So I have been Rovering

[bsalis]

... and well, I have found out that it is boring.

Mainly because it is so slow. Sure you can easily visit any particular point, but... so slow. Not sure it's worth it.

Am I missing something here? I see many people deploying rovers. Do they drive for 5 mins then abandon it?

[stupid_chris]

Slow? Well, relatively speaking to a rocket, yes it is. In term of ground speed, if you're going 20m/s actually going 72km/h, or about 45miles/h, and that's quite fast. But if you compare them to real life rovers, Curiosity can go up to a thunderous 0.025m/s while Spirit and Opportunity could reach 0.05m/s.

So yeah, you're rovering pretty darn fast

Though, for my own rover stories, once I took two of the Kerbals I had on my Minmus base for a two hour ride across the lakes and the mountains in the ANT rover by Bobcat. Since I was coming back, I didn't go far in two hours as the ANT tops 16m/s, but damn, Minmus is gorgeous. I actually had fun

Edited June 30, 2013 by stupid_chris

[Panichio]

Personally, I do actually just drive them for five minutes and leave. I would use MechJeb's rover autopilot if I actually had somewhere to go, though.

[Geschosskopf]

I'm not much of a rover fan myself. I hardly ever consider them worth the weight, mission complexity, and part count they add. I consider them utterly useless for exploration because I lack the patience to drive them for the hours it takes to get any real distance at a reasonably safe speed. And more often than not, I wreck the thing well short of my intended destination anyway, so any survivors now have to walk for more hours to get back to the lander. It's faster and safer to figure out some way to fly around, and makes for a less-complex ship.

Other than killing Kerbals and stranding stranding them way out in the boonies, the only real use I see for rovers is when you have a base with various ships and buildings scattered around several hundred meters apart and you frequently need to move Kerbals or stuff around between these facilities. It's the frequent need to make such short trips that does it. With MechJeb, you can typically land within a couple hundred meters of an anomaly, but why go to all the trouble of bringing a rover just to cover that distance 1 time to plant your flag? Just walk instead. After the months cooped up in the spaceship getting there, you need to stretch your legs anyway. Or, if you just don't want to take the time to walk, bring some flying machine or better yet, land closer .

[Brotoro]

Slow? Of course...You're used to just bopping all over the place with your VTOL. Rover exploration would have to seem tedious in contrast.

But if you want to simulate a realistic exploration program, you have to get boots on the ground (or wheels on the regolith). But I never go into a long driving session without being armed with a trusty audiobook.

My rovers can actually cover ground pretty quickly when I drive them like a maniac at high warps factors (which I do when I'm in an "I'm bored! Let's GET there already" mood...but I don't count any resulting smash-ups and re-dos against my poor kerbals' missions, since they obviously wouldn't be driving that way...and I'd already done it 'hard mode' driving around a planet, so I know I can do it).

I quite enjoy the driving around at times. Much of the sights look the same, but occasionally there's something new. And I'm often impressed but the thought that some dev spent days and days lovingly handcrafting every square foot of terrain (OK...more likely a considerably shorter amount of time herding a terrain generating program getting something he liked the looks of), so it seems a shame if nobody ever goes and looks at the stuff.

[Johnno]

Yeah you're missing something. Different people enjoy different things. Some find building rockets boring, takes time to do well so they just download stuff off the spaceport. Others find flying boring, so they use autopilots or hyperedit. Some build planes, some build cars or trucks, others build boats or helicopters.

Some people find KSP itself boring. I showed the game to someone, did a quick satellite & rocket build, launch and rendezvous with my station, but before I was even docked he told me that he could never play this game cause it takes too long (ie it's boring).

If you don't like doing something in a singleplayer sandbox game, don't do it.

[Boffinbox]

remember, rovers are for show, just like everything in this game. i enjoy deploying rovers because it adds a purpose to a mission

landed this one on eeloo yesterday

http://i.imgur.com/AAxUGfz.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/55Zc7ec.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/fQ1cPQB.jpg

(well proud of that 21.6m/s uphill)

[Akalaël]

I agree with you : I drive rovers during 5 min then give up !

I think what I need is a purpose to drive !

[RocketPilot573]

I agree, rovers are way to slow compared to rockets/planes, and they're too easy to crash. So that's why my Duna Base is going to have a Space Plane to fly around in.

[koshelenkovv]

Best option for Laythe and Kerbin is rover capable to fly low, or low altitude plane capable to drive. You can stumble upon a really nice views when roving, not visible from high altitude. It nice to explore canyons and mountains slowly.

Also, roving is much simpler and convenient than rocketing at atmosphereless bodies like Tylo, Vall, Moho and even Mun, and Eve flights will require immense quantities of fuel.

You can read a book or do anything other while roving and only occasionally look at screen, correct and quicksave.

Just use trim - it works with rover wheels. Trim slightly and drive at breathtaking one inch per second like Curiosity, or trim to max and drive 30 m/s. Remapping rover controls to IJKL helps too.

[OUScooby]

I once had my unmanned rover get away from me on a steep downhill grade on Minmus, it got over 100 m/s and when it finally came to a stop all six wheels were broken.

[Geschosskopf]

I think what I need is a purpose to drive !

Yes, that's it exactly. The main problem with rovers (for those of us who don't groove on them) is that their single purpose is to move Kerbals and/or stuff, but their low speed and means they have a very short effective range (measured by where boredom sets in). Rovers thus can't compete with faster, safter ways of moving Kerbals and/or stuff without help. I mean, if there was the occasional chance of being able to run over Duna's version of the armadillo, it would certainly entice me into driving more .

But really, I think rovers need an entirely new field of activity to call their own. Like earthmoving. If we had bulldozers to level landing fields and build sand castles on Duna, if we had to bury base modules to protect Kerbals from radiation, if we had to mine for resources instead of drilling for them, then there'd be real reasons to have rovers and their slow, boring travel speeds wouldn't be an issue.

Either that or give us virtually indestructible rovers that we can hurl around at 500m/s in perfect safety (unless we bounce into orbit) .

[Kerbal01]

I am using rovers to scout locations for my Duna base.

[Fried]

if it has an atmo I always use kethane mod and a space plane, a lot more work but so much fun.

[Hedd]

I've been charging up my rovers so I can cruise at a decently high speed and find unique points to look from or high places to jump from. One of my goals is to launch a rover into the Duna canyons and stick it, Dukes of Hazzard style. Amphibious rover designs is another thing I've been doing alot of, one that goes faster then 14 m/s. Just recently I dropped a jet rover on Minmus to see how fast I could cross the salt flats, got up to 170 m/s before the camera rolled like I had entered orbit before hitting a bump and actually hitting orbit....in pieces.

I would say your rovering experience would entirely depend on how you build them to be.

[CCKinnison]

This how I feel about flying. It's fast, sure, but I can't land them AT ALL, and I'm not really good at controlling most of them in the air. Slap an SAS on a rover, though, and I'll take that thing anywhere.

Considering looking into a Helo design that I can put a bunch of radial parachutes on to land with.

[Nasakev]

Slap an SAS on a rover, though, and I'll take that thing anywhere.

You can put SAS on a rover? This changes everything! But seriously, though, I like to build rovers for the fun challenge they add. How do I mount them on my rocket? More importantly, how do I get them off? Should they go with the ground crew or before them? Etc etc.

[FITorion]

When a went to Minmus I made a rover that more or less flew rather than rove... Sure it could rove but. For short distances and base construction rovers are great. Driving long distance though... is a test of will.

I have on occasion driven for hours. I've crossed the large dark craters on the Mun. Even my most stable rovers can't go very vast. One bump and flip flip boom. And you can't just point them in a direction and leave it. They'll veer off course of or go down a hill and... well... boom.

They are slow short range devices and that's just the way it is.

[Epthelyn]

I've never attempted a long-distance trip with a rover and probably never will, simply because if you want to drive 100km with a rover you could've brought along a command pod or probe, a small fuel tank and an LV-909 and achieved the same distance in a thousandth of the time and without as many parts or unbalanced lift woes.

That doesn't stop rovers being...well...fun. Of course, if you tell someone that to entertain themselves for a couple of hours they can blow up rockets at 2km/s or drive around the Mun with a rover at no more than 5m/s I'd guess most people would go with the explodey rockets - At first. The really nice thing about slow, hopelessly unstable and, in all possible ways, completely pointless rovers is that they're not rockets. This is KSP, so how can something not-rocket be better-than-rocket? Easy:

Effort:

Yes, ok, rovers are a pain to make and usually result in the creation of rockets that are far from efficient to take them to their destination, or at least in my experience that's what happens (and when you're running at < 20FPS without any parts in the game at all it's a nuisance). However, once you get them to where you want them, you can point them in a direction and, provided you don't say POWWWEERRRR and die in a fireball, rovers are slow but easy to drive. The alternative for 'exploration' is a VTOL, another rocket or a plane, all of which involve big engines and rockets and no matter how simplistic actually require some level of skill to get exactly where you want to go. The only skill required for the rover is patience. You can also admire the scenery whilst driving happily along the surface of (e.g.) Duna

Additional Challenge:

Now I'm going to entirely contradict myself, but this really applies to the bit before the rover is roving about on the surface of another world; construction and transit. Say you have an amazing heavy lifter you made and love to show off to the KSP community and you want to put a rover on Duna for the first time. The lifter can easily transport 300t to LKO and then a transfer stage will do the rest. Sounds simple, but it isn't. The first problem with rovers are that unless you want to make a...er...'blob'...they're not exactly symmetrical. If not in the first stage or even the second, most rockets will suffer the consequences of an unbalanced load and start doing crazy and unhelpful pirouettes in zero-gravity. The solution is MOAR RCS (therefore more weight and a load of white flamey stuff that drives your FPS to 0 when you turn on ASAS) or TWO ROVERS to balance the rocket. Two rovers is more weight and then you need a bigger rocket. Then you have to drop them off when you get there...the right way up

Explodey stuff:

Aim for the nearest cliff, veer left or right at 20m/s+ and watch your poor Kerbal (or probe, but that's no fun) fly gracefully to their inevitable death.

DISCLAIMER: All this is based on my experience with rovers and may vary depending on patience, ability to fly and land large rockets and probably CPU/GPU power.

[Khrissetti]

You can build up a fair lick of pace if you build it to be safe, get it up to speed and then go 4x zoom. 80m/s is fast enough for most journeys shorter than traversing a continent.

Plus they add another series of technical challenges, like making a reliable schrimech.

So you can be sure it'll be safe whizzing over the deserts of foreign planets

[earth]

all my rover designs are made so they can have a 20m/s rollover and have nothing broken ans be able to bet back on wheels. i will post my favourite design if you want.

[TouhouTorpedo]

Rovers too slow? What you need is some kind of faster, or maybe definable speed wheels mod. *cough*

as far as things to do go, set a target you want to drive to before landing, land near to it as you can then go there. Be it oceans, geological features (a crater), mun arches or caves (I'm sure there is one somewhere, Tylo was it?, driving in that would be cool)

Personally I love aiming for the mun arch and jumping through the "hoop".

[MachXXV]

I've had quite a bit if fun with rovers on the Mun, it's a nice challenge to tweak and test the designs out - http://youtu.be/8h56UytRdQU

[bsalis]

Well, it's good to see people who do enjoy exploring with rovers, and others like me that find it a bit boring. I'm not alone here, and I think I will pass on the audio-books and trim-auto-roving.

I agree with you : I drive rovers during 5 min then give up !

I think what I need is a purpose to drive !

Perhaps in campaign there will be missions to collect samples from deposits that are spread out, and cannot be easily seen from a distance. So you will need to walk or rover... then yeah, rover beats walking.

[korda]

Well, I find rovers useful sometimes. For some time ago I was sending new crew to my Mun base to change the old guys that will be getting home, I didn't landed perfectly and I ended up few hundreds of meters from base. I would probably be capable of throtling it up and getting closer or getting Kerbals to use their jetpacks to fly around, but decided to use rover I had at base and that solved problem of transferring crew. And if it was celestial body with heavier gravity then jetpacks wouldn't help and perhaps I wouldn't want to risk losing some of precious fuel on my craft. So having rover around can be useful. With Kerbal Attachment System mod and some small tanks you can use it to refuel stranded landers too.