Flying Kerbal craft isn\'t particularly hard, but nor is it particularly easy. One of the things which makes learning to fly hard is that you also need to learn to build rockets at the same time. Learning to land on the mun is hard when you need to get all the way there just to test your lander. So let\'s separate this into stages and make it a bit easier. Only if you want, mind. But we can learn to fly without worrying about the rockets, by cheating and giving ourselves loads of superlight fuel. Open the config file for one of the small fuel tanks. Add some zeros to the amount of fuel. Now build a rocket with that tank, an ASAS module, and a whacking great steerable engine. Oh, better have some steerable winglets too. Now, we\'ll proceed to lift-off. Turn on the ASAS, go to full power, and head straight up. Follow the usual directions for achieving orbit. You should now be in space, with loads of fuel left - enough to mess about, for the first time, probably. Go ahead, waste it. You can much more rapidly get a feel for the orbital variations acceleration can induce when you don\'t have to worry about fuel, and making mistakes, and so-on. When you\'re comfortable with all that, it\'s time to head to the Mun. Build a lander - your basic cheats\' rocket may well do fine. I\'ve found that it\'s next to impossible to land anything that\'s much (if any) taller than it\'s wide, but if you have a three metre torch underneath a one meter fuel-tank and capsule, that\'s probably fine. RCS thrusters make very little difference when you\'re coming down on a steerable engine that size, and the RCS tank adds a fair bit to the height at this stage, so it\'s possibly not worth adding them. To the Mun, following the usual directions. You shouldn\'t have any trouble doing so by this point, with an incredibly stable and powerful rocket. Orbit the Mun, then, when you\'re over the lit half, kill your forward velocity as accurately as you can. The idea is to end up with absolutely zero orbital velocity, dropping straight towards the Mun. You\'re unlikely to manage it in one burn, but not to worry. Kill the engine. Rotate the rocket so you\'re burning directly against the direction of travel - the green x, as you know by now. Keep it as absolutely centred on that as you can, any time you\'re burning. Now is when having unlimited fuel becomes useful again. Normally, the slower you drop towards the Mun, the more fuel you use, but now that\'s not something to worry about. Let yourself fall until you\'re, say, a hundred thousand metres up - depending on your patience - and then fire the rocket to slow you down below maybe 100m/s. Hell, come to a full stop if you like, you have plenty of fuel. Experiment a little at this height. You\'ll probably find that about one notch of power is enough to prevent the rocket accelerating downwards fast, and two to three notches will decelerate fast and send you back up. Don\'t forget to keep the thrust pointing as exactly at the green x as possible. (Note: if you overdo it and end up going back up, the marker will rotate round the globe. Don\'t try and follow it. Cut the power and wait until you start coming back down, then try to slow down again.) The closer you get to the ground, the lower you want your speed - with unlimited fuel, the only limit is your patience. I find somewhere about 20m/s below 10k metres is fine, and once I get below about a thousand metres, <10 m/s. If you get too low and realise you\'re moving sideways across the ground to any significant extent, blast straight up and try again until you get it right. Ideally, once you\'re fairly low, you\'ll keep the power just high enough to keep you dropping at the same rate, and click it up a notch for a second or two when you want to lose a bit of speed. Congratulations, you\'ve now landed on the Mun. You dirty cheat, you. Getting home won\'t be a problem if you\'ve made it this far, so let\'s skip to the next stage: learning to build a rocket and doing it for real. Go back to the config file you edited earlier, and remove those extra zeros. Trial-and-error your Kerbals into space, and realise that now you know what to do when you get there. Build a lander that looks much like the earlier cheat-ship, except with a single small steerable engine and real mass fuel tanks, and legs of some kind to hold it upright. Remember not to make it much taller than it\'s wide. Add a great big lower stage to shove your lander into Mun orbit, and now try and put into practice what you learnt before about landing, except let your lander fall faster to save fuel, and decelerate faster nearer the surface. Ideally you\'d do a single full-power burn ending with you stationary on the surface, but in practice getting your vertical speed between 10 and 100 m/s at 10k metres altitude with a single mostly-full-power burn below 50k should give you enough fuel to land gently and get back to Kerbal. With the practice you picked up earlier, you shouldn\'t need to yo-yo up and down before landing, although if you\'re as cack-handed as me you\'ll probably still manage to crash a few times. Congratulations, Mun landing achieved without cheating. Return to Kerbal simple enough. Job done. (I know, I know, some people will despise me for this. Others will find it make life a lot easier.)
