Veteran players reminisce: What was your first Munar landing like?

[FlyingPete]

Mine was in the 0.13 demo, with stabiliser fins as substitute landing legs. I'm classing it as a 'touch and go' landing i.e. they bounced a bit on the surface and started to slip sideways, so I gunned the throttle and brought them home.

[JimmyAgent007]

In .17 ish i think, After several way too fast landings due to late burnings and/or insufficient fuel. (i didnt know about the quicksave or load at this point so new launches for each ettempt) I eventually got it right(ish) and fell over sideways because i didnt quite get how to kill horizontal movement. its been a long while, i think thats how the first one went.

[windows_x_seven]

I can't rememer my first Mun landing properly, but it was on 0.23, and my lander was basically a tower of fuel with a command pod on top of it, that landed on the Mun and returned to Kerbin (no Apollo thingies, I could barely understand rendezvousing with crafts).

I remember the launcher, though. I had an orange tank with a mainsail on the middle, then the actually medium SRB radially attached to it, then more orange tanks with mainsails attached to the srbs. (makes perfect sense, I know. But it worked.)

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Forgot to mention that it looked terrible. Both the lander and the launcher.

[Awaras]

The oldest pic I was able to find...

I believe my first Mun lander was very similar.

Edited May 12, 2015 by Awaras

[Cydonian Monk]

Harrowing. It was 2 years ago, so I'm guessing KSP v0.20. I had landed a probe on the Mün before (using RCS no less) so I had a good idea of how much ÃŽâ€v I needed to seal the deal. Hudwin must have had a bit of a lead foot though, because he burned through way more fuel than I expected, becoming the first permanent off-world resident. I did eventually go back to rescue him, but only after I sent up a couple rovers and nearly stranded another kerbal with him.

[Brofessional]

Back then we didn't have any of this newfangled "leg" technology.

[Batz_10K]

Well, my first landing was ... an explosion.

my *second* landing however -

[Fleb]

My first Mun landing was also without legs. Technically it was more of a crash than an actual landing.

[bigyihsuan]

Way back in 0.13.3, where we got fuel lines.

Pretty much, went into the ground way to fast because I couldn't decelerate fast enough.

[rdwulfe]

Sadly, I have no pictures. Round about .18 or .19.

I found the Mun. On accident.

I did a long burn on launch, merely playing with a very over engineered rocket. The Mun was overhead....

So after I get into space, I check my apoapsis in the map. I had a Mun intercept. From there I figured out how to do it once I hit orbit on my own, then I read about the whole 'burn when its on the horizon' thing from the forums. Heh. Nothing like the old "throw a rock, accidentally hit another celestial body" method of learning.

[The Error]

Version .18, and it was... a little messy.

I had buggered up my deorbit and descent, and was descending at only ~10m/s... with 35m/s horizontal velocity.

Totally inteltional lithobraking ensued. Wierdly, the wreck still has one side pod and the central launch stage. It did, kind of, return to Kerbin, albiet with a little bit of help from Jeb pushing.

[Newt]

.18

I did a bit of a progression as far as landing craft, first vehicle was an impactor, then an orbiter, then a soft lander, finally, the manned vehicle. My impactor was pretty small and basic, but as I worked along to the manned vehicle, designs, grew, shall we say.

We launched to the space station. Four crew were already present on the station in LKO, as was the command module of the four part lunar ship. The new crew, three of the six for the Mun vehicle, boarded, partied, and looked through the windows, as the massive fuel tank was launched at sunset. Later came a larger habitat, and the lander itself, as well as three new crew members in a fuel carrying craft.

After all was arranged, all the Kerbalnauts at their stations, the commander sitting looked out the window over the solar areas, and detatched, firing the cold gas thrusters slightly to pushe away from the station, comprable in size to the component that had just left it.

The hours went by, and the station grew smaller in the windows of the ship. As we got into position, the liquid fuel engine was fired, setting up a course for a 10 km orbit of the Mun, or there about. This proceeded well, a few days later the first landing pair climbed into their vehicle, detatched, and fired retrograde, slowly falling away from their comrades.

Fuel was getting short, but not so much so that it posed a problem. We landed on the rim of a large crater, and took what turned out to be too liberal of a flight with the MMU, 10km of walking uphil is slow. Launch back was fairly good, and the docking strained but acheived. It seemed the mission was over, but still, we needed to wait for the Kerbin return leg. THat happened some months later, if I recall correctly, after anoher few Mun landings (everyone got their turn).

[bitbucket]

Excessive horizontal velocity, explosions, and tears.

[KanadianCerbal]

Version 0.21.1 Landed on the Mun horizontally. Then about a year later a quick saving accident let me relive the entire landing, 4 times. Wasn't as memorable the last couple of times.

[Idrryl]

Mine was in 0.18 or 0.19. I didn't know quicksave existed so it was a lot of frustration. I tried to land about twenty or so times. The final manned lander was on a rocket called Spacer IV (don't ask) which was just a double Jumbo FT with a Mainsail, on it where a couple of SRB, then another, and then a couple of FT-800 and LV-T 30s. No mods on that install, as you can probably guess. But I eventually got there with Jeb, unfortunately for him, he was stuck there for a long time until a rescue mission came.

[MrWolf83]

about a month ago, doing the whole point rocket at moon and go, got there in a orbit, began a descent all the saying to myself, "Gee, I wonder what the altitude of the sur...*impact*Explosion...Oh!!"

[TheMoonRover]

My first Mun landing was back in 0.19

Notice the lack of engines.

And the lack of a parachute.

Edited May 12, 2015 by TheMoonRover
Fixed image

[Peder]

All i remember about my very first mum landing was it was a succes, and that I had this amazing feeling that "i did it" I landed on the mum.... However after a few minutes I realized there where nothing to do on the mum other than going home again.. As ksp have advanced since then there now are a little to do such as science and mining for fuel, but I still lack more to do and I unfortunatly always have the feeling once I go somehwere that once I land and have done the science then I have the feeling there are nothing to do and I lift off 30 sec later to go home...

[Yakky]

It was in 0.22 and was the most incredible feeling of accomplishment I'd ever had in a video game. I took about a thousand screenshots and just let Jeb wander around the surface savoring the moment for probably an hour (since, as Peder noted above, there wasn't much to do once on the Mun back then).

It was also really tough because I flew the final part of the descent visually (i.e. looking at the spacecraft and not paying attention to the nav ball) because I hadn't yet grasped the significance of keeping your engine aimed at the retrograde marker on the nav ball. I figured I just had to watch the craft, watch the ground, and try to estimate what needed to be done. Of course the lander was rotated around such that pressing the WASD keys bore no bearing on which way it would actually tilt, so we had a lot of pilot errors and crashes due to tilting the wrong way before I finally got it right.

Landings got a lot easier after I made the little mental leap that the nav ball retrograde marker was your friend on a landing. :-)

Edited May 12, 2015 by Yakky

[tater]

I landed after a beer or so… think I was in science mode? Was August last year:

[Andrewx21]

Well it started with a rover back in my really early days. I was determined to get a small rover on the mun. Always got to encounter, for some reason i just never could.figure out how to get into an orbit. So i settled with flybys, managing my closest at around 70k. After a while, i finally figured out orbital mechanics better and got a probe in orbit. Then a good 6 landing trys later a probe landing. Then my manned missions. 4 were conducted. First 2 i panicked and crashed. 3rd i landed... sorta broke the pod off main stage. 4th went off without a hitch with 1 unit of fuel left.

[EladDv]

man it was at 0.19 i think.....i know it wasnt a big deal then because i got it on the first try (lucky me and my physics studies) but i knew i had more places to go so since then i went to minmus and back, duna and back, to laythe(nope not back) and eve (you can guess how that ended) i think i also planted a flag at the core of jool after this i started to loose interest in the interplanetary stuff and started doing complicated missions and design some aircrafts,boats,tanks and SSTeverywhere

[WyDavies]

I made my first landing in Jan 2012. No idea what version that equates to. I remember sweating hugely as I tried to get my brain around trying to control both the main engine, the tilt of the ship and the RCS thrusters, and finally I landed. And the ship tipped over

The second landing I used tail fins as lander legs (as this was before lander legs existed). And it turned out I put them slightly too high up, so the rocket engine fell off on landing.

Third attempt was a successful landing, exploration and takeoff. But I ran out of fuel with a periapsis of 68,000 metres trying to get back. It took a ridiculous number of orbits for the tiny amount of drag to pull my ship down.

And every one of the landings felt epic!

edit: I just found a video I made of the 2nd landing. Completely forgot I had it until I wrote this post. Also forgot about my launcher and how it would fall apart on the launchpad unless I launched it within 2 seconds. It would shake and the shaking would rapidly escalate and bits would fall off. Can't say my rocket design has changed much over the years

Edited May 12, 2015 by WyDavies

[RocketPilot573]

I had plenty of fuel and knew how to control the rocket.

I thought 30 m/s was a safe landing velocity....

[Commander Zoom]

.12 or so, though I did use mod-part landing legs.