Kerbal Space Program

This is related to #27226, but it's a more detailed, more specific description of the problem as it currently appears in KSP 1.12. These contracts are meant to give you an unfinished rover that you need to use an Engineer to finish constructing to get into working order. But they spawn rovers that work as-is without having to visit them with an engineer.

I just got one of these contracts given to me and it required no repair work for me to finish it because the rover was already working just fine when spawned. I have a screenshot below, and I'll upload the savegame sfs file.

In this savegame sfs file called "Rover repair already working.sfs", the relevant vessel the contract spawned is the one called "Unfinished The Mun Searcher SZT9JT".

Here's my guess about the cause of the problem:

I think the developer was thinking the way to be sure the rover can't be used as-is was to spawn it with either all it's batteries drained of electric charge or to spawn it without an antenna on it.

But probe core parts have some electric charge in them, and they also have some small antenna capability in them.

In the specific example I have in this case, the probe core happened to be the Probodobodyne HECS2, which is a very powerful probe core that has 1000 Electric Charge in it and it also has a good antenna range all on its own. This rover deign had no antenna part but this wasn't needed as the Probodobodyne HECS2 had plenty of range on its own so I could control the rover through that.

Possible fixes?:

- Spawn the rover with no electric charge in probe cores. (Problem, if it has static solar panels it will still recharge from them, so this might not work.)

- Make the contract require transmitting some science from the target location rather than just driving to it. If it has no antenna you cannot transmit science even if you can drive the rover from the connection through the probe core. Requiring transmitting some science would make an actual antenna part mandatory.