Making rovers relevent - rover contracts (missions)

[Dave Kerbin]

So I've been thinking about rovers, and how they really aren't that useful at the moment. You can certainly make them just for the fun of driving around but there are no structured goals that rovers are really suited to. Without mods (and even with them) it just takes too long for a rover to travel far from the landing zone, meaning at best a rover might be able to visit one other biome if it landed really close by. Visiting other biomes just seems faster and easier using rocket power.

My idea is to use the upcoming contract system to let the game provide incentives for short trips on a body you have already landed on. The game would periodically generate a contract for performing a specific experiment at a specific location (within 1m). In terms of wording it would be like "We'll give you this science/money/reputation reward if you take a closer look at that cool rock for us". The contract generator would make these "look at a rock" contracts very close to craft that have already landed, within a dozen km at most (in theory these contracts represent a request to followup on previous biome wide reading with a more detailed reading of a specific object detected). And there would be a short time limit so you couldn't just launch a brand new mission. While you could you rockets to make a hop to that location you'd need a very precise landing to be close enough to claim credit.

[spinomonkey]

I like it!

[CsendesMark]

I like this idea!

[NoMrBond]

Some enabling parts for this would be nice, as currently you'd need to bring along a command pod to 'store' reports, results and samples

Some kind of mountable sample 'pod' which you can store your collected Science! in allowing you to drive and sample and drive and sample and drive and sample without needing to go back to the lander command pod after every sample.

Maybe even some 'rolling science' which requires activation and then a certain amount of traverse

Making some terrain scatter solid and sampleable could also be interesting, you don't want to land near it in case you land on it and tip over, but you still want to be near it so you can drive over with your rock drill for a sample

[Nemrav]

I suggested not too long ago an ai that could, even with timewarp drive your rover to another biome to do an experiment, not to many people read it due to me naming it something people didn't recognize... But this is another good thing, only thing I could think of that would need tweeking would be farm exploits that are possible with this system.. as in people clicking the rename vessel and selecting rover, adding a single wheel part, so that any wheel detector would say "yes this is a rover" and landing, all to increase the amount of science they can get in a single launch.

Otherwise Great idea.

[RedPine]

Low mass high fuel efficiency mini rockets are easier to use than rovers. Rovers, and the ground they are in contact with, need a major physics overhaul before they will be useful, especially when time warping.

I hope that Squads programming towards multiplayer also allows rover autopilots, as driving at 1x time warp is usually safe but tedious.

[technicalfool]

This thread gettin' five stars from me.

Also yes, rover autopilot would be nice as well.