Does anyone actually use/like rovers?

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Every time I've tried to make a wheeled vehicle it;s always been a futile and frustrating failure.

Oh you didn't balance the weight? You went faster than 10m/s? Enjoy a smoking crater where your rover used to be.

With aircraft you slap a few thrusters on a vehicle and you're good to go! No fiddling with a dozen sliders for each wheel. Sure rovers are power efficient but you know what isn't efficient? Blowing up because you hit a 1 degree slope going 11m/s

Rovers are just such a convoluted mess, why is strapping rockets to something simpler than wheels???

[Wulferick]

Most people have hit all the highs and lows of the Rover question. I'm a glutton for punishment and have worked on setting up a Rover Based Infrastructure. I've got a couple of small block rovers that will haul 10 Small Block Large Cargo boxes worth of Ore. I've got suspension Strength controls on the dashboard. When loaded, increase the strength to handle the weight, when empty, decrease it or risk bouncing. Power vs Traction is tricky for load hauling, you need more power to turn the wheels, when loaded, but too much and you just can't get the grip.

Other than the speed conversion, the biggest thing to remember is that high speeds on earth transport, (trucks, trains, and cars) all take place over artificially smoothed terrain. Highways cut THROUGH hills so you can go 70mph without catching air. There's not really anything comparable you can do on SE. I've tried making a grader to flatten the terrain, but from the way the game shapes voxels, you usually end up with a rougher surface than just the normal terrain.

For paved roads, I've taken to building bridges using unfinished Large Block 3x3 windows with 1x2 Large block windows for railings. These act like high speed highways because tires get SIGNIFICANTLY more grip on blocks than they do on natural terrain, so you can climb slopes this way that you normally couldn't with similar power settings.

Basically, Rovers are what people used before Spaceflight or cheap jet engines, you have to CHOOSE to use them when the easier tech is available. It IS highly satisfying to build rovers that will do jobs usually deemed impossible, but it's EASIER not to.

It's just a matter of how you want to play!

[herrschaftg35]

Originally posted by jdtuggey:

Am really adept at managing this game in space, but I'm really a 0 when it comes to planetside stuff. I'm curious about how you rover enthusiast legends manage rover mobile bases. Is it possible to make a large grid rover with big refineries and that sort of stuff that can be moved and maneuvred around ? Is it worth it ? Should I try ? :D

It is possible. Using 3x3 wheels is best. Thrusters will most likely be required for hills.

This is an old blueprint that I had used in survival several times. If I were to make it again I would have used smaller wheels to get more torque out of them.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2373692640

[DivineEvil]

- Rovers are not suited well for every place. Rovers work extremely well in high-gravity environment (Pertam), but completely useless on low-gravity moons. Thrusters are the opposite - using thruster on Pertam will quickly bleed your fuel, power, or space to place sufficient thrusters.
- All the parameters are at your disposal. If you're pushing your turning angle too high for the speed, then don't cry foul if it does barrel rolls across a hill throwing parts in random directions.
- Heavier rovers are more stable and benefit from suspension much more. Oftentimes you want to add more mass just for that. On moons, only the heaviest rovers are viable due to poor traction and tendency of losing it on every bump. Use them big wheels and heavy armor blocks near the ground.
- 11m/s is actually about 40 km/h, so yeah, if your rover is crap, it may not work well rolling off-road at that speed.

[woodsguide]

100 m/s = 220 mph

nuf said ;o)
build wide and low , and slow down



....rovers are great ;o)

[Gorbadon]

Originally posted by jdtuggey:

Am really adept at managing this game in space, but I'm really a 0 when it comes to planetside stuff. I'm curious about how you rover enthusiast legends manage rover mobile bases. Is it possible to make a large grid rover with big refineries and that sort of stuff that can be moved and maneuvred around ? Is it worth it ? Should I try ? :D

I like to use custom suspensions for mobile base rovers to get good off-road performance.
Maintaining a multigrid in a combat focused world can be a chore though, so I tend to go for a single grid ship in that scenario.

Here is one of my more experimental builds using a bunch of scripts.
Has 4 big refineries (4 yield modules each) and 6 assemblers (3 speed modules each).
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2425994449

As others said, keep your speed reasonable and avoid terrain your rover can't handle and you should be good.

[CynicDragon]

ofcourse people do, thats like 30% of the game?

[Jack left town]

Yeah I enjoy making cars in spengies. It's all about weight distribution. It was a 2018-ish update that made wheels have actual proper traction, so you can now build absolute meme mobiles that pop wheelies and stuff. Before that, cars were simply hoversleds with thrusters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0lTd1O19lw
Oh yeah and from smallest to biggest, rovers/cars serve no practical purpose. Any flying machine using any propulsion method that works in your preferred atmosphere or lack thereof will always be better and more practical.

[Storm]

I love vehicles in this game, but like you, I never really end up using them. I build one, drive it someplace, build a base there, maybe use it once or twice more as I get that going, then build aircraft and grind it up. lol

Ultimately, it just takes too long to manually drive places vs fly

I wish there was a vanilla setting that made you basically need to travel more, like some ore distro control or something. Vanilla now doesn't take long at all to find cobalt mag gold and silver on Earthlike and get to the asteroids.

[Ronin Planetary Industries]

Rovers can be part of an effective strategy. But they aren't the be-all end-all solution.
Rovers are much more useful in multi-player/server games.

If you drill a lot of holes in an area near your base, you are putting out a neon-sign as to where your base is located. So it's much better to place your base in an area that is prestine and free of voxel damage.

Flying long ranges to and from ore in gravity eats up a lot of power/fuel. So a better solution is driving to the location with a vehicle with lots of storage space and a small flying miner on it. Get your resources and drive back. Your miner will last a lot longer because you can park the rover right next to the mine entrance.

I have built a few mobile refineries. I've used this one on servers before. The large wheels upfront help it roll over obstacles and uneven terrain. The smaller 3x3 wheels allow for more torque and stability when climbing hills or carrying a bunch of ore. 3x3 wheels are better than 5x5 at everything other than clearance.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2687663565

[legoking907]

It's the terrain that will kill you. There are currently too many hostile hills and shredded terrain to safely dive small grid rovers around, especially if you base in the mountains.

[valrawk]

Small grid, H-No.. Large grid, well..
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2816064089

[Kamakazee Monkey]

I love the extra challenge added by focusing more on rovers instead of flyers. In fact the only thing that I have ever been proud enough to upload to the workshop is my mining rover. I actually need to update it because I have since discovered a way to swap out the drills for welders or grinders without anything blowing up or summoning the wrath of Lord Klang, which was definitely not an easy task.

It can mine it's own tunnels down to ore, dig itself out of a hole, or just mine out an area for your underground base. It can travel across fairly rough terrain without much of a problem since I gave it a fairly wide wheel base and reduced the strength of the middle wheels to help them roll over rough terrain easier while the front and back do most of the heavy lifting. It also has a low center of gravity due to the fact that I used a bunch of medium cargo containers to spread the weight out more evenly, but it still has a deceptively large cargo capacity with 18 medium cargo containers.

It might have taken me a long time to get my rover design to work the way I wanted it to, but it is by far my coolest creation in my opinion. I still find myself tinkering on it from time to time or just designing other things to work with it, but I will admit that it definitely might not be for everyone. At the end of the day if you don't enjoy the extra effort it takes to build rovers, then feel free to stick with flying vehicles. However, if you're like me and you're looking for that bit of extra challenge then trying to design rovers that can do the jobs you normally do with flyers can be a lot of fun.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2510066174

[Manhattan]

You could, i don't know, just use your jet pack.

[Hardie]

I really like Rovers and i usually build mine as a first vehicle to farm materials

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2466948835

It might not be as efficient as a ship since you have to deal with terain while driving back and forth but the usage of rovers adds a lot of immersion to the game. It kinda gives the fealing of starting from the ground up. With ships it allways feels a bit of a waste to just build atmo ships since its not big leap to build one for space. and once you are up there a ground base looses a bit of "sense".

so for the progression of a playthrough i like them a lot.