Your first Mun landing

[Sputnik 1]

I was wondering, how did your first Mun landing (or attempt) go? On my first attempt I missed the capture and orbited another 60 days until I finally entered the Mun's SOI, after a few burns I was heading in for a one way landing, at the time I had no idea how to return so Jebediah was going to be in a one man Mun base for a while, well it turns out you need to slow down in advance to land so time warping until I was just above the ground was a poor decision. They say you could see the explosion from Kerbin.

[Madscientist16180]

Personally made SOI with relative ease, then spent like a full afternoon reverting cause i could not land it!

Then i understood how to aim for flatter spot, and it worked well ever since!

[Peder]

My first few missions to the mum resultet in me making a fly by instead of going into orbit.
I saw that I did not have enough fuel so I fly back and redesign my rocker.

After the few test flights I made orbit and landed but I used way to much fuel to land, and decided to launch a rescue mission instead of risking not being able to reach a stable orbit.

I cannot remember if my rescue mission was a success, but I kind of doubt it since I had to design a rocket that could carry more than 1 kerbal and make my secound mum landing and go all the way back with a new rocket design "before" jeb running out of oxygen on the mum  ;-)

[worir4]

My first (successful) landing was with entrly SRB's and RCS. I didn't know how to throttle liquid engines (silly me) so i launched into orbit using SRBs, did the transfer burn using SRBs, almost landed using SRBs and then used RCS for making up for the (large) error in burn times. Also for the final landing I used RCS. 

Needless to say, Bob didn't make it back...

[Dravin]

It wasn't particularly troubling so no funny stories about the struggles but when all was said and done I probably had enough dV left over to do it all over again (which is probably why there were no funny stories, more dV covers a multitude of errors). Packing light is a dicey proposition when  you're doing stuff without knowing your dV.

Edited February 23, 2016 by Dravin

[MaxwellsDemon]

My first Mun landing was with a vehicle that I now know to be wildly over-engined and over-fueled... I lugged SO much fuel all the way back to Kerbin for no reason.    There are safety margins and then there's ridiculousness, and I definitely was in ridiculous territory!

[Evanitis]

I remember I was pretty fast - maybe 2-3 days into the game and I landed a kerbal on the Mun. It took another 4-5 more days to land a living kerbal there. I didn't know there's a savegame feature (if there was at that point), so I think at least 8 deaths were involved (for the landings. I bet it was a lot more in total by that time). The first survivor never left the Mun. Designing a mission with a return trip involved was obviously the next step for me, but doing a precision landing for a rescue looked unthinkably complicated back than.

Edited February 23, 2016 by Evanitis

[JoeNapalm]

 

Came in with too much lateral V, crashed. Crew survived.

Sent larger manned rescue, ran out of fuel, stranded more Kerbals.

Sent automated rescue drone, worked perfectly, all rejoicing all around...(well, except for the guy who got carried away and EVA packed himself into a crater at over 128ms, making a smaller, Kerbal-shaped crater. )

 

Man...those rocket designs look so rudimentary and primitive, to me, now!

-Jn-

Edited February 23, 2016 by JoeNapalm

[UmbralRaptor]

It was less a landing than impacting the surface at a few hundred m/s. First successful landing (circa 0.13, despite the Mün being added in 0.12) used legs from a mod pack (Which made sense given the limitations of stock at the time), and was amusingly overbuilt. It took more than one try to get a successful return, also.

 

[maceemiller]

My first attempt ended in a fireball. My first landing looked like it was a feather falling to the ground. It swept, gracefully I might add, from left....to the right.....back to the left....the navball started suffering from motion sickness until, god knows how, my little lander sat still, and upright on the Mun.

At that moment I realised things would never quite be the same....

Edited February 23, 2016 by maceemiller

[stosyfir]

Successfully landed on the sea of kerbility after just one failure..had a little too much ground speed and did the 'ol skid and flip the lander on its side routine. Quickloaded back to about 50,000m and smooth sailing down on the second go.. A little too much vertical speed maybe that was about it had a minor weeble-wobble for a second once i touched down               edit:this wasnt my first rodeo Im not THAT good.. I  used to play Orbiter a lot. (Note to self: build a kerdelta glider)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 24, 2016 by stosyfir

[Gojira1000]

It went well, as I recall. Made SOI, orbited, landed (on the second try, I believe, the first tipped over) - the fun occurred when I wound up out of gas with a 230km+ Pe while on a very elliptical Kerbin orbit. 

I then learned how EVA controls worked while Jeb pushed on the poophole-end of a Mk I capsule for a long, long time out at the Ap.

 

[nosirrbro]

My first  Mun landing was in .20 (or possibly early .21), using a premade craft I had found. At the time I was really bad and inefficient and burns, so while I easily got there and landed once I had the craft, I knew that I didn't have enough fuel to go home so it went from lander to base xD

My first minmus landing was similar, I did it the same day with the same craft, and I would have gotten home of the craft hadn't tipped over, and, well, trying to get off the ground in the position didn't work well for me.

[purpleivan]

It's a while ago that I made my first Mun landing (August 2014). I prepared for it by first sending a small unmanned probe there to see what landing would be like and then sent up command module/lander pairing into Kerbin orbit to try out the two vehicles and to practice my docking.

I remember that the landing I carried out on of the subsequent flight was pretty terrifying, as I had no idea if I had enough fuel make it down. Looking at my screenshots it seems I had only 47 units of fuel in the descent stage, of the 360 I headed to the surface with, when I landed.

Just wish I'd taken some screenshots of the landing and ascent (plenty of everything else) but I guess I was busy

Good times!

 

[schoff123]

I thought getting to Mun SOI was relatively easy, but making the landing was difficult for me. I went through 2 lander designs before I finally had enough fuel to make it back to Kerbin. Its ironic that landing on another orbiting body is conceptually easier than docking with another orbiting spacecraft.

[purpleivan]

I just remembered (after looking at my pics) that the following day I sent up a larger lander with a rover and as I landed close by the 1st landing sight, I took a sightseeing trip there.

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

Crashed into the Mun the first time, but got it second time. Don't remember much, except that I didn't have the fuel to get Jeb home.

[Nich]

My first landing on the mun was by pure luck on the first try.  Transfer stage had too much dv so I landed on the end of a poodle with landing legs on the landing stage 10m above it.  I was lucky because return stage would not have had enough dv to get back.  Next 20 attempts were a painful series of rollovers and impacts.

[dangerhamster]

Sideways. Into a crater rim. Screaming.

First successful landing was Minmus as were the next million or so until I had the confidence to try again.

 

[Guest]

I crashed, duh!  When I actually landed, I had already made several other attempts...

[RocketPropelledGiraffe]

Before the first successful landing I crashed a couple of minimalistic landers, until I realized that the deltav map numbers for landings should always be multiplied by 1.2 (or even more when you are unexperienced), because they represent highly efficient maneuvers with almost no margin of error - certainly not what Kerbals are doing in their space flights.

All my crashes got me frustrated, but once I had redesigned my lander with a huge amount of deltav to finally be successful it certainly felt twice as rewarding!

[sardaukar11]

my first one was a crash at some 300 m/s on .20 i remember

the second was succesfull but the crew got stranded there

[KerBlammo]

It took me a while before I screwed up enough courage to even try a Mun landing.  The first two three were "successful" in that the crew survived.  The first one where the lander was capable of taking off again resulted in the return capsule in an elliptical orbit around kerbin that just grazed the atmosphere.  It took at least 2 dozen orbits before it finally de-orbited.  It never occurred to ,e at that point to use RCS to hurry things along/

[Zer0Winds]

Ah, my first Mun landing... The best achievement yet, of that time. My first attempt ended in a catastrophic failure. The crew of Jonbart and Sigler... Oh they ran out of fuel just before we could land, it then accelerated just enough to BLOW UP! The crew pod went flying into the air though! So they survived for a while. Then it came back down... And blew up. My first landing however, Jebediah and Bob landed on the Mun, planted a flag, however I forgot to bring a ladder, so while I was using an EVA pack to get back on, Jebediah ripped off the engine! Literally! He bumped into it a little to hard... and POP it comes off. (It took about 9 years to realize, they're never coming home...). I still can't get a rover to them... I've been trying... 

[cubinator]

This image sums up my first few Mun landings pretty well: