Vanilla Mining Rover?

[Delnizz]

Anyone have a Mining Rover design for vanilla that actually works on atmosphere planets?

I have tried everything I can think of for about a week and a half and nothing works.
I have had a few key problems with it.

One, the rover tips forward because of the weight of the drills. One drill cannot clear enough space for a vehicle body to follow through. Two drills tip the rover forward. By adding weight to the back I am able to overcome this problem.

Problem two, the rover seems to always drill down at an angle. As you move forward, the drills keep clearing more ground out in front of the wheels and pitching the tunnel at an angle downwards. I can't seem to find a way around this one. I have tried raising the front suspension and lowering the back. This method seems to give 30 degrees of difference from front to back, but doesn't not prevent the miner from digging downwards. I have also tried mounting the front wheels on a block lower than the wheels in the back (thus raising the front even more). This gives more than 30 degrees difference but still does not prevent the drills from clearing ground out in front of the wheels and eventually causing the rover to be digging straight down.

Anybody have another idea?
Do people use mining rovers or is everyone just using a flier?

Thanks for any help.

[Buzzard]

On the wheel suspension, there's a slider for Strength. This is how much spring in that suspension to lift loads. Increasing this will help keep things off the ground.

Weight balance. If you make the craft a bit longer and stick some storage back there, this may help with how the thing will ride nose/rear.

More wheels where they're needed. There's nothing that says you have to have only 4 wheels on a rover. More wheels will share the load proportionally to where the mass is at. Steering will be affected, so the inner wheels will want to be set to steer less than the furthest or not at all.

Getting stuck in a hole. It WILL happen. Pistons and thrusters suitable to the environment will help.

Eventually, you WILL lose a wheel due to ...stuff. Having a set of pistons to lift the whole thing up will become priceless. In the wheel suspension, there's a nifty button for 'Add Wheel', or the whole group of wheels can be added to the taskbar with the setting of 'Add Wheel'. Also danged handy.

[Delnizz]

I have tried multiple wheel designs.
Like I said above, weight balance is an issue I already solved.
My problem is no matter how high I raise the drill, it always digs in a downward direction.

[Buzzard]

Drills have a radius of effect. You'll need to place the drills higher up. Seriously, the drills have a fairly big radius, so get them off the deck another block or two.

[Tanoshi]

my piston landing gear caterpillar can scale vertical holes! It is a bit slow though.

[RoofCat]

And when you finally balance dive, it will do roll. Drills are too random.
You will need very long rovers with many wheels and careful balance. You can put drill on rotor to adjust descent angle and play with suspension... but roll will still get you and since your rover is quite long now, you will likely get stuck at some point.

Mining rovers kind of suck. Except for surface scratchers. You can use flying mining ship. But those run out of batteries rather quickly. So it is not that great either.

You can still have some fun with designing all that. Just don't expect too much from this game universe. Well in fact you don't see mining vehicles with drills roaming the streets in real life either. Those are all more like crawlers built at spots. Not rovers.

[Karmaterrorᵁᴷ]

Bulldozer type designs work quite well for stopping the alway going down thing.

You can angle the scoup (made from drills) up a little so it stays flat. Even put the scoup up enough to make inclines as you tunnel.

But at the end of the day even though power hungry a flying rig is better imo :)

[Arctic Ice Fox]

only mining rover i have fond that works is a rotor and piston boom with a set of 7 drills on a rotor and more pistons at the end tbh

[Delnizz]

Ok, thanks for the info guys. I think I am going to try a flyer with drills on the bottom next. Just let gravity pull me down and drill out as I go.

[Mod Sloth]

If you're still interested, I uploaded a blueprint for a build that has worked pretty well for me.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1698482192