Your first Mun landing

[Zoidos]

After about 2 hrs of impacting the Mun with enough force to decrease its rotational velocity and reverting to the last save in orbit and with the help of several youtube vids I finally managed to set down the overengineered monstrosity I dared call a mun lander on the surface intact. I even had enough fuel to return to Kerbin and noticed just as I entered the atmosphere that I forgot to plant a flag. 

[Guest]

It was back in .19. I was on KLF chatting it up with other players, and I'd just failed the last two times because I tried to land on the dark side and wasn't aware my craft had lights. I was using Vandamonde's Mun rocket, and I did the newbie mistake of burning out all horizontal velocity while I was at least a whole Mun away from the Mun.

 

Yeah, I tipped over, and didn't know about precision landings, so I deleted them because there weren't any consequences at the time.

[KerbonautInTraining]

I got KSP just after 1.0. 

The first Mun mission I can remember led to me "discovering" asparagus staging. My lander had a single terrier and drop tanks. I realized I could shut off 2 and drop the other 2 first and gain insane amounts of delta v. 

I did use mechjeb to touch down but that's besides the point...

[I_Killed_Jeb]

My first mun landing was before I knew quicksave/revert were a thing, so I had to make it in a single go. I want to say it was 0.18? Maybe 0.2x? Landing felt surprisingly easy, though, and I nailed my first attempt. Honestly felt a lot like a 3-D version of the old "moon lander" games I used to play on Mac 2e's

[Randazzo]

My first lander attempt had radially attached thuds which rather inconveniently burned off my landing legs.

After correcting this, I crashed several times, finally managing to land after watching a video tutorial (I don't recall whose video it was, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't Scott Manley)

After that, I went straight for Duna, assuming I could just make some correction burns to get there. I was wrong.

[spacebrick3]

My first Mun landing [attempt] was in Science mode, in 0.90. I was very low on fuel (read: started slowing down at 50,000m), and was zoomed in way too much on my craft. Funnily enough, it was also on the dark side (read: no orbital insertion burn). When the lights finally hit the surface, I throttled up, but it was too little, too late. The first landing [actually] was with the same craft, but I saved some delta-v on the transfer burn, and so was able to get a landing.

[oglommi]

I think my first landing was a crash in tremendous speed into minimus.Did'nt bother to slow down after entering minimus SOI. Just did a rudimentary burn so I would hit the planet and then assumed landing would be easy.

[msasterisk]

I first landed on Mün in 0.90, sandbox mode. After some trial and error, I derived Jeb's 1st law of Rocketry (moar boosters) and built a grossly overengineered rocket. Aimed at Mün, launched, and missed because it had moved out of the way. Tried again, got an impact course. This was all without orbiting.

This was back when I thought the monoprop engines were OP because they were physicsless. The result was a huge upper stage of monoproppelant tanks. I descended and slowed down, but my horizontal velocity was too high. The bottom fuel tank emptied just as it exploded, though, so I called it "lithostaging". I figured out what was wrong and slowed down. As far as I know, it's still there!

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

My first landing was with a very top heavy lander with a mk2 lander can and a rockomax 200-x32 tank or whatever that thing is called. It had a totally overpowered booster as I was playing in sandbox mode. After many failed burns and 30 m/s landings, I crashed Jeb and Bill on the mun without any fuel. Deciding to be nice, I destroyed them with whack a kerbal instead of leaving them forever on the mun.

[Korvath85]

My first Mun landing was back on 1.0.  I didn't really know what I was doing.  Jeb made it there just fine, but landing on a slight incline, he tipped the lander.  Didn't do any damage, and I sat there rocking it back and forth a little bit but couldn't get it to budge.

I immediately launched Valentina on a rescue mission, and made my second landing pretty quick (this was before I knew about MechJeb), so my landing was a good 20-30 km away from the "crash" site.  Luckily, you can move pretty quick on EVA with the jetpack, so Jeb made it back without much incident.  There is now a crashed lander and a flag marking the spot in that old save file (looks a lot like the splash screen on the menu).  

Good memories!

[pandaman]

I went for the cautious approach and dropped vertically from quite high. Ran out of fuel a few metres before touchdown and the tall thin lander fell over.  Poor Jeb had to wait till I'd designed and practiced with better landers, and still ended up having to walk 16 km to his rescue vessel.  Then he only just got home as he had to finalise his return trajectory on SAS and only had 10 units left.

[something]

So finally after a lot of tries achieving orbit with relative ease, I decided it was time to go for the Mun. Tried to find some tutorials on that but it turned out there wasn't much helpful stuff on how to design a Mun-return-capable rocket in the 1.0 demo. So I sat down with the aid of gnuplot and a delta v map and did the physics. Ended up with a ridiculously over-engineered rocket design out of those fuel tanks you have in the demo. Still wonder how the CPU managed the part count... Lower stage consisted of 9 LV-T30 engines each fed by 8 FL-T200 fuel tanks (just to give you an idea of the sheer size)

Orbit was easy, Mun SOI was easy, orbiting Mun was easy and finally going suborbital was easy as well. Then crashed on first landing attempt and made it on the second or third attempt to land. After all, the design had a lot of spare fuel that I could spend on the descent. Coming back was much easier than I initially thought, however I had my problems with using the EVA RCS thrusters to get back to the capsule. Freaked me out and did cost a lot of time (no ladders in the demo version).

[GeneralVeers]

Mine went off without a hitch. Mostly as a result of watching YouTube videos of other people playing KSP and showing me how NOT to do it.....

One of my most important lessons was when I watched Kurtjmac trying to land on the Mun for the first time, way back in beta--the video was at the same time hysterically funny and incredibly frustrating, because Kurt was not grasping the concept of neutralizing sideways motion.

So when I was testing my lander at KSC, I took the time to figure out how to read the nav ball and get a straight landing.

[ag3nt108]

My first Munar impact ended badly when i discovered how inaccurate the altimeter is (in relation to the mun surface at least).  

[Geschosskopf]

On 2/23/2016 at 11:53 AM, Sputnik 1 said:

I was wondering, how did your first Mun landing (or attempt) go?

Well, my 1st attempt happened way back in 0.20.  Back then I followed Scott Manley's advice and went to Minmus first, using a rocket he used in an ancient tutorial.  This all went perfectly.

So then I decided to go to Mun.  I took the same lander and added some pivoting wheels on legs so it could tip over and drive around like a rover.  I didn't research the dV required because the Minmus version had come home with plenty of fuel and I underestimated Mun's higher gravity.  So in my ignorance, I figured Minmus' greater distance would balance Mun's "slightly" higher gravity, and still have enough left over to carry the wheels.

Somewhat amazingly, this got to Mun just fine and drove around all over the place.  In those days, Mun was good rover country because back then it was all pretty smooth polygons (procedural crater "Mun pox" appeared in 0.21).

However, it consumed WAY more fuel than I expected during landing so just had enough left to get back into orbit.  A rather inclined, somewhat eccentric, retrograde orbit.  Thus, I had to do my 1st rescue mission, which meant learning how to rendezvous in a wonky orbit.  The plan was to refuel the lander using a KAS winch (this was well before the Klaw existed, and before KAS had pipes).  This entailed learning to EVA, too, to attach a connecting port and then back again to connect the winch cable.  However, due to a glitch, this failed so Jeb abandoned the lander and EVA'd to take the empty seat in the rescue ship (and note that boarding was done by F back then, not B).

So I learned a lot of basic skills and also swore never to run out of fuel again, which I haven't in all the time since.  dV maps are your friend

 

[T.A.P.O.R.]

Pretty sure I missed the orbit insertion and ended up time warping until I had an intercept again.

Eventually made orbit and had many f9 reverts before I landed with frantic jabs at the keyboard.

I wasn't all that familiar with the interface and struggled to keep the orientation retrograde.

If I picked it up now, the hold retrograde function would have made it a heck of a quieter and less stressful.

Of course that doesn't help any in early career.

[HoloYolo]

It was 0.23. After literally weeks testing, and learning the game, I was ready. It went really well. Then the first issue popped up. My decouplers (the biggest side ones) weighed me down. I had to decide for a land and rescue or return mission. I went with the former. I slowed my self down to 30 m/s a second. Then the second problem popped up. I never knew you had to cancel horizontal velocity. I hit the ground on my left side first. I lost my fuel tanks and I decoupled the right side to balance it out. I slowed down enough to hit the ground at 10 m/s. The pod and the parachute were the only two parts to stay connected. My 20th kerbal ever to leave Kerbin orbit stepped out, planted the flag, then got deleted as I got embarrassed that the mission "failed".

[DankPepeDealer]

First time? I was a young lad, with mods and a bad habit of cheating. So I cheated. Still have yet to make a fully manual landing. MechJeb landing isn't the best, and the closest I came to manually landing I hit too high of a warp and crashed. Though I have done an unmanned landing. Made a little ship and rover, brought it to orbit, and skycraned it down to the surface. Though I made the crane first, then the rover, so it wasn't a very useful rover.

Edited March 13, 2016 by DankPepeDealer