Rover construction tips

[Cpt Cornelius]

Hey guys, I was just wondering if anyone could give creative tips on building aesthetically pleasing rovers, I'm not much a creative minded person so I'm sorta stumped for ideas.

Basically I was trying to build a rover that looks a bit like a real life dune buggy, like this one here: http://www.sdjetski.com/images/Sandrail%202seaterblue.jpg

Any help will be great

[Cashen]

You should check out this mod: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/34014-WIP-Rover-RollKage

[Cpt Cornelius]

Ah, that will help both of my problems, thank you

[BigDog]

I have done what you want to do and can offer up some tips and some pics for inspiration.

1. Know the scale of your Kerbals. Yeah sounds simple, my first effort produced something that looks like an insane shopping cart or a go-kart on steroids. The roll bars are more like seat belts.

2. Save yourself a ton of headaches and build it in the Space Plane Hanger. The symmetry mode there will do what you want as opposed to the VAB. One of my rollbars on the rover in the following pics is a bit off due to my not doing this.

3. Stuff can only attach at one point. So if you build a cage out of beams such as in the following pics you will need to tie them together with struts.

4. Provide a means of flipping the rover back over. I use landing gears and RCS on the one in the following pics. This is probably unnecessary, but I am doing a long distance journey with this and do not want to find myself ending the mission halfway around Kerbin stuck on my back.

5. Provide lots of the fixed solar panels. This allows more driving time. The extendable panels blow apart at around 9 m/s. So to use those you have to either stop or drive very slow.

6. Put lots of batteries on the underside or floor. More weight down low improves roll characteristics and more juice gives more drive time.

This first pic gives an idea of the scale of my K-100 Explorer. Lewis and Klark Kerman are charging up after departing from KSC.

These following pics are in the VAB, since I had not caught on to the SPH trick when I built this and give some overall views of my revised design.

Hopefully these pictures can give some ideas to you or anyone else wanting to build a buggy. I am really happy with this design as it handles very well and is as stable as a rock.

[Cpt Cornelius]

Thank you. Now that's inspiration, my main problem is getting it to look good - which I am abysmal at, never got the hang of using the parts as decorative pieces.

[the_bT]

Some things that help me:

1. Build of a central structural beam, that avoids very wide vehicles on which the wheels look too small. Wider vehicles help with stability though, so you might want to consider that too.

2. Use the structural beams and panels etc. only low down. Low center of gravity helps with stability.

3. Use the small cubic strut thing like mad

4. The big Batteries pack is very useful to fill in odd holes, give some contrast and make your vehicle look a lot better. Try to use the sides too! Also, more electricity is always good.

All in all, stability is always a problem (mostly because you cannot connect two wheels with anti-roll bars I believe) and there is not that much you can do about it but keep COG low (not always easy) and vehicle wide (not always nice to look at)

Here are some pictures to illustrate:

Javascript is disabled. View full album