Bob's Sport Rovers with Free Delivery

Surprise your friends and/or family with their own bad-ass two seat sports rover! Using Bob's Aviation custom DC-3.5 (a DC-3 with tricycle landing gear), this trio of rovers can be manually dropped to a location of your choice. Along with dropping the rovers down, they can be ejected upwards using a custom rocket-power ejection system. Additional safety systems are built into the plane so in the event of engine trouble or other failure, the rovers are automatically ejected to safety.
The rovers themselves have been highly modified to give the most extreme roving experience! They are fast, agile, powerful, and stop on a dime thanks to the standard all wheel drive and four-wheel steering. They have enough oomph and grip to drive out of the water and up all but the most vertical cliffs in the DSC.

The DC-3.5 transport aircraft is disposable and will fly away and crash after rover deployment.

Technical description and project history: This is part of a never-completed themed project that, based on some of the craft filenames, I started in august 2021. I started by using the DC-3.5 to drop or eject a group of Droos. Then I added a rover to the plane with the Droos and finally settled on this version that carries three rovers and no Droos. I created it as part of my "Bob's Jump, Dump, Dive and Drive Discount Training Institute of Aviation, Aeronautics and Rover Technology" (or BJDDADDTIOAAART) play set. I used this project to work on my early building and vizzy skills. An embarrassing amount of trial and error went into the vizzy. It's pretty rudimentary but I did finally get it to work consistently on all three rovers. Both the original DC-3 and the rover are not my craft, and I have long since lost whose craft they belong to. I did modify both throughout the whole life of this project. The plane has some nifty failure features I use in the vizzy. The rovers however are heavily modified. On top of the performance and other modifications, every single rover part is collision-free (that took me some time). You can drive them directly through each other.
I wanted to have some fun with dropping the rovers so I devised an over-the top, way-too-complex, multi-stage deployment process just for the hell of it.
When dropped, the rovers use a three-parachute procedure to ensure quick deployment from the bottom of the plane. An initial parachute is quickly deployed to pull away the folded rover before a second parachute is deployed for deceleration. Once that chute is cut away the rover falls to a preprogrammed altitude before opening the landing chute. All landing hardware is cut away by the time the rover unfolds and settles onto the ground.
When ejected, the rovers are launched out of the plane using 4 small solid rocket motors before deploying the deceleration chute. The rest of the landing process is the same.

All three rovers go through the same procedure in sequence independently and are all fully operational once on the ground.

I had a lot of fun goofing around on this project off and on over the 2+ years I’ve been messing with it. And I know I’ll continue to mess with this occasionally. So now, in honor of the Late December Happy Family Togetherness Enjoyment Time Holiday, I decided to post it.

AG1: Unfold/Fold Rovers
AG2: Eject Rovers
AG3: Drop Rovers
AG4: Engine Failure
AG5: Taxi
AG6: Auto Takeoff w/ Engine Failure
AG7: Auto Takeoff
AG8: Gear
AG9: Rover Self Destruct
AG10: Plane Self Destruct

Enjoy!