- Getting to the moon - [TUTORIAL]

[Nomer]

I know there are about 400 about to get to the moon,

But this is my method.

I don\'t know,

maybe 399 of those threads use it.

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This is how I get into a munar orbit,

Not land,

I fail at landing,

The closest I\'ve been is a touch & go because of unstopable lateral movement.

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You have to keep your rocket going straight up untill you reach 500 meters a second,

Your altitude should be over 180,000 at the time, if not, try a lighter and more effiecient ship,

Now, your HDG has to say 270 degreese, not 271, not 269, but exactly 270.

I tried going a bit off about 268-269,

I ended up getting no encounter and flew off into deep space.

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Now, once you are in this, check your orbital map,

When the orbit is expanding to fast, you have to lower the throttle,

Keep the throttle 0 to 5% when your apoasis reaches the moon, keep it slow and steady

Eventually, if you\'ve done this right, you will reach a munar encounter,

but,

You will gain a peoapsis,

Burn a bit more untill your peoapsis goes away,

and you will now crash into the lunar surface, not crash, hence,

atleast encounter, your choice to crash or not.

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I reccomend using an extra fuel cell to retro-burn, but don\'t retro-burn to high, or you will end up with a peoapsis and flying away.

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IF YOU GO TO FAST IN YOUR ORBIT EXPANDATION, AND MISS THE MOON:

No problem, just quickly turn your ship the opposit direction,

no exact HDG or anything, just opposit from the direction you were going before,

but do this slowly, and have your orbital map open.

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This is a quick explaination of my method,

never failed me,

But I fail to land on the moon successfuly.

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[Teh_Miner101]

You know going 270 HDG rather than 90 HDG is inefficient because you have to fight the rotation of Kerbin? You can save fuel if you go 90 but I don\'t know if you get your encounter that way. I usually just get into a 100-150km orbit above Kerbin (going 90 HDG) and burn for the Mun when it rises over Kerbin. You do that till your apoapsis reaches the Muns orbit and you will get an encounter then you can land or do whatever.

[Nomer]

What orbit...?

I learn from tryingtodielive.

It gets me there in less time, I\'ll try your 90 HDG thing though.

[Teh_Miner101]

Yeah you get an orbit above Kerbin at around 100km to 150 km (at 90 degrees) and when you see the Mun rise over kerbin from orbit you burn your engines at till your apoapsis reaches that of the mun then it will come up the encounter thingy if that makes sense

[sleeepz]

What do I do if my rocket is going 500 meters a second at 20km?

[togfox]

What do I do if my rocket is going 500 meters a second at 20km?

stop cheating.

Actually - I try to hit 400m/s at an altitude of 15km. That\'s when I start my grav turn.

[vexx32]

There is no viable reason to burn 270 from Kerbin -- waiting until munrise while in orbit takes very little time, so catching up to the Mun is quite easy. Minmus, on the other hand... well, let\'s just say it\'s best to burn 90 till you get the altitude, then burn 270 so you orbit opposite. THEN you need the plane change as well, most of the time. What? it\'s faster than trying to catch up to it.

Anyhoo, pretty good tut. Some pictures would make it better

[Endeavour]

If you have too much horizontal speed, just burn with a pitch of 0 degrees in line with the retrograde symbol thing until it is on top of the navball.

[Khrissetti]

Pow! Zoom! Straight to the Mun!

Your method is the direct ascent method which is quick, but fuel inefficient.

A much easier solution is a munar orbit Rendezvous, which has the advantage of being more efficient and gives you a wider margin of error.

1) launch your rocket straight up until you reaach about 20k, then gently angle the rocket eastwards (90 degrees) at a steep angle. You don\'t need to be doing huge speeds, just enough to keep raising your apoapsis.

2) When your Ap reaches 100k, stop burning and turn your ship to turn at 90 degrees, with zero inclination (on the nav-ball you should have equal amounts blue and brown and be sitting pretty on the 90 degree marker)

3) Just before you reach Ap, fire those engines as hot as they\'ll go until your Pe ia about 100k and shut off the engines again. Don\'t worry if you\'re out by quite a margin or if the eccentricity is high, just get that Pe up above the atmosphere.

4)Keep your eye to the horizon in the direction of travel, you want to watch for Munrise. As soon as you see the Mun poke up above the horizon, turn to prograde (The yellow ciircle on the nav-ball) and start to burn.

5) On the map view, you should see your Ap rise, you want to get is close to the Mun\'s orbit at about 11,500k, reduce your burn as your AP gets close so you don\'t overshoot, and keep watching for when your map tells you you\'ll intercept.

6) time warp 10,000 until you get captured by the Mun.

7)You\'ll notice now that your path isn\'t a circle but an arc with a Pe in the middle, this shows that you\'re on an escape trajectory and we don\'t want that.

8) wait until you reach Pe and turn to face retrograde (they yellow/green symbol with the \'x\' through it) and start to burn your engines, watch as the two ends of the arc start to close up.

9) You can now keep burning to lower your Ap to a circular orbit.

10) Voila, you\'re in Munar orbit!

LANDING ON THE MUN!

now you\'re in Munar orbit, I bet you\'d like to settle yourself down on the surface right? Well, all right then. First let\'s find a landing site.

1) The safest places to land are the large craters on the lit side of the Mun (You\'ll see why soon) so wait until you\'re in sunlight over a crater.

2) now we kill the majority of your lateral velocity (There are Kerbal pilots who are capable of killing it all at this step, but if you\'re like me you\'ll still have a little left.) by turning to face retrograde again and burning. Your pe will lower until it sinks into the ground and your retrograde symbol will travel up the nav-ball until it\'s sat on top of the blue segment. This is what we\'re aiming for.

3) Now we need to gently control our descent without losing too much fuel. I do this in stages, Keep an eye on your nav-ball and as long as you\'re above 5,000m watch your map and wait until you\'re about half the distance between your Ap and the ground, then burn to bring the Ap down to you.

4) Keep doing this until you\'re about 5,000m up. Keep an eye on your retrograde symbol and keep it as close to the top middle point as you can.

5) at 5000m it starts to get into nail-biting territory. The first thing to remember is to ignore your altimeter, it shows your position relative to a \'sea level\' not from the ground. Even in the craters you\'ll land somewhere close to 300m high up.

6) get your velocity down to about 20m/s and just keep the engines on a nice, slow descent burn, you don\'t want to be violently speeding up or slowing down.

7)When you get to about 2000m, turn your RCS on and use the J,K,L and I buttons to fire bursts to kill any lateral movement you\'ve still got, your retrograde symbol should sit snuggly over the dot at the top of the ball, if not, you still have lateral movement which will tear your lander to shreds.

8) keep slowly bringing your velocity down, at 1,000m (if you\'re landing in a crater) you want to be at about 10m/s this is still fast, but depending on how well-made your lander is, it can probably survive those sorts of speeds.

9) Now, keep your eye below you and look for your ship\'s shadow, that\'s your altimeter now. When you see it get your velocity down as low as you can without flying back up again, about 5m/s or less, keep using RCS to keep that retrograde symbol over the zero point.

10) when you finally touchdown you want to be as slow as possible <1m/s is perfect, but when your ship is about half a ship-height from the ground and your lateral movement is dead (Keep using those RCS if you need to) kill your engines completely, you should land with a bit of a bump on the Mun\'s surface. Congratulations!

RETURNING TO Kerbin.

So, you\'ve landed on the Mun, used F1 to take some commermorative screenshots and you\'re ready to go home?

1) Fire up those engines, but keep them low, you don\'t need much thrust to escape the Mun, just fly up until you\'re at about 1000m then, as on Kerbin, slowly and gently tilt to 90 degrees at a fairly steep inclination.

2)When your Ap is at about 3,000m you should be high enough to miss all the mountains, so turn to face 90 degrees at zero inclination and burn to raise your Pe to about the same height. You can safely orbit at 3000m but if you feel too nervous at that low height then burn to about 5000m

3) Watch the horizon again for kerbin-rise then start to burn prograde, it shouldn\'t take much fuel to raise your Ap to a point where it gets captured by Kerbin but if you run out of fuel at any time, remember you can turn your RCS on and press H to use a makeshift engine.

4) When your map shows your proposed new orbit in yellow, time-warp until you get captured by kerbin

5) You probably won\'t have much fuel left now, so let\'s make every drop count, your Ap and Pe will probably be all over the place, so just time-warp until you reach Ap

6) At Ap, turn retrograde and burn to reduce your Pe to lower than 65k. That is your target, if you don\'t have the fuel to lower it any more, don\'t worry, you\'re on a course for Kerbin!

7) if your Pe is lower than 65k (prefereably somewhere closer to 50k) your orbit will take you through the atmosphere, when that happens you\'ll perform what\'s known as an \'aerobrake\' maneuver, whereby the air will lower your Ap. If you don\'t have any fuel left don\'t worry that you shoot out of the atmosphere again, it will just take multiple aerobrakes to get your speed down and your Ap inside the atmosphere.

8) When you\'re in the atmosphere, wait until you\'re over the ocean and fire what\'s left of your fuel retrograde, to make sure your path will make you fall in the drink.

9) Jettison everything except for the command pod and parachute. make sure your parachute and module is above the rest of your rocket when you jettison or they will smash into your module and kill your kerbals, don\'t screw it up now!

10) Fire your parachute as soon as the debris is away and ride it down safely into the ocean. Splashdown!

Congratulations, now just time to wait for a rescue ship!

[Vanamonde]

Very good tutorial, Khrissetti.

To Mun step 5.5: Shut off engines as soon as the conic section display shows you\'re going to get an orbit, so you don\'t overshoot. (Just in case that wasn\'t clear.)

Landing step 9.5: Last-second vertical RCS puffs (H key) can fine-tune descent speed, meaning the difference between a gentle landing and kablooey. This has saved my landers more than once.

Landing step 10.5: As soon as you\'re down, turn off SAS and RCS. In their attempts to maintain your attitude, they can bounce and twist you into trouble.

About return step 3? I\'m still working out the best method. If you aim straight for Kerbin, later path adjustments risk slowing you to the point that Mun grabs you again. Also, going straight down leaves you with more speed to burn off when you get there, and you don\'t want to slam into the atmo or overshoot because you ran out of gas. For those reasons, I aim 45 degrees behind Kerbin, so that Mun is 'throwing me back over its shoulder,' as I think of it. (See attached illustration.) This gets me clear of Mun sooner (as it moves on ahead and is therefore less likely to recapture me), and means Mun\'s gravity is releasing me to fall more than throwing me straight down. How does that sound?

[E. F. Kranz]

I\'ll just leave this here.

Made it about a week ago. No notes or narration, just a straight up round trip.

[Nomer]

I landed on the mun 2 weeks ago and have set up mun colonies, and have docked a space station in it\'s orbit,

I\'ve set up a min camp-site with only 3 vessels.

This thread is out-dated.

[adorian]

got to say i finally landed on the moon, still not good at dealing with side slip but pretty good on getting their catching orbit and descending

[Vanamonde]

got to say i finally landed on the moon

It\'s amazing what an accomplishment that feels like, isn\'t it?

[Trekkin]

got to say i finally landed on the moon, still not good at dealing with side slip but pretty good on getting their catching orbit and descending

If side slip is a problem, have you tried Kosmo-not\'s method of locking your orientation at the vertical and using RCS to adjust your lateral velocity? It works for me.

[Bluejayek]

Yeah you get an orbit above Kerbin at around 100km to 150 km (at 90 degrees) and when you see the Mun rise over kerbin from orbit you burn your engines at till your apoapsis reaches that of the mun then it will come up the encounter thingy if that makes sense

I never liked the munrise thing, I always use the map screen. I burn when the mun is 1/4 of an orbit behuind where my apoapsis will be after the burn.

[adorian]

yeah i do that but trying to figure out which key is firing which direction for rcs is sometimes an issue for me

[vexx32]

It\'s better to orient yourself using the navball. L and J are always reversed on the navball -- L moves the marker left, J moves it right. I and K are not reversed; I moves it up, K moves it down. If your craft is oriented so that it\'s facing upwards, you can use RCS to kill horizontal velocity without a problem.

[matmilne]

Short Version:

take off until 40,000m.

turn 90deg and go full throttle until at 2300ms(check map to ensure periapsis is there), turn off engines.

rotate view until looking along travel direction

wait for the moon to rise (time warp is helpful), the sun will rise first.

Reorientate the ship until pointing at the yellow acceleration circle, activate sas, go to map.

accelerate up to about 3100ms the apoapsis should move out to 12,000,000 meters. turn engines off.

time warp until captured by the mun.

move to the green circle with the cross through it, and decelerate until in circular lunar orbit.

Move round the darkside into light, and decelerate again, so the circle becomes an arc. keep decelerating until the arc becomes a straight line.

wait until altitude is 10,000m, decelerate to 200ms. at 2000m decelerate down to 100ms.

keep pointing at the green circle and slow the descent to between 30 and 50ms.

at 500m slow to around 20ms and keep minimum thrust until touchdown (final velocity should be 10ms or less).

(assuming you haven\'t exploded or inexplicably jettisoned the landing stage in a moment of wild panic) you have landed. Apply sunscreen, locate shades, bask in glorious sun until lightly crisped.

accelerate until 800ms (lunar escape velocity)

wait until recaptured by kerbin,decelerate until periapsis disappears.

jettison final stage and wait until below 500m.

now deploy parachute for a gentle, scrambled-kerbinaut-free landing.

get out of craft and wobble around a bit. the end.

[yoyo478]

Might as well throw in my two cents.

I\'m not sure about the angles, I usually just guess (Science!) but if you have enough fuel to get to the Mun, the amount required for Minmus is near nothing.

Little off topic, but I thought I should throw that in because the first moon I landed on was Minmus, and in my opinion is actually an easier landing spot.

[vexx32]

Minmus is easier because of the lower gravity, yeah. It\'s also a much more scenic landing to try.