Advanced Grabbing Units Contacting A Moon's Surface

[The Flying Kerbal]

I'm planning a little trip to the Eve system in my Rusty Star Rockets Career, and was thinking about a better way to land on Gilly.  Usually when I try this, even creeping down at extremely slow speed, I always seem to have trouble getting the lander to settle down on the surface because of the tiny Gilly gravity.

So I came up with what I thought was a good idea: remove the landing legs and have an Advanced Grabbing Unit instead!  They work perfectly fine on asteroids, so why not a moon or even a planet too, right?

Unfortunately in tests on Minmus, I don't seem able to get the Claw to grab the surface, is this because it won't, or because I'm not doing it right?  In the screenshot you can see a little science probe I landed beside a Minmus Science Base; it looks like it has grabbed the surface, but it's just sitting there, the reaction wheel onboard is keeping it steady.

Am I flogging a dead horse with this idea, or is there a way of getting this to work that I am unaware of?

Thanks everyone.

 

[bewing]

Dead horse. You can't grab planets or moons.

 

[The Flying Kerbal]

12 minutes ago, bewing said:

Dead horse. You can't grab planets or moons.

 

Sigh... so it's back to the landing legs then.   Thanks for answering.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Try using landing legs, but enabling advanced tweakables (main menu settings) then overriding the spring/damper settings and setting spring strength to minimum and damper strength to maximum, that might* stop it bouncing too much on Gilly.  Or there's using KIS/KAS to stick some anchors to the surface and attach the vessel that way, would be particularly useful for a base.

*might, because I haven't actually tried it myself.

[king of nowhere]

you may also try to use RCS to counter the bouncing.

[Superfluous J]

I had a mining rig that I put a spider facing up on. then I ran it on as low of thrust as I could while the ship was loaded.

Of course, once you unload the vessel from physics and revisit it, all bets are off... landing legs, engines, and actual expected physics be darned.

[DeadJohn]

Landing legs can be too bouncy on low gravity worlds. Options include:

• Turn on advanced tweakables to adjust landing leg's spring and damper settings.
• Rigid structural parts instead of legs. Modular Girder Segment, I-Beam, etc.
• Put a wide, flat part such as a fuel tank as the lowest part of your lander.  This limits you to radial engines.
• If you land on a modest slope in low-g expect to slowly slide all the way down to the bottom of the slope. RCS can stop the sliding.