KerbinRover Off-Road Vehicles CKAN

KerbinRover, famous for their Defender series of vehicles, is now making space adapted versions of their range of vehicles.

License: MIT

Game Version: 1.6.1

Downloads: 42,296

Mod Website: Forum Thread

Support this mod: Donate

Followers: 40

Outdated Mod

This mod is not known to work with the latest version of Kerbal Space Program. Proceed with caution.

Currently this mod is just a single vehicle, which exists more for the pun value than anything else. A KerbinRover Defender 110 crew chassis. Scale is 64% as suggested by NathanKell for using real vehicles in KSP. Some of the initial versions of this mod (and many of my others) mistakenly used 50%. Until RSS includes humans to replace kerbals, I won't be making an RSS conversion in scale. Kerbals would look rather daft in an RSS scales rover. Currently there's two wheel choices, although I'll probably add a military style wheel as well. I didn't set the resilience of the wheel amazingly high, but I've yet to see any wheel damage, so wheels will probably get at least slightly less resilient in a future release. If only so I can see the torn tire mesh that's been there from the start. The interior is based off the 2015 model, which means many countries wouldn't have seen it, as the Defender was withdrawn from sale in the Americas much earlier due to not meeting various standards. With the exception that I turned the rear seats to face each other. In the real 2015 Defender they face forward for crash safety reasons.

Not Really Dependencies If you have Firespitter Core (and ModuleManager), then you can change the colour. Colours are based off the 2015/16 Australain market, minus some of the "wouldn't work" metallic colour options, plus a couple of military camo patterns. Not all variations of roof, trim, colour are provided. Because that'd be an enormous collection. If you have Raster Prop Monitor (and ModuleManager), then the dash works. If you don't, then the dials are static. The speedo is obvious, fuel is liquid fuel level, temp is from about -10C to 160C. And the "tacho" is a mash of variable intended to give an idea of current oompf for want of a better term. There's obviously no RPM to be had from a non-existent engine, before non-existent gearing.

Issues Wheels. KSP uses Unity wheel colliders which use Nvidia wheel physics through physX, and they're plainly wrong. Also, KSP has issues with wheels being near other parts, and well, wheel arches are exactly the sort of thing that are bound to cause issues. Wheel functioning is basically a compromize. The current wheels are mostly working, and (stupidly for an off-road vehicle) better on flat terrain than any sort of bumps. Unity wheels pretty much act like a static wheel of the size you see with a tiny little wheel attached to the bottom of it. If the surface hits the static wheel, then it acts as a normal collision instead of hitting a rolling wheel. So driving over bumps is, well, stupid.
To top this off, NVidia's friction system is clearly an attempt at correct friction, but comparing graphs of how it behaves vs how nvidia say it behaves shows they just keep ramping friction up proportional to velocity forever. So skidding is sub-optimal. And if things aren't just right, the wheels will decide they're too close to another part and go into “Wheel Blocked” mode. At that stage there's nothing you can do to unblock them (AFAIK). For this reason I added the stack nodes for attaching the wheels. Using the stack nodes should get you wheels attached at the right position to not block unless there's other things going on. Surface attaching parts near the wheels can also cause blocking. I've run into it with thermometers and other science equipment. Sometimes with quite some distance from the wheels. That said, a lot of the time they work "OK". And I'll keep tweaking until either Kerbal Foundry complete their wheel rework or KSP 1.2 fixes them (there's some "IF"s in front of all that). (end rant)

Accessories RoofRack: This adds a roof rack which actually doesn't change anything as you can attach things directly to the roof anyway, but it looks better to attach them to a rack. Spotlights: There's a spotlight resize of Squads round spotty, suitable for attaching to the rover. It's not marked as manufacturer "KerbinRover" because I wanted to make it clear that it is litterally just a resize config for Squad's part. Manufacturer is called out as "Squad Resizing Corp" and it just refers to the squad model rather than re-including it. If you have a stock revamp mod pack of any sort, it'll probably pick up the new model instead of squad's (that's been my experience anyway). Coming soon RooBar: What most places will call a bullbar or bumpbar. This is a protective steel device at the front of the rover. IFF you have KAS installed it will include a winch (although some winch head attachments end up clipping and thus not detatching due to collision stuckness). Snorkel: This is a part to provide a new air-intake higher up. Surprisingly everything is already provided by Squad's air mechanisms to make this work perfectly. Except that water doesn't cut out air-intakes. So, looks nice, kinda cool, effectively does nothing. Extra spare wheels: Pretty much just a decorative wheel. I'll look later to see if I can enable them to enable wheel fixing without an engineer, but the current working (unuploaded) version is just a surface attachable part that does nothing. I'd like to also include a tow mechanism but don't currently have a way of doing that.

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