Finding & targeting a flat Landing spot with Scansat.

[Cloakedwand72]

How could I find a safe landing spot with Scan sat & select a landing spot with Mechanical Jeb? Like how can I find a target spot & make sure its flat be for I set up shop their?

[Vanamonde]

Thread moved to Gameplay Questions, since it's seeking help rather than offering it. 

[Foxster]

I'm not sure there is a way to be certain. The map view will give you a fair idea, with you wanting to avoid areas with peaks. 

If you use Mechjeb's Landing Guidance then you can have the projected flightpath and landing location displayed. It won't be spot-on in an atmosphere. 

If you build in some spare fuel (always a good idea) then you can do an Eagle type landing and keep going close to the surface until you get to a better spot. 

And you can always F5/F9 and go around again. 

[Zhetaan]

The SCANSat map has a slope mode, but it's limited to the quality of your altimetry scan.  If you are using the low-resolution radar scanner, then the slope map will also be low-resolution--you can have a lot of jagged terrain in that map and never see it--but the high-resolution synthetic aperture scanner (SAR) gives much better results.  Careful use of the scanner, altimetry map, zoom map, and slope mode will help you to select a landing site.  However, be aware that in most cases it's necessary to go to the surface and look in order to best understand what's there.

[devikwolf]

Similar to what Zhetaan said, when you're using the altimetry map, look for sections with as little color in them as possible. Anywhere you see bold green lines in the alt map, this means a sharp variation in terrain slopes at that location. However, even the best ScanSat maps don't have a whole lot of resolution even when you zoom in further on these maps, so the best recommendation is still aim for a 'dark' area on the alt map, and carry enough fuel to seek for an optimal landing site. Other than that, the only good way (in my experience) is to have a small prospector probe that you can swing down into an ultra-low-altitude flight over the desired area, and design your lander to be as stable as possible on an uneven slope -- because you're pretty much guaranteed to be landing on at least a few degrees of slope anywhere but Minmus.

[Gilph]

I have discussed this briefly with DMagic on the scansat forums. The short answer is there is no easy way. I played with the colors and cutoff limit in the slope map and picked some target candidates and then zoomed in over 100x  and move my mouse pointer over sections to see the slope. It can be very tedious. I've recently used Game Mode in recording in Win10 to record my mouse movements over promising sites and watch them at .2x speed to see if there was a small value that I missed.

[Kurld]

The best I was ever able to do was find areas that held ore according to the scan and also looked like they were relatively flat according to some height map I found online.  I then launched a series of unmanned rovers to drive around looking for area with very little slope and relatively high levels of ore. I found several in a few different places on the moon. So it can be done.

It was super-duper boring though.

Edited March 18, 2018 by Kurld
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