KeiranH

As a followup, I had saved and exited very shortly after the screenshot shown in landing #3 above. Although obviously not an ideal landing, the craft was resting stable and balanced (I watched for a minute to be sure). However, when I loaded up again to make the return trip, the rocket immediately began keeling over. I brought up the throttle, but not fast enough to escape a fiery death on the Munscape. Is this kind of issue similar to that of switching time warp speeds? It seemed like the physics engine decided to recalculate the position and trajectory of the rocket and Mun and killed me with a rounding error.

My intended landing stage (as seen in the second picture) uses quad-909s, for fine control. I was floored that I pulled it off with the T45; I think it was only even possible because I was sitting on the RCS thrusters.

I picked up the game after the xkcd comic (as I'm sure a number of people did) and started wasting waaay too much time with it immediately. Got to the Mun fairly fast (rather too fast, actually): I like to imagine that my Kerman's last hours were spent gazing forlornly at the Earth on the horizon as life support in his command module slowly failed. The second Mun landing of note touched down almost softly enough: One of the engines on the landing craft broke off on landing, but the return rocket was enough on its own to get back to Kerbin. Yay! So the other day I finally landed perfectly on Mun without exploding, tumbling, or breaking any parts off: This was from the same model craft as the 2nd landing, with the nice landing gear and plenty of engines... but I burned fuel carelessly and ran out during final approach to Mun. My only choice was to jettison the landing gear and fire the return-stage rocket to keep from crashing. Just for grins I thought I'd try landing my tiny needle rocket on RCS and one engine. Success was a huge surprise. So, my first intact landing. Anyway, hello, all! -- KeiranH