BillWiskins

Awesome, well done sir I think you can quicksave using F5.

Okay, so it wasn\'t as far away as I thought: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=7332.0 Some useful information in there, as well as the info on making your orbital planes align better. Out of interest, how is your lander constructed? Do you use RCS?

Pink symbol = direction of the space centre. Personally, I haven\'t ever used it. The nav-ball isn\'t that tough after a while. Obviously the brown half is the ground, or down, and the blue half is the sky, or up. It changes to refer to whichever body you\'re orbiting. Along the horizon line between the two are heading numbers - 0 is north, 90 is east, 180 is south and 270 is west. I think. Okay, go with that for now, I\'m not able to play KSP right now and paranoia has made me doubt my memory...but it seems right. You also have lines that run parallel to the horizon line right up (and down) to the poles of the ball. These show your pitch angle in degrees. When I\'m messing about above the Mun, to get my orientation easily compared with the map view, I rotate the camera so that the Mun looks the same way up as it is in the map - using the fact that one side is in shadow from your POV a lot of the time, that\'s not too hard. That way you can use the map to figure out where you need to be aiming your engines, and convert that easily when you switch back to normal view. Also, it means that if I suffer from a catastrophic brain failure while using the nav-ball for such things, it is immediately obvious from the main view that the ship is pointing the wrong way... As for adjusting the plane of your orbit, that\'s a bit more difficult. Basically you need to thrust at 90 degrees to the direction of your orbit, halfway between Ap and Pe. There is a thread that explains it better, I\'ll find it in a minute.

It\'s a good place, for the most part. There are a lot of very very smart people doing very complicated things with KSP, and I for one get a lot of pleasure from pretending to be one too. Just...don\'t venture into the Development forum when it\'s close to release day of a new update. There be scary happenings in there. Seriously though, I\'m glad you\'re getting somewhere. I can remember the first time I landed one of my Merediths on the Mun - I must have used an entire tank of RCS fuel on the last 50 metres or so, so nervous was I of touching down too hard or at a bad angle. And my first return home was poorly calculated and involved a very undesirable orbit, being recaptured by the Mun (!!) and finally transferring back to a Kerbin orbit with just enough atmosphere to slow me down (after a few laps).

Could state \'2\' refer to Kerbals who are in a ship that has landed? I know I\'ve seen it mentioned that the game differentiates for vessels.

I expect you just increased your speed. Just as slowing down gives the Mun\'s gravity a chance to capture you fully, if you speed up on your existing course you\'ll overpower it again and be back with \'flung out to space\' issues looming... It\'s all trial and error (or it was for me). I refused to go looking for assistance to begin with, until I got really stuck with an unstable rocket and I headed here for help. Wish I\'d done that sooner, to be honest! The beauty of KSP is having the freedom to just do what you like, whether it ends in a beautiful orbit or a melted pile of melted Kerbalnauts. Glad to be able to help so far, though!

I find it helpful to think of gravity in terms of a roulette wheel. I know - bear with me a minute. The middle of the wheel = the centre of your source of gravity (in this case the Mun), and the ball = your ship. The ball will happily fly around the outside of the wheel so long as it has enough speed (=an orbit), but when it slows, it falls inward towards the wheel because it doesn\'t have the speed to continue to overcome the grade of the slope it\'s on (or the gravity of the Mun). Urm, clumsy metaphors aside, it\'s mostly about speed. Burn retrograde enough when in orbit around anything, and lose enough speed, and you will be pulled in by gravity. So, when you convert that escape trajectory to an orbital one, you probably won\'t want to increase your speed for a while. Fiddling with orbits is something you\'ll find yourself doing a lot in KSP. It can be tiresome sometimes, but when it goes smoothly it\'s very satisfying. Plus, it will set you up for upcoming fun stuff like meeting up with other ships in orbit. Really simple instructions for that: burn prograde at AP to increase PE, burn retrograde at AP to decrease PE. The opposites also apply.

No worries. You probably figured out at some point during your recent rapid descent to the Munar surface that if you do end up with a trajectory that leaves you heading directly into the Mun, reducing speed is one of the more pressing matters... for some reason, parachutes don\'t work up there. To be honest, this scenario usually happens to me completely by accident, but it\'s nice when it does - it uses less fuel and is quicker. Another nice aspect is that if your Kerbin orbit was reasonably accurate and the plane nice and flat, you end up heading right for the equator of the Mun, which is very convenient for my favourite landing-crater.

Thanks for the illustration, sir. And may I say, superbly executed as well. Saves me having to do them, at least!

If you\'re being captured by the Mun but ending up \'lost in space\', my guess is that you\'re finding yourself on an \'escape trajectory\'. Basically you\'re being pulled in by the Mun, but due to combinations of your speed, its speed, and your angle of approach, its gravity isn\'t enough to pull you back around for a full, circular orbit. Essentially, a couple of ways to change this are: 1 - put yourself in such a position that, when your craft meets the Mun\'s gravitational influence, your path intersects with the Mun itself (not that easy without practise), or 2 - when you get captured, slow down! If your path isn\'t going to cause you to hit the Mun itself, the reason you\'re getting shot out into deep space is your speed. If you start moving slower, the Mun\'s gravity will be more able to affect your craft and bring it back around for a lovely complete orbit. To do this, when you notice the orbit pathway in the map view change from your elliptical Kerbin orbit to a Munar one, make a note of the PE height. When you reach that value, rotate your craft so that you are facing away from your direction of travel. This what is meant by \'retrograde\', and there is an icon on the nav-ball to indicate it. It looks like a yellow (green, if you insist) circle with a dot in the centre, and (importantly) a cross through the middle of it. Align that with the middle of the nav-ball and fire your engines when you get to PE. Check the map view, and watch your escape trajectory become an orbit. Once you\'ve settled into that...well, there are plenty of landing tutorials but some rules of thumb are: aim for a crater, try to descend as vertically as possible, and go SLOW when you get below 1,000m, because the surface of the Mun is variable in height (and chances are whatever you\'re landing with won\'t take too kindly to more than 10m/s, anyway...). Hope that helps. I got a lot of valuable advice from these very pages in the past, would be nice if I could return the favour.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=7332.0 There is a step in this guide which can explain how to alter the plane of your orbit. I usually adjust so that my path will take me directly over the site of whatever went horribly wrong previously, spin my good self retrograde and before I\'m quite overhead, full burn to basically \'stop\' and then fall straight down. It\'s not the most scientific, economic or accurate approach, but if you can land within a kilometre or so it\'s not too hard to use RCS to hover closer to your target.

Sounds like you\'re on an escape trajectory, sir. You\'ll need to slow down, I expect. Turn your ship so that it\'s pointing opposite the direction of travel, and fire your engines for a bit when you reach the PE in the map view. Your orbit should circularise and leave you in orbit.

Lordy, I do wish I could speak Science. Anyway, I did the challenge, and came up a couple of hundred (okay a thousand) metres short. Trying to understand all the terms and equations being flapped about in here is actually more fun than trying a slightly different throttle plan.... Anyway, guess it\'s not so much of a \'mini\' challenge anymore, right?

Purchase? Yes. I have done this thing some seconds ago. Enjoy my £6.59! I feel, or some part of me thinks it feels, like I have broken into your home and stolen your fancy television set, leaving behind a tiny piece of fig leaf as payment.

Can\'t we all just get along? Come on, sit down. Help yourself to a rhubarb and tofu sandwich, sit back, and build a nice space rocket. Isn\'t that better?

I\'d say practise is a large percentage of it...I\'ve always used just the standard parts so I can\'t comment on flying a pre-built lander, but I can\'t think of anything outrageously, glaringly wrong with what you say you\'re doing, so I reckon just keep at it. I guess it\'s not exactly uncommon or a secret technique, but when I\'m getting near to the ground I find it helps to pan the camera all the way over the top of the lander, so you are looking vertically down. This way it\'s very easy to see which way you need to thrust to kill any sideways movement nonsense that may be occurring.

As someone who has recently caused Mun landings to become fairly routine (endless, painful repetition and having a good solid pole nearby to smash one\'s head upon both seem to help), I\'d say these things: How are you landing (RCS, liquid engine)? Where are you landing? (Those lovely craters are a lot smoother and more level). How are you correcting the lateral movement? It\'s a lot easier with evenly-spaced RCS than with one gimballing engine. I\'m hardly the expert you want (and there are very many threads here which will help you more) but I\'ve managed it, with stock parts, and compared with many on here I suspect I have the piloting and construction skills of a cheeseburger. Good luck!

Well congratulations on the first RCS lander landing then, sir. I\'m pleased to have had some contribution (trivial as it may have been after your redesign). I still stubbornly believe that it can be done with my original version, though I am completely willing to admit that that is probably foolish. I will try again, but I will also have a shot with your edited Meredith just to see how far off I was. Re: ASAS, I had tried using one of those units before, but it\'s corrections were so violent and frequent that poor old Meredith shook her good self to death, with many explosions, and not far from the pad. Cheers for the revisions, anyway - look forward to trying them out.

Heartily agree with all the above niceness. And still loving all of the science, even though it may as well be pictures of toasters riding about the place of the backs of pork pies for all the sense it makes to me. AN UPDATE because I know how important it is to everyone: I made a few changes to my lander/returner homer stage, allowing the third RCS tank to be jettisoned along with the winglets. Also repositioned four thruster blocks so that they didn\'t get lost when that happens. I forgot to mention previously that below the command module and decoupler sat my lone SAS unit - I\'ve left that alone for now, but I\'ll shift it onto the landing-only part at a later date if it seems likely to help. I made an attempt with this set-up yesterday, and whilst it was ultimately another Mun crater creation exercise, it was significantly closer to being not that. Boosting in \'stages\' as suggested finally led me to Munar orbit, although due to an intelligence/observational deficiency, I may have achived orbit some time before I noticed. I ended up a lot higher than I needed to be, and without enough fuel to boost home. Still, it\'s a dramatic improvement on previous flights... I\'ve attached the .craft for your amusement. Technically a few extra struts would improve performance I\'m sure, but firstly, I get a LOT of lag in the Vehicle Assembly Building (as well as the frequent symmetry glitches in 0.13.1) - and secondly, watching Meredith wobble is quite a hoot. I think. Edit: feel free to deposit Meredith in the Stock Repository, if you like.

Aha, right, well this does seem to be a thing which will help me. Thanks a lot - I\'ll put it into practise on poor Meredith 12 when I get home later. I may even upload a .craft for your wobbly spacecraft enjoyment.

This is entirely a marvellous thread, this is. I feel like I\'ve tripped and fallen down a science lesson. And while I hate to interrupt all the science, I did want to briefly pose a question to some other stock-rocket fans. It would be unnecessary, but I am away from my copy of KSP and as such all your lovely .craft files are useless to me. The question is this one: closette, with your fancy munandback, are you leaving the Mun powered by RCS only? I ask because, having finally made successful Mun landings a thing that I can do with relative ease, I\'d like now to be able to get some of the little fellows home. With the command modular population of the Mun rapidly increasing (and my poor laptop trembling at the prospect of persistent CMs littering the surface), I am constantly getting closer, but ultimately failing, to a proper return journey. Of course, it might well be that my design is in need of a massive update, but the lander stage in your pictures seems to resemble mine and I wonder what it is I\'m doing wrong. My lander looks like this: Parachute (for safety) CM (for being in) Decoupler (for decoupling) 3 RCS tanks (with 12 blocks in three sets of four) 4 of those wobbly winglets (for landing on). Having landed, I\'ve usually used only half to two-thirds of a tank of RCS. When leaving, I boost straight up on the H key and slowly turn towards 270 degrees, in an attempt to achieve some kind of useful speed. Trouble is, I always run out of fuel long before I break free of the Mun. So far my best is 78,000 metres and around 3/400 m/s. So before I try six more times, get angry, try six more times and climb inside the washing machine to go slowly mad, what\'s glaringly wrong with my plan? Any advice gratefully received. I did do a quick search for this kind of thing, but I didn\'t find much of use. If this is a thing that has been covered a hundred and seventy-nine times already, then I apologise. Just leave a message saying \'sod off\' if this is the case. Good day to you!

Thank you, Mister Silisko. I think I will enjoy writing things in this Internet Place.

I know it is possible, because I have poured so much concentration and effort into trying to make it happen that even if it wasn\'t previously, then by now some mystic mind-conjured forces will have made it so. So far, though, no successful return trips for me. In the picture previously posted, I actually ran out of RCS juice at about 5 metres above the landing altitude. Anger was displaced by bemusement as the fins failed to shatter, and then the dread set in as I realised I\'d have to fiddle the design and launch a Meredith 11. There has been a more recent attempt, but due to a minor time-warp miscalculation I regained control around 4,000 metres up, and travelling at the kind of speed that you often travel at when you aren\'t 4,000 metres from something very large and rock-based. So, the landing was about as successful as a chocolate helicopter would be, and the Mun didn\'t even look up from what she was doing. Onward, and to more wasted fictional lives! P.S., I can confirm that I am not Mark Twain, on the grounds that his facial hair would just crush mine in a battle.

I must say, I\'m very grateful for your assistance here folks. Another set of four fins and the Meredith 10 quit her acrobatic tendencies cold turkey. She still wants to lean one way or the other while under SAS, but I was able to achieve this: http://t.co/k9ZuG4GF Just need to sort out my fuel management a little so the guys can get home again, but I\'m pretty pleased. Cheers!

A Quote of the Month in my first post? Why thank you kind sir! Well, I got myself some aftermarket add-on legs, even though it made me feel dirty. Sadly, I was so busy sanitising my WASD fingers that I miscalculated and gave that silly old Mun another crater. I thank you all for the recommendations, and I assure you they will be thoroughly tried and tested if it means I get to land with my original design, or something close to it.