killernerd

i remember that too. Used this site to determine orbital (and escape) velocity: https://gist.github.com/1075144 Good times, good times

that's what i do if i'm landing on the night side. I don't even have to design my ship for it. It's main stage has enough fuel so that even after getting into orbit of the mun (or even minmus) i still have plenty fuel left to do manoevres and even slow down to a complete stop. I just drop that stage at the very end (when i think i'm about 500-ish meters above the surface).

map generation is actually pretty cpu intensive. It's just not multi-cored, so it gets bottlenecked pretty badly.

to put it simply, he tried "dipping" into the atmosphere to slow down without reentring completely. Like they did with the appollo missions that returned from the moon. Those pods carried so much speed that it was impossible for them to enter earth's atmosphere in one go. So in stead they enter the upper layer of the atmoshpere, lose some speed, get back out of it to cool down. Rince, repeat untill you lose enough speed to make a safe entry.