Trekkin

It would appear the download for the 0.14+ railgun is broken. EDIT: Fixed now, apparently.

Blind luck, or the Muon detector plugin/mod. Really, though, craters are a better bet for just general purpose landing. The big dark grey ones you see aren\'t too far off 0 inclination, and they\'re fairly flattish.

You can try to find the Munoliths. They\'re at the center of totally flat areas. If that\'s not something you want to spend time doing, try craters. They are flat towards the middle.

I checked the mass on mine. ~51 tons on Munar touchdown.

One easy thing you can do is to cut out the lower stages entirely. Instead of a stack decoupler, tri-stack, and subsequent tanks, mount those tanks radially along your upper-stage outer engines. Four tank stacks get rocket nozzles, while the outer two have fuel lines running to your upper-stage outer engines. You cut out 4.7 mass units of dead weight that way, with no drop in fuel capacity. You can also replace those vectored engines with their non-vectored equivalent, while dropping the extra ASAS and so forth. Like this: EDIT: I can confirm it lands on the Mun and back, but RCS is sorely missed coming in. By the by, what\'s the intent behind all the fuel lines already on the third stage? I can\'t figure out what they\'re for.

Also, as a slightly silly solution, just add more RCS. It sounds like you might not be throttling down quickly enough, so nose RCS will help.

In that case, yes, it\'s probably your thruster placement. Look at what way it flips, and compensate for that by moving the opposite thrusters outwards to the edge or the same-side thrusters inwards to the middle of the craft. For example, if while hovering its nose rises, you need to move the nose thrusters inwards or the tail thrusters outwards.

Are you trying to land VTOL horizontally or vertically? If it\'s horizontal, as I suspect, your heavy RCS thrusters are likely positioned at different distances from the center of gravity. Move the one opposite the direction you flip closer to the end of the plane.

Well, if you want my 'forigiving' method: I aim to put my apoapsis on TMI in the middle of the Mun, so I\'ll hit the Mun if I don\'t change course. Then I burn retrograde until my velocity vector is near vertical, starting at maybe 40,000 feet or so. Once my retrograde indicator is near vertical, I lock my orientation upward and brake with my main engines while adjusting lateral velocity with RCS till I\'m pointed straight up and down, moving straight down relative to the planet, etc. It\'s not fuel efficient at all, but it reduces the problem to a one-dimensional one fairly quickly.

Here\'s my first attempt; I may re-engineer this, but for now I just like how it looks: That\'s 64 fuel tanks, incidentally. I don\'t know how to determine the size though.

I made one! It\'s a bit weird to land, because rather than a stack decoupler I had to use radials to accommodate the Muon detector, but it gets from Kerbin safely to the Mun.

Two questions, if I may: 1. Is Mechjeb allowed? 2. Must the module land intact?

I\'m trying to build rather large rockets, and it keeps happening that i\'m a bit off in placing rings of fuel tanks, so that only, say, six engines bear the weight of the rocket, rather than the full 24, which causes structural failure. Is there any way to ensure my rockets are level?

I meant that my trip there and back was ineptly controlled. It\'s why I posted the rocket; it has enough fuel that you can afford to be sloppy.

You still have a full fuel tank, no? A retrograde burn until you swap apoapsis and periapsis, then until you get the new periapsis down for a light-side landing, ought to be within your delta-V budget if you jettison stage 4, and it\'s simple enough to do.

I do this as well, and make up for the increased fuel cost by deorbiting Kerbin via aerobraking.

This is the rocket in which I made my first (embarrassingly inept) Mun landing and safe return. It could be considerably reduced in size, but I rather like the wide footprint and orthagonal RCS thrusters. At liftoff, the bottom liquid engines will occasionally break, but it\'s rather rare (for me at least).