I feel very Kerbal right now

[FinalFan]

I had a little adventure with my second ever Mun landing.  I did a picture perfect suicide burn to 10 or 20 meters above the ground but then I totally failed to stick the landing—started sliding sideways, lost retrograde marker, and I'm too noob to know which keys were the ones I wanted to correct attitude.  Reload, try again, same problem.  Feathering the engine didn't seem to be working.  So I went with short full-throttle blasts and touched down as easy as pie.  In that moment I couldn't decide if that meant I was better or worse at the game than I thought. 

Then I tipped over because my 20 meter, 32 ton lander was on a 13 degree slope.  Well, at least this explains why I was having such a problem. 

So on the next try, I land, and right as I start to tip I separate the rover attached to the nose, hoping that the ejection force will tip me back upright, and turn on the RCS that I had fortunately slapped on "just in case".*  Success!  Surely a landing can be no more Kerbal than this.  Jeb, sitting back in LKO, suddenly felt intensely jealous and had no idea why. 

*"Just in case" of what?  I actually have no idea. 

Edited April 18, 2018 by FinalFan
"rover"

[Geonovast]

4 hours ago, FinalFan said:

lost retrograde marker,

Switch your SAS to "Radial Out" instead of "Retrograde"  just before landing, and make sure the navball is on surface mode when landing, not orbit.

 

4 hours ago, FinalFan said:

turn on the RCS that I had fortunately slapped on "just in case"

RCS can also be very handy in landing, using 'H' to thrust forward and slow as you come down.

[RizzoTheRat]

Once you've switched to Radial Out you can "Hover Taxi" to find a flatter bit of ground, but it really helps to rotate the camera so that the left and right on the keypad are left and right on the view.  Give it a bit of WASD to get some horizontal speed and then it will automatically revert to the vertical and keep moving, you can then start to learn how to use the navball to cancel out that horizontal speed for landing.  I don't tend to bother with RCS except for docking.

I've found before that the Gigantor solar arrays are strong enough to push an overturned craft back upright as they deploy

[The Aziz]

4 hours ago, FinalFan said:

I had a little adventure with my second ever Mun landing. […] my 20 meter, 32 ton lander 

That's... Kind of impressive

[JAFO]

11 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

That's... Kind of impressive

In a major overkill kind of way..

Reminds me of a friend who used to build massively over-engineered (and massively oversized) Mun landers because he insisted it would allow him to visit more biomes in a single trip. He refused to believe that he'd almost never be able to do more than 3 biomes in one trip, regardless of size, until he'd unsuccessfully tried several times to prove me wrong. You''d think a trained scientist would understand the law of diminishing returns.. but no... 

[Skystorm]

Also, if your engines are too powerful you can adjust their Thrust Limiters to reduce thrust for landing and give you more fine control over them.

[FinalFan]

7 hours ago, Geonovast said:

Switch your SAS to "Radial Out" instead of "Retrograde"  just before landing, and make sure the navball is on surface mode when landing, not orbit.

 

RCS can also be very handy in landing, using 'H' to thrust forward and slow as you come down.

I don't have any pilots capable of this but it still sounds like good advice for manual piloting.  I wouldn't have gotten so discombobulated at the controls with a target on the nav ball.  Thanks!

[FinalFan]

7 hours ago, The Aziz said:

That's... Kind of impressive

 

7 hours ago, JAFO said:

In a major overkill kind of way..

Reminds me of a friend who used to build massively over-engineered (and massively oversized) Mun landers because he insisted it would allow him to visit more biomes in a single trip. He refused to believe that he'd almost never be able to do more than 3 biomes in one trip, regardless of size, until he'd unsuccessfully tried several times to prove me wrong. You''d think a trained scientist would understand the law of diminishing returns.. but no... 

Well, I sort of knew it was oversized, but there is some method to the madness.  I'm counting the 4 to 5 ton nose mounted rover for both height and mass.  I have a boatload of tourists requesting a Mun landing.  (There's another boatload orbiting in an overgrown upper stage, I love those PPD-10s!).  I have my 2.5m Can O' Science (tm), and I have more fuel than I need because I want to make inclination changes to fulfill more (non-landing) contracts, so the tank size also contributes.  (The lander is going all the way back to Kerbin without redocking.  Up till recently I had no docking tech but I think I will try using it soon--been practicing rendezvousing with rescue contracts.)

Edited April 18, 2018 by FinalFan
Falsely implied I had experience docking

[JAFO]

4 hours ago, FinalFan said:

Well, I sort of knew it was oversized, but there is some method to the madness.  I'm counting the 4 to 5 ton nose mounted rover for both height and mass.  I have a boatload of tourists requesting a Mun landing.

Ah yes.. I've made a few monster landers myself when I had 6 or 7 tourists all wanting to land on the Mun. I'm quite impressed that you attempted something like that for your second-ever Mun landing! Well done!

[FinalFan]

Lander just splashed down.  1859.6 science retrieved.  Dem gravity scans, lol.  I think I'ma get me some very heavy rockets. 

[HeliosPh0enix]

At one point I made a massive abomination with 4 drop tanks the size orange tanks on the lander.  Why, you may ask?  I wanted to have a science lab on the lander, and needed all of the science materials, batteries, life support (using TAC), and crew modules to go with it.  The thing was a beast, and I thought I had enough fuel to go to 4 different biomes with it.  However, I ended up not having enough batteries to run the lab during long Munar nights, and I was not going to switch the lab on and off every day of in game time.  I had to go straight to orbit after only going to one other biome.  Turns out there weren't even enough batteries to run the lab in the ~20 minutes I was in the Mun's shadow, so I had to fly a drone with batteries in a KIS container and use KAS to add them to the body.  Luckily, everything was fine at that point and I returned a few thousand science points by processing all of the data in the lab.  Now I know to never put a lab on a Mun lander that has no way to produce EC at night, but it was a long experience getting to that point.

[JAFO]

46 minutes ago, HeliosPh0enix said:

At one point I made a massive abomination with 4 drop tanks the size orange tanks on the lander.
...
The thing was a beast, and I thought I had enough fuel to go to 4 different biomes with it.

So going by this:

46 minutes ago, HeliosPh0enix said:

I had to go straight to orbit after only going to one other biome.

I'm guessing that it could still only do two biomes max?

 

My friend found that despite the massive size of his lander (something like 45 tonnes, IIRC) he was struggling to do more than two.. I had to point out that because of its' weight, it required a helluva lot of fuel to soft-land/launch that thing, so that in the end it was really no more capable than a lander weighing just a few tonnes.

Edited April 21, 2018 by JAFO

[HeliosPh0enix]

3 minutes ago, JAFO said:

So going by this:

I'm guessing that it could still only do two biomes max?

 

My friend found that despite the massive size of his lander (something like 45 tonnes, IIRC) he was struggling to do more than two.. I had to point out that because of its' weight, it required a helluva lot of fuel to soft-land/launch that thing, so that in the end it was really no more capable than a lander weighing just a few tonnes.

It had enough fuel to go to a few more biomes, but I was running out of EC and my Kerbals would have died if I ran out because of the life support mod, so I had to get into orbit and recharge my batteries ASAP. 

[JAFO]

Just now, HeliosPh0enix said:

It had enough fuel to go to a few more biomes, but I was running out of EC and my Kerbals would have died if I ran out because of the life support mod, so I had to get into orbit and recharge my batteries ASAP. 

Ahh.. ok. so, apart from the EC issue, sounds like it was a very efficient craft. Well done!

[HeliosPh0enix]

1 minute ago, JAFO said:

Ahh.. ok. so, apart from the EC issue, sounds like it was a very efficient craft. Well done!

I wanted to fly over enough batteries to make it through the Munar night, but with the EC draw on the thing,  I would have needed something like 100 of the biggest batteries I had, so that wasn’t going to work out. I think the asparagus-staged drop tanks probably helped improve efficiency. 

[JAFO]

47 minutes ago, HeliosPh0enix said:

I think the asparagus-staged drop tanks probably helped improve efficiency. 

That was my thought too.. I can't picture any other way (apart from ISRU) that a Mun lander could do more than 2-3 biomes in a single mission.