How i do land on the mun,minmus and other planets with no atmosfere

[jbaltus123]

I do know how i do get trasnfer to the and de-orbit but i dont know TO LAND! please help! send a picture how i do it and a download link of the craft!

[DeepSpaceDutch]

The best advice I can give you is fly through the nav-ball! Make sure your retro-rockets are pointing the correct way and fly all the way down pointing towards retrograde. When you start to see ground scatter (if you have that turned on) start throttling up until you're going between 25 - 75 m/s, when you start to see your shadow throttle even further up until your going around 10 - 15 m/s, when you're almost there decrease your speed to around 2.5 - 5 m/s. If you make sure that you're always pointing towards retrograde during the descent you shouldn't have any horizontal speed left.

send a picture how i do it and a download link of the craft!

Well where's the fun in that?!!

[GateCrasherVI]

Once orbiting the planet you want to land on, fire rockets retrograde. Or "backwards".

You'll start to fall towards the planet. As you fall your prograde marker will point towards where you're going to land, and your retrograde marker will point towards where you came from. Point away from the ground, or better yet, the retrograde marker once you're falling straight down. Then before you hit the ground, fire rockets to slow your fall towards the planet. Time it right and you'll float slowly onto the surface, safe and sound. And thats it!

Easy to do, hard to make perfect.

Landing gear (activated with the key assigned for "gear", usually G) can make your touchdown a little safer, and more reliably pointing the right way to leave again.

Bringing as little weight as possible onto the surface (adding multiple stage rockets) will make leaving again easier.

Minmus is generally accepted as the easier of the two to land on. The Mun has considerably more gravity than Minmus.

OH! And if bad luck puts your landing on the dark side of the planet, you may want to have brought some batteries, solar panels (for keeping things charged) and LIGHTS

If you really want an example picture / craft, I can post one

[Scorpi15]

Burn retrograde so your periapse intersects the ground. Burn retrograde enough on the way down, so that you don't come down too fast. Slowly descend and land. Don't forget to press 'g' for landing gear! Lights would also help you judge the distance to the ground. There are loads of tutorials on how to do it more efficiently or explain it better, such ashere,here or

There are better ones and whole series but I think that should be enough.

[Scarecrow88]

Once you have de-orbited, landing is just a matter of controlling your speed so that when you arrive at the surface you are going slow enough not to crash. After completing your de-orbit burn, just keep you craft pointed retrograde and manage your speed. You need to be doing less than 10 m/s when your each the ground.

[GateCrasherVI]

Well where's the fun in that?!!

Lol, totally agreed.

I think finally landing safely on a planet was one of my favorite moments in gaming. I played CONSTANTLY for about a week until I finally made a craft that was almost perfect for touchdown. It probably took me five minutes to stop running around the apartment celebrating and sit back down to get out and run around on the surface

[PrivateFlip]

Oh come on!

Just joking jbaltus123. It's very hard especially the first tries.

Landin on the Mun tutorial. See step four.

Here's a nice

. It's an older version of KSP but it explains all the concepts in a very clear manner. The ship is obviously over engineered which the guy admits at the start of the video.

Press F5 before going down so you can try again a few times if you crash. Good luck.

[Tw1]

A better technique for landing is shown in this video, also from an older version.

This way, you have less chance of not going slow enough before you hit the ground, but need to look out for mountains.

Landing on a slope is also generally bad.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Tw1

[Skorpychan]

My advice is to take the bare minimum down with you, and to kill off as much sideways velocity as possible before dropping like a rock to the surface. THEN start burning to reduce the vertical speed and drop like a rock with brakes.

Ideally, you want to touch down at about 5 m/s tops. Don't burn all the way down; you'll run out of fuel, drop like a rock, and crash. Aim to hover a bit above the ground to make sure you're good, though.

Mount a few lights pointing downwards in case of a night landing.

DON'T FORGET THE LADDER. And make sure it reaches the ground. My first few missions involved someone falling off the lander because they couldn't climb down safely.

And once you're down, BE CAREFUL WITH THE JETPACKS.

[petrichorAM]

Also make sure your landing legs aren't too high up your lander otherwise you'll be coming down on your engine nozzle

[SRV Ron]

Depending on your lander size and weight, engines and legs are optional. This 1.8 ton probe was landed on Mun using thrusters alone on the RCS fuel tank. I do now include legs for stability on slopes.

[maltesh]

And especially important for Minmus, if for some reason you've decided to land on the high areas, remember to manually click on the Navball to switch to Surface Velocity when descending. It's a good habit to get into in general, but several small worlds, including Minmus, Bop, and Gilly, have areas that are higher than the point where the navball automatically switches to Surface Velocity. In the case of Minmus, the difference between Orbital and Surface Velocity can be over 9 m/s horizontal, which can result in a bad time if you're looking at the wrong onel.

[KerbMav]

Landing on a preselected spot - that is where again the fun comes in!

On bodies with no atmosphere - tried it on the Mun only yesterday and only once - lower the orbit so that the flight path leads into the body a few kilometers "behind" your target and the craft flying 10-20km high over the target - then burning for a horizontal fullstop right above your landing zone, so that the craft falls vertically instead of landing "like a fast plane" - basically aim to get the retrograde marker on top (middle of the blue half) of the navball - you then can slow down your decent, tilting the lander a bit while thrusting to gain horizontel speed to get closer to your desired location as needed - the retrograde marker should be very close to the (blue) center of the navball before you touch down.

[Bacterius]

You can also lithobrake if you're feeling lucky (or are out of fuel). It occasionally works if you graze the surface, or have a lot of parts under your pod to absorb the shock. Of course, you, uh, you probably aren't getting home after doing that, but it doesn't matter because rescue missions are better.

There's also a good thing you can do right after touchdown if you don't land on a flat surface - enable autopilot (or SAS or whatever it's called nowadays) to "lock" your craft into position, otherwise it might tumble down a slope with regrettable results.