pushingrobot

Sometimes 'debris' doesn't show up properly on the map view. However, the lander is not hard to find. It's located mat the west end of the largest lake formation, about ten degrees south of the equator. From the starting position (i.e. where the orbiter is located when you load the quicksave/persistence file) you should be able to spot it right away if you look southeast.

Yeah, I wish there was a proper mission editor; it would make things like this so much easier. The idea behind the Minmus mission is that there is a 'key' located in the lander down on the surface (not the ascent stage floating next to the orbiter), and that key must be obtained before you can fire the orbiter's engine. The most straightforward method would be to drop a Kerbal from the orbiter to the landing site, then fly back up to the orbiter. EVA fuel is tight, though, so if you come up with another solution I'll accept it as long as you show how the 'key' made its way to the orbiter. And remember: You can't use the orbiter's engine--even to adjust your orbit--until that 'key' is back on board.

Challenge 1: Escape from the Mun Moved to Fan-Works Objective: Return to the orbiter. Get the crew safely to Kerbin. Difficulty: 1.5/4 Challenge 2: Escape from Minmus Lemuel Kerman held his head in his hands. How could he have been so stupid? But as he went through the last day's events, they made a perfect--if terrible--sense. Before Lem took the lander down to the planet, he had surreptitiously taken one of the keys from the main engine interlock. It was the right thing to do. There was a reason Jeb had never been promoted to Commander; as amazing as his piloting skills may be, he couldn't be trusted with authority. If he had left Jeb that key, he was sure the orbiter would have been long gone by the time he returned from the surface. Then the lander's antenna had stuck. The lander had come down hard--those engines were still a problem--a connection had broken, and the key was the perfect tool to bridge the gap. His foresight in bringing the key had saved the day again. Of course, he wouldn't forget the key--he wrote "GET KEY" in huge letters on the cover of the ascent checklist. And then, as he was making his way back from the frozen Ammonia lake, it happened. His radio crackled with a warning tone and a recorded "fuel low" message. There was a leak. It had been leaking since he hit the surface, he was sure, and it must have been too slow for him to notice earlier. He raced back to the lander, powered up the engine--there was no time to follow the checklist--and shot back to the orbiter as fast as the engine would take him. Even then, it wasn't enough. The engine ran dry before he had reached orbit. Fortunately, he had enough RCS propellant to finish his rendezvous, but it was a close thing. He climbed back aboard the orbiter to cheers and pats on the back...and then...it hit him. He had been an idiot. Had he simply left the lander on the surface, he could have recharged his maneuvering pack, grabbed the key, and flown up to meet the orbiter. His older brother had escaped from the Mun using an EVA pack, and orbiting Minmus was far easier. Losing the rock samples and photos would have been a small price to pay. But now... He would have to attempt it. There was no other way. If his brother could do it...still, this would be even harder. His destination was well south of their current equatorial orbit, and he had to not only reach the surface, but do so with enough fuel to return to the orbiter. It would take a miracle. Objective: Return to the lander on the surface of Minmus. Operate the antenna (ladder). Return to the orbiter. Get the crew safely to Kerbin. Difficulty: 2.5/4 Mission 1 survivors: Mission 2 survivors:

A warning tone sounded; behind a thick layer of dust, the reserve battery gauge had just ticked down to zero. Please, just three more minutes... Moments later, the rover's lights dimmed. Two more minutes? The filthy instrument panel begain to flicker. ONE minute? The motors slowed to a halt. Elijah Kerman sighed, leaned back, and stared out at the sunrise as its light began to peek into the cabin. It was a fitting end to a perfect night. As he sat, his father's constant refrain rang in his ears: "Study hard, Eli, and one day you'll walk on the Mun!" All his childhood he had dreamed of nothing but becoming an astronaut--his father had made sure of that. While other kids played catch, Eli built rockets and learned to fly planes; models at first, but soon enough Eli's father had his son behind the stick of his lemon-yellow Piper Cub. After graduating, Eli signed up for the air force. He became a fighter pilot, then a test pilot, and after a few close calls found his way into the space program. He volunteered for the most dangerous tests, trained and studied harder than anybody. When he was finally picked for a Mun landing, Eli hardly felt surprised; in his mind, every day of his life--every ounce of his being--existed only to bring him to that moment: hands trembling, unfolding the letter from command. Since that fateful winter evening, his life could only be described as grueling. He was training even harder than before. Command wanted him in peak physical condition for the flight, much more than the orbiter crew. He had to master a variety of controls and practice endless scenarios for every 'anomaly' the engineers could come up with. He even had a session with an Air Force shrink whose job was apparently to train Eli to meet his end with dignity, should he find himself trapped on the Mun with no means of rescue. But every hour--no matter how miserable--moved him inexorably closer to launch day, and this thought propelled Eli forward with manic energy. It was launch day. Sleep had escaped him the night before, and before dawn Eli stepped out of the quarantine barracks to sit and gaze at the starry sky. It was the most incredible feeling, seeing the Mun hovering above the horizon and knowing that within a few hours time, it would be something more than a light in the night sky. It would be a destination, and he would be streaking toward it as fast as any man has ever traveled. The morning was a blur of checks and re-checks. Not until he was strapped into his seat did the reality begin to sink in. It settled on Eli's chest like a heavy weight. This wasn't a boyhood daydream. It wasn't a simulation. He was sitting in the world's biggest roller coaster, and in a few moments he'd set out on the wildest ride of his life. And one of the shortest. When the first stage cut out he was certain that something had gone horribly wrong, but a peek at the instruments and the calm demeanor of his crew mates proved that they were quite on trajectory. Eli marveled at the power required to lift a skyscraper (for that is how it had seemed on the pad that morning) to the very edge of space in what felt like mere seconds. He tried to lean forward to get a better look out the pod windows, hoping to take in the view from this altitude, but he had barely moved an inch when the second stage began pushing them into a stable Kerbin orbit. Soon the second stage, too, had expended itself, and the third stage gently put them on course for the Mun. They were cruising now, and despite their tremendous speed, the journey took place in complete serenity. If not for the lack of a planet stretching out beneath them, it could have been any of Eli's test flights. Under the pretense of testing the reaction wheels, the crew periodically turned the craft from the Mun to Kerbin and back. Finally, Eli had seen his planet like few had ever done before: It was like an enormous, round painting, with rough, dappled blotches of green, tan and brown paint atop a canvas of brilliant blue, covered in wispy brushstrokes of slowly shifting white. It took up the entire window the first time he saw it, and yet seemed far too small and distant; for the first time in his life, a vast gulf separated him from everything he had ever known. Since then it had grown ever smaller as the Mun loomed larger and larger ahead; each time the craft rotated, his heart skipped a beat at how much each world had changed in the hours they had been turned away. He was close enough to make out tiny mountains and valleys on the Mun now. Jagged edges and perfectly domed craters jutted up here and there; there was no wind or water to soften this world's harsh visage. Nothing moved or changed on the landscape which would have been quite at home among Dante's hells. It had a strange, forbidding beauty; yet, despite all the years Eli had looked forward to this day, he could not shake a feeling of great foolishness--that he had been mad to trade the beautiful, blue, living world behind him for the barren gray waste that lie ahead. But such thoughts had to wait. They had reached the Mun, and the next few hours were spent following endless checklists. Decelerating into a stable equatorial orbit, detaching the Mun lander, carefully docking, and before Eli knew it he was shaking hands with his crewmates and sliding into the cramped lander. As his crewmates--his friends--closed the hatch, he caught their faces one last time. For a second, he was back in the sappy psychiatrist's office. "Wherever you find yourself, Eli, you will not be alone. As long as you keep them in your heart, your family, your comrades, your nation will always travel with you." And then they were gone. Eli pulled out the pre-landing clipboard from beside his seat and began checking off each step: Batteries, fuel, RCS, engines one, two, three, four, ascent engine, thrusters, oxygen, scrubbers, reaction wheels, landing legs, navigation, radio... soon he had reached the end. Everything checked out. He reached the descent node. Fired the engines. It was happening. He was landing on the Mun. It was all he'd ever dreamed, Eli reminded himself. Everything went smoothly until the final descent. As he hovered a hundred meters above the surface, watching the dust scatter as the lander slowly crept downward, one of the engines suddenly gave out. Eli's had trained for this; moments later he had switched off the opposite engine and killed his rotation with some well-timed RCS bursts. Unfortunately, he was now descending fast and the two remaining engines would never stop him in time. As he hit the ground, he heard a loud crack, several pops, and the terrible creak of twisting metal reverberating through the cockpit. For what felt like hours Eli sat in stunned silence. He was alive. The instrument panels all showed good readings, and there were no obvious fuel leaks. He took a deep breath to steel himself for whatever he found outside, turned the handle, and pushed open the hatch. Blackness. He could just make out a faint patch of gray past the bottom lip of the opening; the landing lights seemed to be working. Still, for safety he tapped the button near his shoulder and the tiny pod was filled with the piercing white of his headlamps. Eli unbuckled his safety harness, grabbed the handles on each side of the opening--his hands were sweating inside their thick gloves--and pulled his way out of the tiny pod. He regretted it almost immediately as shooting pains ran up and down his back. Eli had repeatedly complained about the seat's shock absorbers, though the engineers had assured him that they would work much better in the Mun's gravity. Engineers. The pilot's natural enemy, they only listen to their slide rules and think every contingency can be planned against from a drafting table in an air-conditioned office. The immediate adversary, though, was the lander itself. It was tipping precariously as he stood leaning out of the pod, and seemed fit to topple the moment he climbed out. Eli sat back in his seat, wincing as fire shot up his spine. He was more than five meters off the ground; normally he would have no problem leaping such a distance and tumbling to safety, but he couldn't risk tearing his suit on knife-like rocks below. He picked up his clipboard again, held it in front of his head, and dropped it. Slowly, comically, it pirouetted down before gently coming to rest on his lap. This is the Mun, Eli reminded himself. Gravity works differently here. It may look like a two-story drop, but here it was no different than hopping of the back of his pickup truck.

Eli planned his next move. He would have to resist the urge to leap from the lander; on the Mun, who knows were a simple jump might carry him. He would take one small, quick step out of the lander and let his momentum carry him forward. Eli shifted into a squatting position--his back still hurt horribly--and in one movement he was out of the lander, staring down at the rocky surface below his unsupported feet. It was one of the strangest experiences of his life: He felt like he was watching a slowed-down video of a man falling. The ground was creeping upward at a impossible pace. Yet his arms and legs were moving as fast as ever, flailing as he began tumbling head over heels. He had't stabilized himself properly as he left the pod; at this rate he was going to hit the Mun head first, and even in low gravity it would be a very bad thing. Eli finally remembered his zero-g training and began swinging his arms in circles and moving his legs in a bicycling motion. It must have looked utterly absurd, but the manoeuvre worked; he just had time to get his feet back underneath him when he hit the surface with a thud. Another pain seared across his back, but he had done it. He was on the Mun. There was no time for self-congratulation. He was squatting in the pool of light left by a flood lamp on the side of the lander. Turning around, he could immediately see damage; two of the landing legs had snapped, and several more had become cracked, bent or twisted by the impact. One of the engine nozzles had apparently smashed against the rock, it was rather lopsided and had a deep fissure in the bell. Luckily, the ascent stage seemed completely undamaged, but he would have to stabilize the lander before attempting takeoff. He opened the toolkit mounted on the side of the lander and secured the cracked legs with a roll of always-useful duct tape. The rock on which the lander was composed of distinct layers, and a but of hammering and chiseling with a crowbar left Eli with slabs which he carefully piled under the damaged legs and engine for support. With any luck, it would support him and the ascent stage when the time came. Now that the immediate crisis was over, he could finally move on to his real mission. He looked around, hoping to see the walls of the crater in which he had landed, but sunlight was obscured by the tall rim and his suit's headlamps were far too weak to penetrate the intervening kilometers. He cast his gaze a bit closer to the ground, looking for the rover which had been sent to the Mun a week prior; if everything had gone to plan, he should be less than a kilometer from it. After a few minutes of growing concern, he finally spotted it in a slight depression a fair distance away, the whites and grays of the rover blending exceptionally well with the surrounding terrain. After packing up some tools and supplies, Eli began his hike to the rover. With luck, he'd reach it by the time the orbiter passed overhead again and he could finally check in with the crew. It wasn't going to be an easy walk. He had practiced moving around in a room back at the training center, suspended from a counterweight that helped simulate the Mun's gravity. At first Eli tried bounding across the room in great leaps, but that left him sliding, tumbling and dragged along by his gear; the counterweight eliminated most of his traction, and his heavy spacesuit had just as much inertia in any gravity. With practice, he learned the shuffle-hop technique, using quick motions of his feet to steer and brake more than support. He likened it to moving while sitting in a heavy, rolling chair. After twenty minutes of this awkward dance, Eli finally reached the depression that contained the rover. The rock around it was scorched from the rover's braking rockets. The back of the rover was full of cylinders--the beacons he would be placing around the rim of the crater. Command wanted this crater surveyed for a possible colony site, and the engineers had told him these cylinders could test the rock beneath the crater and also monitor Mun quakes and meteor impacts. Eli climbed up the side ladder and edged his way along the cargo. The rover was supposed to be the pinnacle of comfort, with a pressurized, climate-controlled cabin and spacesuits built in to the airlock so he could pop in and out easily and cleanly. A complex suspension system and large, knobby wheels would let the rover traverse almost any terrain, and a large robotic arm could load and unload cargo with ease. Unfortunately, *that* rover was notoriously behind schedule and over budget, so the one Eli was standing on was a vastly inferior prototype. He climbed the ladder to the emergency escape hatch (the only working entrance), dropped down right onto the startup clipboard (which had apparently come loose during landing), and began operating the controls through his thick environment gloves (the prototype rover wasn't pressurized). If his back had been hurting at the start of the mission, it was nothing compared to now. Sixteen hours of bumping and shaking in the rover, digging it out whenever it got stuck in loose soil and uneven rocks, climbing in and out of the escape hatch, and hauling beacons which were tremendously heavy even in the Mun's gravity had taken their toll. The first time Eli found himself on the left side of the rover, he noticed someone had stenciled the name 'Charlie' on the side. He wasn't sure if the rover had been given that name or if it was some technician's way of immortalizing himself, but Eli jumped at the opportunity to anthropomorphize the vehicle; it was much easier to take out his aggressions on a 'person' than an inanimate object. The thrill of being on the Mun had worn off quickly as well. For the first ten hours, he had been working in total darkness. When sunrise finally began to slip light over the crater's rim, the view scarcely improved. The black basalt in the crater was hardly any brighter in sunlight than starlight, and the whole landscape looked just as hellish as it had from orbit. Rolling hills of black rock covered in dark gray dust stretched to the edge of the crater. And the dust! It stuck to everything and etched away at everything it touched, like millions of tiny knives. Eli's suit was covered, his helmet was scratched, and the rover was absolutely filled with the foul stuff. Every time he entered he seemed to leave another layer behind, and the vibration of the rover turned the cabin into an endless dust storm. The only interruption to the miserable monotony came in the form of meteor impacts. The Mun seemed to be passing through a small cloud of them; every half hour or so, Eli felt the ground shake as a rock or a shower of pebbles fell into the crater. At first, he followed procedure and climbed into the shielded bubble beneath the rover each time he felt a shudder. As the hours wore on and his backache got worse and worse, Eli gave it up as a bad job--a hit from one of those rocks would kill him instantly, shielding or not, and in any case there was never any warning before an impact. And now here he was. The beacons were finally in place, and he was sitting in a dark, dusty cabin, staring at a harsh sun. He gazed at the stars overhead; he wished he could see Kerbin. This crater had been specifically chosen for its size and position; it afforded a wide view of the sky, yet blocked light from the planet. It was an ideal site for telescopes and radio arrays--but not for homesick astronauts. The only thing Eli had been looking forward to--other than getting off the barren rock--was the chance to drive to the edge of the crater, fly his maneuvering pack up to the rim, and gaze back at his home world. Previous Mun astronauts had told him how sublime the sight was, and how enormous and how dazzling the planet seemed seemed as it floated on the barren Munar horizon. But that was now impossible. When the beacons had activated, Command notified him that a pair were in the wrong positions--they had apparently been mislabeled prior to launch. The last-minute switch had used up all the rover's reserve power and left him barely enough time to return to the lander. Even that would be cutting it close. 'Charlie' wasn't going any further. The rover's batteries were completely dead, and the maneuvering thrusters could only rotate the vehicle. For a mad second he considered firing the final, reserve pair of retro rockets, but as miserable as the night had been, he wasn't quite ready to end it with fiery death. There was nothing for it; the orbiter was getting low on CO2 filters and would soon leave, with or without him. Eli stood, feeling another spasm in his back, grabbed the precious maneuvering pack he had hauled to the rover hours earlier, and hoisted himself out of the cabin one last time. But as Eli trudged painfully back to the lander, he counted his blessings. He was now among the handful of men who had left footprints on the Mun. He would be hailed as a hero, and his name would be immortalized in plaques and history books. And while he had no desire to ever return, his life-long dream--his father's dream--had finally come true.

Heh, I was just in the process of making those same two stunts into challenges. Your bouncing-on-the-Mun idea is interesting, though I\'m not sure it would save more fuel than it wastes reorienting yourself each time. I\'ve been leaping from moving rovers to craft in low orbit, and that works well.

(yes, he made it home safely)

You\'ll never get to orbit unless your spaceplane is very balanced, both left-right and top-bottom. Once the atmosphere really starts to thin (around 30km) and control surfaces lose their effectiveness, even a small offset between the longitudinal axes of your center of mass and thrust will send you tumbling. Since your craft\'s center of mass will shift around as fuel tanks are emptied, the easiest way to keep a space plane vertically balanced is to put all the heavy parts in one flat plane (pun intended). I should really make the time to finish and post my air/space plane tutorial. It goes into all of this. (Though I\'ll need to update it for 0.16, assuming I can ever download it 8) )

Grab a book or other solid object. That\'s your \'plane\'. Rest it on a pair of pencils at the front and back. Those are your \'landing gear\'. Now, push down (your \'control surface\') on the back of the \'plane\', right on top of the rear \'landing gear\'. Notice that the \'plane\' doesn\'t tilt up. Play around a bit and you\'ll figure out how to position your landing gear and control surfaces to provide much better leverage.

I was going to update this to 0.16, but I can\'t get the game to patch. Since quite a few people seem to be having the same trouble, I guess I\'ll throw this out there as a consolation prize to those of us still stuck on 0.15. Unzip the attached file to your KSP folder and it should put everything where it needs to go. I included both a persistent.sfs and quicksave.sfs. Both are identical. You may of course want to back up your old saves folder beforehand. The plot: You were landing on the Mun. You just ignited your lander engines. There was a loud bang, the cabin shook, and now everything is silent. Deadly silent. Your objective: Stay alive. Get home before your air supply runs out. You have thirteen days. Good luck. [table] [tr] [td]Survivors:[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][/td] [/tr] [/table]

When pod torque gets nerfed ASAS may be less a bit less useful, but right now it\'s ridiculously handy. It\'s way better than a basic SAS for keeping ships in line, since it controls pod torque, gimbaled engines, RCS and control surfaces. It\'s amazing for hands-off landings; just kill your horizontal velocity, point your lander straight up, and you won\'t have to worry about anything but your rate of descent. I can land without it, but it\'s an annoying luxury to give up. Oh, and I also tried my hand at this challenge. I know I could land with a kg or two more fuel if I picked an ideal landing spot and descended in a perfect arc, but this will have to do for now:

Here\'s a more traditional rocket:

I\'m thinking you also need a 'no RCS' rule...or else you\'ll end up with this:

Yep. I had originally gone with a much more stylish modified delta wing, but it took so many (stock) parts to build a triangular wing that huge it killed the engine.

Figured I\'d give this one a try. (edit: added runway pics) 22 B x 10 B. Stock. If I ever decide to do anything like this again, please do me a favor and shoot me.

Thanks! Dragonshy is one of my favorite eps, too. But I already had something in mind; I\'ll throw it together when I get a moment. H(e|a)y, every(body|pony), don\'t forget to donate to Humble Brony before it\'s too late! And while you\'re at it, pester the devs about getting KSP into the next Humble Bundle.

Well, the only solution is to have a MLP-thon. Free up a weekend, get some friends, drinks and snacks, start from the beginning of the first episode, and don\'t stop watching until you spot it... *cough*

I appreciate the compliments but the Sawfish is just a huge (185-ton!) rocket flattened out and turned on its side. It\'s not well balanced and a huge pain to fly. It\'s good for bragging rights but not much else. I\'ve never touched it since the challenge. And as far as testing and balancing goes, once you\'ve got a solid design it\'s easy to adapt for different sizes and situations. I start with a long sturdy fuselage, stick engines on the back, hang fuel tanks in rows off the sides, and slap a wing on top. Sure, there\'s some tweaking at the end, but not nearly as much as you\'d expect. When I get a chance I\'ll detail how I build my planes in the how-to thread. In the meantime, feel free to try something a bit smaller (and far more flyable), the Morning Star: It doesn\'t pack as much power, but the Morning Star has improved flight characteristics and great range for its size. While I haven\'t taken the grand tour in it yet, I\'m confident it could land on the Mun and Minmus and make it back to Kerbin easily. And while it may lack a bit in engine power, it makes up for it in RCS: Its 80 (!) thrusters eat through fuel like crazy but really cushion the Morning Star\'s landings. While I can\'t say landing is easy, it\'s far safer than the Sawfish. In fact, once I got the thrusters balanced, I managed to land on the Mun on my first attempt: I used the main engines to come to a near-stop 50m above the surface, then floated down the rest of the way on RCS. Unfortunately, all those thrusters don\'t exactly help the game performance, so you might want to pull them off if you won\'t be making Munar landings and it lags too much. Many of the wing segments could be eliminated also. But KSP handles it relatively well even on a 3+ year old Core 2 Duo, though quicksaving/quickloading or jumping to the tracking center periodically is necessary to keep lag from creeping in. Oh, and the Morning Star uses MechJeb. If that\'s a problem I could make a version without it, but you really owe it to yourself to try MechJeb; it makes missions go so much more smoothly. Have fun!

Unfortunately you\'d have to be going well over 900m/s straight up at 20km for your momentum to carry you to 'space'. In theory, you could accelerate past that at 16km-18km and do a zoom climb to 69km. In reality, even if your plane is nothing but engines and nacelles I doubt you could reach that without mods or exploits. Why? Three reasons: [list type=decimal] [li]Improper drag modeling. Right now drag is calculated on each part individually, and fuel tanks, engines and nacelles add a lot. Because of this, no matter how many engines you use you hit a wall around 950 m/s.[/li] [li]Improper aerodynamics. Wings don\'t work properly in KSP. Doing a zoom climb in KSP is like making a sharp turn in your car on an icy lake. You can accelerate horizontally at 16km, pull back into a steep ascent... and keep moving horizontally.[/li] [li]Limited parts. KSP jet engines drop to zero thrust by 20km. A SR-71 can cruise in level flight at 26km. Until we have some more realistic engines, there\'s not much chance of performing stunts we\'ve never even accomplished in the real world (the current altitude record for a jet-powered plane is 37.65 km).[/li]

It would be a much better challenge if you provided a save with debris already in orbit.

This challenge is all about going sloooow (well, that and building a plane you can walk away from for an hour and not worry about...) I actually built a simple plane shortly after 0.15 came out that could circumnavigate Kerbin, though it flew at around 10,000m. I revised it a bit to ensure it would work at 6km, but shortly after I started I decided it wasn\'t sufficiently cool for a challenge like this. So I decided to go back to the drawing board, and build a replica of the GlobalFlyer plane that the late Steve Fossett flew around the world a few years back' Unfortunately, KSP physics are a bit off, and I had to pack a bunch of wings together to generate the sort of lift it needed. KSP balked at that, and not long into the mission it just became too laggy to fly, not to mention the phantom forces that tended to send it off the sides of the runway. So I went back, tweaked the design, spread the wings out, and beefed it up a bit: And made the KerbalFlyer II: More fuel, better balance, way better framerate. Flying was a breeze--I set MechJeb to maintain 'PRO GRAD' orientation, and all I had to do was come back every hour or so to reduce the throttle a bit so it wouldn\'t go over 6000m. The only harrowing bit was landing; it\'s such a good glider it took an hour of slowly circling just to get it down to the ground, and it was on the brink of stalling a few times. How\'d it do? Pretty darn well. I did the math and the remaining fuel would have been enough for an entire second trip around Kerbin. But no, it can\'t glide forever. I deliberately kept control surfaces to a minimum (which wasn\'t fun when landing...) and used a rocket engine in place of the jet during trials so I could test fuel flow and handling at a variety of fuel levels.

Actually, now that we\'ve got the capsules from the C7 pack and radially mounted chutes, you don\'t need to do that anymore. Your entire lander might not survive, but the pod can at least handle a lot more abuse. And even in 0.14 I\'d started building large landers with 'escape vehicles' consisting of a booster, two RCS tanks and a few thrusters, a command pod, and a chute. The booster could get you into Munar orbit, the RCS could get you home, and (once the booster was empty) the whole thing was light enough to land safely. They were a great backup on the rare chance something happened (or was about to happen) to the lander.

I\'ve actually done this, though it took a fair amount of saving and reloading. First, I put myself in a very shallow decaying orbit. I repeatedly saved and loaded until I had a trajectory that would put me down on a relatively flat stretch at a vertical speed of about 10 m/s. Then I pointed my ship in a retrograde direction, with my nose slightly higher to account for gravity and give me a little breathing room--in other words, about 5 degrees above the green \'X\' on the navball. I made a first few tries to get a general idea of how long it would take to stop the craft. Then, I made a save shortly before the burn point with my ship already pointing in the right direction. Then it just became a process of trial and error. I\'d engage SAS every time I reloaded, so the only variable between attempts was the altitude at which I started my burn. After several attempts, I finally determined the exact altitude I needed to burn at to stop right before I reached the surface. My proper burn point ended up being only about 300 meters above the surface (!) though it will vary depending on your craft\'s thrust/weight ratio. If I could land this: ...you should be able to land a more typical craft without much trouble. Speaking of landing craft, the more thrust your ship has the easier it will be to land on the Mun. The faster you can decelerate, the shallower of an angle you can land at, so you might want to think about packing in some extra engines. Also, RCS thrusters below the nose of your craft really help, since you\'ll land at a slight incline and your nose will fall to the ground hard without RCS to stabilize it. Also, this sort of landing uses far, far less fuel than a typical Mun landing. If the Mun has a gravitational acceleration of, say, 3 m/s per second, every second of descent takes means another 3 m/s of delta-v gone to waste. If your descent takes 5 minutes, that\'s 1000 m/s worth of fuel. If your descent takes 30 seconds, it\'s only 100 m/s of fuel. Once you\'ve tried a few high-speed landings, you probably won\'t want to go back to slow, floaty descents; the fuel savings lets you do so much much more on a mission. It\'s also way more fun and thoroughly Jeb-approved. Just remember to save before the attempt

They\'re not rifled, they\'re circularly polarized.

Funny--I was about to suggest you call it the Yamato Now you\'ve got me wondering if a passable Wave Motion Gun could be built using particle emitters. And I must say, of all the things I\'ve seen in KSP, that definitely wins on style and coolness (and makes good marks on awesomeness and radicalness).