up with this:

I've driven it around Kerbin a bit, it's mostly stable, it can manage bumps and slopes without too much trouble, caps at around 22m/s (I imagine it'll do more on the Mun), and can last a decent amount of time in the dark. My primary problem is this: how on earth am I going to get this to the Mun? I think it's a bit too big to practically attach to a lander, and I'm not sure how I'd go about building a skycrane for this. Getting Jeb back home isn't a worry, my plan was to get the car onto the mun, do a bit of exploring, and drop a lander down to pick him up later on. He's got a packed lunch, he'll be fine.

More to the point, I don't see any way of porting this into the VAB, since it was designed in the Spaceplane Hangar. While I do use Subassembly Loader, I'm not able to save this as a subassembly. And I'm pretty sure I won't be able to build the rocket and skycrane in the Spaceplane Hangar because of the wonky symmetry and height restrictions.

Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated, thanks. And if there are any glaring faults with my rover design, please shout at me for it

Oh, yeah, and I don't use any mods except Subassembly Loader, so I'll have to stick with stock parts.

[Klajan]

Nice design

I have set my Münbase in a similar way and I had dockingports at the end and simply attached small fueltanks with the orange radial engines to these, so I could decouple them once landed.

Also you can either:

Install subassembly loader and use this to transfer your vehicle to the VAB

or

Fipp the rover and build your lifter/transfer stage below it, attach the starting clapms to this and fligh away.

here with generic build-in-10-seconds launcher

[EndlessWaves]

Push it over.

Seriously, it's not very long or heavy and the worst that'll happen to it in the mun's low gravity is that a few tires pop and they're easily repaired.

Stick landing legs and short rocket nozzle on the end (probably a gimbaled one to compensate for the off-centre wheels) and once you've landed retract the legs and use the pod torque to tip yourself over, then eject legs and engine.

[Klajan]

Will work yes. This design is propably overkill, as it is designed for my huge 50t munbase.

[DMagic]

If you are having trouble saving this in subassembly loader it's because the main control point has no access nodes. You need to have at least one free point to connect something to the first part you chose for the rover (I assume that's the cockpit in the middle). To get around this, just take one end of the rover, starting from those circular battery packs, and temporarily move it to the other end, so that you have a free connection on the cockpit. Then you should be able to save it subassembly loader.

As for landing it, you can try the horizontal thing, as shown above, or you can just put an engine and some landing struts on one end (with a docking port or a decoupler to separate the rover from the engine), land vertically, then tip over. A pair of 1-way RCS thrusters, one on top, and another on the bottom of one end are enough to tip over without damaging anything.

Something like this.

[Panzerbeard]

Thanks very much for the help guys, I'll try out a few of those suggestions and see what works

And @DMagic: thanks for that tip with Subassembly Loader, that was my main problem, really, not being able to get it into the VAB .

One thing though, wouldn't the launcher be extremely wobbly and unstable, with that long rover design stuck on top of it?

[DMagic]

It can get wobbly. The first way to combat that is to try and make it balanced, keep the center of mass as close to the middle as possible. You can also try draining any fuel you have from the rover to keep it from being top heavy. You can play around with having an bigger-than-necessary fuel tank and draining fuel at different stages to do this without leaving your final stages with not enough fuel. And also, struts. The rover in my picture is just connected with a single docking port to that tri-connector piece. But there are several struts holding the whole thing together, they are just hard to see.

One other thing about landing it horizontally. It can be really tricky without some kind of properly oriented control point. The cockpit and any docking ports will make your navball orient the wrong way. Pointing directly up, at the center of the blue side of the navball, will make your rover come in vertically. You need to stick a probe core on there somewhere so that it orients correctly or else your pro/retrograde markers won't be aligned properly and you'll have a hell of a time getting down safely. And mechjeb will be of no help here.

Edit:

Here is a not-totally-clear picture of what I'm talking about. There is a probe core on that central stack coming off the top of this thing. That lets you orient correctly for landing.

Edited May 16, 2013 by DMagic

[Vespasianus]

STRUTS!!! MOAR STRUTS!!!

But seriously, a few struts should do it.

Good luck

EDIT: Ninja'd

[EndlessWaves]

One thing though, wouldn't the launcher be extremely wobbly and unstable, with that long rover design stuck on top of it?

Your rover looks to be under 10 tons, probably well under, and at that sort of mass you're unlikely to get dangerous levels of wobble whatever configuration you build it in. A 50-100 ton rocket tends to hold itself together nicely even if built like an octopus.

[Panzerbeard]

Thanks again, all; I just gave it a shot with the vertical lander, as Dmagic suggested. Worked fine, but I was a bit heavy-handed with landing; the rover itself landed safely, if not gracefully, but the lander may have exploded slightly. It's certainly a lot faster than the small probe; I was hitting speeds in excess of 40 m/s, but I've noticed that it tends to flip over quite violently if it hits a bump. It's a little risky, but luckily I can use the Roll keys to ensure that I land on the wheels, which are easily repairable .

[Merinsan]

Another method of moving stuff from SPH to VAB is just locating the file and copying across. Then you just need to change the location in the file itself from SPH to VAB (3rd line in I think). I once forgot to change that and it still worked, but it went back to SPH after I ended the flight.

[Specialist290]

...I was hitting speeds in excess of 40 m/s, but I've noticed that it tends to flip over quite violently if it hits a bump.

I'm sure my car would flip, too, if it hit a bump like the ones on the Mun's surface while it was going over 85 MPH

Or 144 km/h, for y'all who have speed limits posted in metric.

[Panzerbeard]

I'm sure my car would flip, too, if it hit a bump like the ones on the Mun's surface while it was going over 85 MPH

Or 144 km/h, for y'all who have speed limits posted in metric.

Did I say 40m/s? I meant 31, Jebediah is very careful about those speeding tickets, you know .

That being said, apparently leaving your moonlander in a supermarket car park is a parking violation, so speeding is the least of his worries.