Kerbiosity – Duna mission

[DirkLarien]

Greetings Kerbalnauts.

After watching video about Curiosity rover, i decided to recreate it in KSP... how hard can it be, right?...

Mods am using are:

Procedural Fairings

Kerbal Engineer Redux

Kerbal Attachment system

RCS Build Aid

Building the rover itself proven to be harder then I thought.

Vanilla KSP could use more structural parts. But after hours spent rotating parts, i managed to build something that from afar might look slightly similar to the real deal.

Production of a Skycrane hasn't gone without some difficulties, particularly the attachment to the rover itself proven to be quite a challenge, since the rover was refusing to connect where i needed it. But in the end my patience prevailed.

In testing process i noticed weird thing.

For the skycrane i used winch from Kerbal attachment system. Unfortunately as soon as you start lowering your cargo, game focuses on the lowered object and your engines will stop automatically.

You can rise your throttle again, but you might imagine how hard the whole maneuver gets.

While you trying to hover and at the same time lower the cargo, that leads to unintended engine cut

„Control from here“ setting wont help, nor placement of the winch to the rover.

So if anyone knows about the right method, please let me know.

Well, after few hours of trails, which led to plenty of unintended explosions (and invention of a swing for the kerbals... eureka! )

I was feeling rather optimistic, since Duna has lower gravity then Kerbin. That should make things slightly easier. So... LIFT OFF

More in pictures

Note:

You might notice some discrepancies in pictures (time, height...)

This is due to rather complicated Skycrane maneuver. Its quite a challenge to focus on landing and taking pics in the process

Pictures are taken from two successful attempts. One of them was less successful (i brake one wheel) The second was amazing but i didn't get much pics

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Edited April 10, 2014 by DirkLarien

[DirkLarien]

never mind ...

Edited April 10, 2014 by DirkLarien