Rover controls

[LethalDose]

Man... Rovers... using these things is a pain in the asteroid

PREFACE: My attitudes on rovers may be caused by the fact that I've only really used Rovers on the Mün. Under different gravity conditions, some of these problems are moot, but they're still a problem on the Münar surface which is one of the places rovers are going to be most commonly used, even after we get biomes elsewhere. I also understand that a number of the problems I'm having are "realistic", but simplifications have been made elsewhere in the game to make it more fun, so there's no reason similar changes can't be made to rover controls. That being said...

I've developed a love-hate relationship with these craft playing KSP. They're useful, especially when you want to visit multiple locations on a body's surface, or can't land in the location you want to visit.

BUT! Driving these things are PAINFUL!! they're slow, fragile, and can be as difficult to control as Jebediah during one of his post-recovery benders. Right now, I rovering has to be:

1. Drive
   
2. Stop
   
3. Quick save
   
4. Restart
   
5. Quickload and return to 4 because the rover went to ****
   
6. Arrive at destination 2 hours later
   
7. 
   

Below are a few small changes that would help.

SAS locks heading only

In space, SAS maintains your orientation in terms of yaw, roll, and pitch, but trying to maintain all three of these on the surface of a planet REALLY screws up handling, because trying to lock roll and pitch prevents the wheels from having full contact with the surface. However, deactivating SAS in a rover makes things worse because the rover will bounce around so much it will knock itself into oblivion at any useful speed. As it stands, I have to babysit the rover during travel so I can occasionally turn off SAS, let the rover settle itself, and then reactivate it. This needs to be done almost everytime there's a change in orientation of the surface I'm on: going over small hills, on the sides of a valley, etc. If there was some option to have SAS only lock the heading/yaw were set, it would make controlling the rover way easier.

Relax surface impacts with Rovers

Rovers have to travel on rough surfaces and at speeds that exceed safe landing velocities (> 10m/s). It would probably be a lot of programming, but I would LOVE to see the durability of rovers increased by changing the impact rules for destroying parts on rovers due to surface collisions.

Way points

We can set nodes in space that show us relative headings in 3 dimensions when we reach a point in time. Please allow this for rovers in 2 dimensions.

Throttle maintenance

Let us set a speed, or throttle % the EXACT same way we do with landers. The rover throttle up/down is a headache, and resets to zero if you don't sit and hold the button. There should be separate throttle for gears/rover wheels and a separate throttle for rocket engines.

Autopilot

Yes, I know it says we can't suggest autopilot, but in space, we can set a speed and heading, then click time-warp so we don't ahve to wait 8 hours to hit the burn node. If we can do it there, we should be able to tell a rover to do the same thing: Set a speed and heading, go until you reach a point. This could involve a pathing algorithm, or, the game could test a straight line path between the current and target position and reject a path if there is too great a change in surface geometry on the straight line.

I'd like to see the devs addressing the throttle and SAS issues during development ASAP. In fact, I'd LOVE to see a separate interface for rover control the same way they added a docking interface. When this mode is activated, the SAS control and throttle would be as described above, or in some other way that achieves the same ends. The other issues can wait, but they're still valid, and would make this part of the game WAY more fun to play and make rovers much more appealing.

HarvesteR said to expect more biomes in 0.23, so rovers are gonna get WAY more useful soon.

It's my opinion that these features absolutely have a place in the stock game. You can disagree, but please don't recommend I use the XXXX add-on that already does this.

Finally, if you're going to mention add-ons as a solution, please actually add to the thread, too. Seriously, if all I wanted was an add-on to do this for me, I would have posted it in the appropriate sub-forum.

Thanks!

Edited November 24, 2013 by LethalDose