How do we land accurately

[Bej Kerman]

13 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

23 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

but, still, as a backup, you have a great view of your lander you can use to estimate your speed and direction.

Doesn't help on the dark side of a planet. 

Bring lights then - again, this isn't the game's fault.

3 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

I don't have a citation on hand, but actually HarvesteR did oppose piloting assistance in the stock game. However, he didn't care if modders added it. I neither support nor oppose such a thing myself and mention this only as a matter of historical interest. 

Thank you! This may be interesting to research.

13 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

23 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

If you want to land consistently you have to get used to spacial awareness because 1.6m/s is way too fast for a certain landing.

Nope, I've never been able to properly judge distance in a third person view. (I even have problems with the platforming sections of the Lego games because of that.) I normally play sims in either a cockpit or forward (in front, or bumper)  view. We all know that the IVA view is useless since you can't get the angles you need to see. There is no forward camera in KSP. So I'm perpetually at a loss with my spacial awareness in KSP. 

All on your side. I agree that the UI has us darting our eyes round too much, unable to focus on one thing for too long, but it's something you may get used to with time. For now you'll just have to design your landers to be very short, but quite wide. If you can't fix the landing, fix the lander.

[boolybooly]

Before all the SAS bells and whistles were added landing was quite a learning curve, took me hours and hours to understand how to coordinate navball and eye. Its actually much easier to land now, if you have a pilot or probe core which can track retrograde. 

You just set SAS on retrograde, altimeter to mountain i.e. distance to surface and set relative velocity to surface, execute an approach burn then set up a braking burn node which brings the orbit velocity to zero, as a guide at the point just above where the approach meets the surface in the map,  which  will help keep a tab on how much dv you need to use to get to a landing velocity and the time it will take to make the burn. 

Then you approximately execute the braking burn as necessary by the seat of pants method and allow the craft to fall when it will continue to orient to retrograde at the correct angle for braking and you can bring it down gently and the altimeter will tell you how far you are above the terrain. The trickiest bit is right at the end, switching SAS to hold course when you get below 5m/s, by which time you need to be on a vertical descent, also if you want to gain altitude, as otherwise you will find your lander veering erratically or even upsidedown!

Once you have that working you can do the whole thing with a target selected and land accurately by switching between target and surface relative velocity and navball display.

Edited September 10, 2021 by boolybooly

[Staticalliam7]

On 9/5/2021 at 11:50 AM, PlutoISaPlanet said:

It would be nice to be able to set launch pads as targets. Atmospheres make landing on launch pads with precision very difficult.

It's far easier with Trajectories

[SciMan]

I agree that some form of "impact/landing prediction" view would be extremely helpful. I don't even really have much of a need for Trajectories itself, MechJeb's landing predictions on their own do a good enough job for me. Then again I stay away from bodies that have a significant atmosphere, mostly because to get BACK into orbit of them they all seem to require a similar amount of delta-V as getting to orbit at Kerbin (or for eve, much more than that), and that clashes with the way I like to explore a planet.

The way I explore planets is to send exactly ONE lander craft, with ONE stage, and my intent is to land it in every single biome of that body, and leave behind not just a flag, but an entire surface experiment package with a full complement of instruments, only swapping out one instrument (ionographer or atmosphere analyzer) based on if the place has an atmosphere or not.
Not only can this lander take a single trip down to the surface and back to orbit on a single stage, I like it if it can do a few suborbital hops to nearby biomes as well. I don't have the patience for rover piloting, and I don't have the computer that can handle the high part counts that would happen if I sent a bunch of lander probes to send back science data from all the biomes, and I also like using science labs so I need to deliver this data back to the orbital lab (which also lets me refuel the lander), so this is the route I have taken.

Now the high delta-v to get to orbit of Laythe, Kerbin, or Eve just basically destroys any chance I have of that approach working, so I just haven't gone there with big landers yet. Probes only so far.

EDIT: All that being said, I do believe that being able to set a landing pad (or runway, can't forget the players that use mostly aircraft and SSTOs) as a target is a very nice feature that should be in the game.
To incentivize use of partially and fully reusable rockets and spaceplanes (be they SSTO or not), it should be possible to launch such a rocket or spaceplane to orbit, deploy the payload, switch back to the rocket or spaceplane and somehow tell the game "The vehicle just delivered a payload to orbit, in the future it should be able to do this automatically (even if that requires pilots to accomplish)". Then, to get the "reusable" part ALSO automated, you'd somehow tell the game "Now I'm going to attempt to land this thing", followed by you (manually + whatever assistance like the SAS modes or autopilots the game gives you normally) piloting the thing to a safe landing on the surface of the planet (or splashing down in the ocean, if the planet has those), and then telling the game you finished landing it. Then the game would be able to "take care of itself" as far as launching and landing that particular rocket with any payload within (aka lower than) the mass and size bounds of the payload you deployed way back at the start of this paragraph.
That's how I think the game should handle "automating launches and landings". You should only need to fly them manually once with any new vessel, unless you're trying to get more performance out of it than you did the first try.
On second thought, there should likely be some extremely simple but completely customizable "pitch/heading program plus auto-staging" type ascent autopilot that can, with the right parameters, get a vertically launched rocket into a stable orbit. That's the kind of autopilot all the early rockets used (yes even Mercury wasn't flown by hand!). It wasn't until the Shuttle that we had proper "powered explicit guidance" programs that would make efficient use of all the rocket's performance capacity to get to a specified orbit.
The point is not to make it "trivial" to get something to orbit, instead the point is to make it a whole lot easier to get the 2nd, 10th, or 100th rocket to orbit.
With the pitch program type autopilot, you're still flying the rocket to orbit yourself, you're just piloting it "before" you launch it, in a way.
(end edit)

Speaking of "if it has an atmosphere or not", I just thought of an interesting idea for a planet. A high gravity planet, with both extremely large plains that are relatively "flat" (as flat as Kerbin's grasslands, so not "minmus flats" flat but still plenty safe enough to land most landers on), as well as mountain ranges that tower significantly ABOVE the level of the planet's (notably abnormal) atmosphere.
Oh and if it is a gameplay factor, the surface would also be relatively MORE radioactive than outer space, despite having no significant magnetic field, due to high presence of radioactive elements (good place to mine for stuff used to make RTGs). This helps explain why the atmosphere is the way it is, I'll explain that a little bit later in the post.
The atmosphere density at the level of the plains would be somewhere between Duna's and Kerbin's low altitude atmosphere (perhaps as dense as at 5-7.5 km ASL on Kerbin), dense enough for aircraft to fly at reasonable speeds, but lacking oxygen, and the atmospheric analyzer instrument would tell you that the atmosphere is almost entirely composed of heavy noble gases, which as anyone who knows how radioactive decay works, is the product of radioactive decay of heavy elements undergoing spontaneous fission (a point that would make it the ideal location to harvest xenon and other electric rocket engine propellants from the atmosphere, you might also find He3 in the regolith at significantly elevated levels because of Tritium decay, which itself is the product of heavy radionuclide elements decaying or undergoing fission chain reactions). Due to this abnormal atmospheric composition, you wouldn't need 75km high mountains to get above the atmosphere, perhaps only 15-25km high mountains. Alternatively, you could have a much higher atmosphere, but have the planet's surface gravity level be much lower, say maybe it's the core of a Kerbin-like planet that had the rest of the crust and mantle blown off by a catastrophic impact event (that would also be a good way to get such high mountain ranges).
Basically, the atmosphere would be a weird hybrid of Eve's (abnormally dense atmosphere at sea level) and Duna's (atmosphere "cuts off" at a lower altitude than Kerbin), but at the same time not landing on the same box that Kerbin's atmosphere did.

And before any of you say it, I don't particularly care if this planet is "possible" according to the laws of physics or not, I did give it a first-pass approximation at trying to make sense as far as what elements it's made out of, but I paid no mind to the realities of structural stability or tidal forces ripping the mountains down.
My point is that I was trying to come up with something interesting to explore, not something that completely adheres to the laws of physics 100%.
I don't feel like that's even a requirement, after all you need only look at the configuration of the Kerbol solar system itself, which according to N-body orbital dynamics as we know them should fling itself apart within the time frame of a few thousand years or less, so little violations of reality that make interesting things to explore are probably just fine.

Edited October 4, 2021 by SciMan