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(case occured on august 20) Dan Duggleby was up in the hills with a .22 caliber rifle when he heard a "whooshing" noise and looked up to see a large rocket-shaped object about 60 feet in diameter and 300 feet tall, which landed close by. An opening appeared in the side of the cylinder and a ramp slid out, and five robotic metal "boxes" with small wheels on the bottoms and four "arms" on the sides came down the ramp. One took ground samples, while three of the others took air, grass, and flower samples and the last one "just stood there." When finished they rolled back up the ramp, the ramp slid in, and the ship took off straight up and vanished in the fog. The witness had seen disc-like UFOs on many previous occasions.
originally posted by: humanoidlord
a reply to: gortex
there are quite a bit of robotic encounters, taylor being one of them
however this is the only one that involve rovers
originally posted by: gortex
If you define "rover" as something with wheels then I guess that's true but I would argue any autonomous vehicle leaving a craft for the planets surface is a rover regardless of its method of travel.
originally posted by: Archivalist
a reply to: mikell
We traveled to another planet.
We dropped some stuff with wheels.
???
Show me your data set for advanced remote scientific equipment that won't use wheels.
Circular wheels make sense from engineering terms. All high gravity celestial objects appear as circles to an observer from far away. Big spheres far away, are flat circles.
Lowest possible resistances for movement of a mass object, upon a mass object, would dictate a circle on a circle.
Gear setups are very very close, to the same mindset of the tangents of a wheel and a celestial object, which in general, form as spheres.
You want to burn your anti-gravity, lift, or propulsion fuel to have a few rovers zip around!?!?!? Wasteful.
Wheels are low energy, high efficiency in terms of circle on circle, or spheroid on spheroid contact. Low resistance, while providing the correct range of tangent motion for low energy propulsion.
The cost of a wheel on a wheel movement, will always be less than the cost of having to act against gravity without direct solid to solid contact. I don't care how advanced your technology gets.
Tangent point, to tangent point, with rotational movement that allows for adequate movement, with low energy resistance IS the advanced intellectual method.