Finally!

[mnemon]

Hey,

just to share, since there is a moonlanding Anonymous around: Finally managed to land AND return. Jeb wondered if the Mun was so cratered by all those other attempts of landing there he never heard again from.

Trip went smoothe like an oiled kerbals head.

Achived by 99% stock, I used a RCS-Tank by DownUnder accidentally. I\'ll attach the craft. Learnings:

* I was surprised how little one does need to get there and back. My current ship 'Stockwolf II' is still overengineered, but it helped me to have the last stage attached to the landing craft till about 3000 m above surface, discard it, and use its impact to estimate how high the moon surface was. Plus it was a nice explosion.

* Landing on the dark side of the moon sucks, I never figured out how to measure the distance that is still left to the surface, since surface often actually starts ~ 2000m above the sea level the meter seams to display. Cratered moon many a time with my prescious expendable kerbals.

* Landing was achived without recurring to quicksave.

The Sequence:

[malcheus]

I also recently managed to do a return trip;

My first few attempts were a disaster; as was expected, I didn\'t realise I was landing on the dark side untill I was wel underway of slowing my descent, and then noticed I could not see anything.

I attempted to do a pure instrumental landing, slowing down to 20m/s around 2KM altitude, but then at 1200m my craft crashed hard into the munar surface; aparently the ground wasn\'t at 0m =P

I then tried again, by dropping the descent state around 1500m, and using it as a visual guide, but I still didn\'t manage to land in a controlled fashion.

I then reloaded the mission and tried again on the light side, which worked just fine.

To get off the mun I had only very little fuel, so I had to place my TKI on the far side of the moon, and 5 days later I could slow down enough to land on kerbin about 10 days after I lifted off.

Cheers for doing it without quick-saving/loading!