Vanamonde

Congratulations on your first Mun landing. Isn't it an amazing feeling of accomplishment? (Your Mun has hardwood floors? Classy!)

Twice for me now. Both times, at normal speed (no warp, I mean), while I was looking at the map view, in deep inter-planetary space. (I was lucky; in both instances I had recent quicksaves, and just went on with the missions.)

Have you looked at the how-to section? There are several video tutorials stickied at the top of the page.

I think I have a new world. (It's Vall, if you were wondering.)

Has anybody landed an intact ship on Moho? I tried one with no engine, relying on RCS propulsion to get around the overheating issue, and the LANDING LEGS blew up at around 1200m due to overheating! I did previously make a survivable crash landing with just a capsule, though, at around 4000m local ground altitude.

Fie I say! How does this pernicious and base rumor persist, maligning the entirely adequate atmosphere of poor, innocent Duna? I use engines down to the last few thousand meters/300m/s or so, then descend entirely on chutes. Five large chutes bring down a lander at a nice 9m/s or so. The lander comes down with full tanks in reserve for the ascent and orbit to meet a Kerbin-return ship. The truth will set you free!

To be honest, there's really not much to do on any of the worlds yet except see how high your little guy can hop and take screenshots. The only reason it's so frikking cool to BE there is because of the sense of accomplishment you have after struggling so hard to GET there. As frustrating as it may be right now, you'd lose all that if you used a cheat to get around the process.

Would I? I already devoted an entire narcissistic thread to it. Ignore my earlier modesty; craft files are halfway down page 2.

I find it to be the other way around. I use engines down to the last few thousand meters/300m/s or so, then descend entirely on chutes. Five large chutes bring down a lander at a nice 9m/s or so. The lander comes down with full tanks in reserve for the ascent and orbit to meet a Kerbin-return ship.

I'd rather the forum was about the game than the players. These things tend to degenerate into popularity contests, and I wouldn't like to see people competing for things, and possibly hurting each other's feelings.

That's a cool thing that happens now and then, but it's actually not supposed to work, so don't count on it as a landing method.

On the map view, pressing the keypad decimal will cause the navball to pop up, and when it is, you can steer the ship from map view in every way, except changing stages. It is ALWAYS more efficient to launch toward the east (90 on the compass), no matter where you're going, with the sole exception of a polar orbit.

It looks pretty cool up close, though I didn't see any blue in .17 before my ship went boom at about 120,000m.

Also, from what Olex's transfer calculator is telling us (and it seems to be correct), sunrise/set are not the optimum times from which to start your burns.

I had a NERVA fall off for no reason as well. Fortunately, I heard the little poof noise and had a recent save I could load.

I do it the methodical way others have mentioned: start with the lander (or whatever the mission requires), then do the delta-V math and work backwards. 1) The payload (lander or whatever), 2) a stage which gets the payload from Kerbin orbit to the destination (sometimes this is 2 stages for big payloads or long distances), 3) a stage which gets the rocket from high atmo to Kerbin orbit (because it's usually too big a job to launch with a single stage), and 4) a big brute to get me off the ground and most of the way out of the atmosphere, but then is discarded to save weight and reduce lag. I make the smallest ship that can do the job, plus a bit of a safety margin. So far in .17 I've only been landing 1-man ships, because currently there's nothing 3 Kerbals can do that one Kerbal can't (except take screenshots standing on each other's heads). Also, there's no need to make a ship that does both the jobs of landing somewhere and returning to Kerbin, since those have conflicting imperatives, so all my landers have been one-way-then-meet-return-ship designs. And I never use SRBs because I feel that they burn out too quickly to bother with. If a liquid fuel design is under-developed, a little kick in the butt at the start of the mission isn't going to help much. (That's personal feeling, not rigorous design analysis.) Besides, with the larger new parts and their fragility, a high G load at any point in the flight can be dangerous, which I feel is another good reason not to be shoving your ship around with SRBs.

While the thicker atmosphere on Eve will give you much more lift, it will also give you much more drag. Isn't that going to be an awfully long engine burn, to drive a plane from the surface to high altitude, in that soup, at a shallow angle?

I'm getting a delta-V of 2960 for a Laythe surface to 65km (~10 above atmo) orbit.

What did it look like? You know, there are occasional graphics glitches in which a pixel or two twinkles, sometimes at a stationary point on a planet, and sometimes it appears to move across the surface.

"Two down... "

I don't know why, but sometimes having both SAS and ASAS together seems to cause problems. Maybe try doing without one or the other? (As a matter of fact, I find one ASAS and no SAS is enough to control all but the very largest rockets.) Have you tried adding more fins/canards/fins with control surfaces? They are the best control devices to stop spin in atmosphere.

There are disadvantages to coming straight down. You can't tell the slope of the ground below you until you're on it, for one thing. Also, your vertical speed tends to build up rather quickly. I like to come down on a curve that gradually approaches vertical as I do several burns directly to retrograde, reducing both speed vectors (vertical and horizontal) at the same time. Also, I'm not sure how to describe this, but this approach means that the surface of the target world is curving down away from me as I approach, effectively reducing my descent rate. You end up burning the same amount of fuel, of course, but it's spread out over a longer time, making the whole process less hectic and more controllable. Looking past your ship at about 45 degrees down, you can also get a pretty good idea of where you're going to come down, and it's fairly easy to make adjustments to the landing point. You can even pretty easily abort that landing spot simply by burning straight up, putting yourself on a sub-orbital arc to another spot altogether. But these are just matters of personal preference and style of play. There's no one correct method.

The moment when the orbits cross is the most efficient time to match, but if you have the fuel to waste, you can still brute force it in a sloppy way, using several burns to bring the planes progressively closer.

And some characters so the interface doesn't complain.

Four large chutes were not quite enough to bring down a lander safely, so I added a 5th, and that seems to work pretty well, at least at a low-to-middle-altitude landing site. That's not going to work for anything much larger than this. I don't know if you'll be able to use the chutes the way you're describing, though. Remember that they don't open fully until 500m before the surface, so you won't have a lot of time to use the engines after that. If you haven't shed most of your speed already, I suspect the chutes will either rip off or you won't have enough time to get much use out of the engines before you go splat. Not saying it's impssible, mind you, because I haven't tried it. But it sounds pretty tricky to pull off.