Mun landing assistance

[Nomer]

press F5 without ship acceleration, and when crashed, press & hold F9

I didn\'t find this out untill recently, i had done successful mun and min landings before without needing it.

[kknight13]

it would just save time to have another chance to land the ship withouthaving to repeat the launch and flight to mun.

[kknight13]

have just had a somewhat sucessful landing, lost 5 out of 12 legs. i have however stopped on the mun and am in a good enough shape to return. will hopefully get a bit better (down to only losing 3 legs).

how do you correct sideways motion using rcs, i used i,j,k,l and it only seemed to change the rockets motion to about the 45 degree angle. how do you know which to use? that sideways motion is a killer

Here are pictures of first fully (will be when they get home) sucessful landing. (if anyone notices a flaw in lander your advice would be great, it does normally have more landing legs, some blew up)

[Vanamonde]

i used i,j,k,l and it only seemed to change the rockets motion to about the 45 degree angle

It looks like much of the mass of your ship is below the RCS thrusters. If the force is off-center, it will push the ship to the side AND cause it to pivot around the center of gravity. Add another set of thrusters lower down, or move the ones you have so that they\'re around the COG.

[kknight13]

thanks, once this mission is over the next rocket will have lower thrusters.

[samstarman5]

I just pulled off a Munar landing with a bit of exploration today with a fresh stock craft. The stock wheels are amazing little buggers, though I don\'t recommend going over 20 m/s sustained with them on the ground. It does have a large launch stage, but I encountered barely any lag if any at all. I was able to use the third stage for descent control when it was actually meant for TMI and insertion. The sucker gets the job done.

Though it isn\'t tested, the lander stage LFT should have what you need to return to Kerbin. You can use the RCS to power it on the munar surface.

[Nomer]

Lol pls, I go abou 170 meters per second off a hill to start of ascent

[Nomer]

RSC tanks will not remove lateral movement, for your retro burn to decrease orbital descent you need to burn at the retrograde which will eventually come up to the top of the blue part of the navball.

I\'ll be on Xfire once you need me, try not touching down more then 2 meters per second and try going for touchdown only once because if you do not land and give it more throttle you will gain some lateral movement.

[kknight13]

i have gotten another lander onto the mun (took 4 retries) a few more sucesses and i will have it down pat. still trying to work out landing rover.

[Vanamonde]

RSC tanks will not remove lateral movement

A lot of players use it for that: fine-steering on the final descent. That\'s not my method, but it works for other people. However, I think kknight is talking about using RCS to propel his lander-rover? That will work, I think, but you\'ll run out of RCS fuel pretty quickly. A little fuel tank with the 50 unit engine will last a lot longer.

[Railsmith]

Yeah, once you\'ve done a retrograde burn for long enough, and you\'re on a slow descent, you can actually see the direction-of-travel thing scoot around as you fiddle with the translation thrusters. Oh, and always have at least eight RCS thrusters: four as close to the top as you can, and four just about on the bottom. If your ship\'s heavier, add four more above and below each group, nearly touching.

Personally, I\'ve never done an orbit around the Mun when pulling a landing. I just goose the throttle on my TMI burn so that the entry and 'exit' vectors are as close to each other as possible, then do burns at 1 million, 500k, 20k, and 10k to keep my speed under ~400 m/s. At 5000 meters or so I slow down to 30 m/s, and once the ground rolls around I\'m doing like half a meter per second. If you\'ve got a ridiculously overbuilt lander (which I do-- see picture) and you keep your speed low, you can land on almost any surface, dark side or light side. And since this monster has a separate return stage, you don\'t have to worry about having enough fuel for returns or aborts. It\'s incredibly handy, and a total of three stages!

If anyone wants this rocket and lander which work incredibly well (and have an inordinate amount of fuel), just let me know and I\'ll post the .craft and a more detailed tutorial. Have fun!

Oh, and how in the heck do you post an image? Can\'t seem to get it to work. Never mind, thanks imgur!

[Nomer]

Also knight, don\'t try to land on the dark-side, because the albedo of the mun isn\'t like the mins, it\'s extremley hard to land, I only did a successful landing on the dark-side because I judged from the ascent engine that I dropped and saw the explosion.

[Markus Reese]

If you are having problems with the horizontal movement, for your deceleration always point towards your from direction indicator. When you get closer to the ground, burn it to almost zero, all your decel pulses, keep it aimed to your braking direction and watch for it to move around so you can continually keep any horizontal movement cancelled out.

[kknight13]

i use the main engines to burn in direction opposite to travel but just as i get within a few metres of surface the horizontal componnent becomes extremley large. probably in proportion to speed i am travelling down. it is to extremley late (the rocket clips the surface) to turn rocket to burn in new reverse direction and doing a quick jump for extra adjustment time just adds more horizontal motion. I have no problem keeping horizontal motion low for most of trip but the last bit of distance is where it becomes difficult.

returning to ksp isn\'t an issue, most of the time i use the engine to escape the mun and then just use the rcs thrusters to get myself back to kerbin

[Tarmenius]

Toward the end of your descent, when you\'re too close to the ground to risk turning 'sideways', you may want to consider only pitching slightly away from your horizontal direction of travel. Even though the retrograde marker moves significantly away from vertical, your actual horizintal velocity is likely to be pretty small. By pitching over slightly, you will slowly bleed off the little that remains while still keeping control of your descent rate. Plus you won\'t have to turn much to get back to a completely vertical landing position when the time comes. Hope that made sense and it helps

[kknight13]

I have a rocket enroute to see if it makes sense and helps, thanks

[kknight13]

i tried using the main rockets to reduce lateral motion, it was effective up until the last few metres where i found that i was moving slowly enough that the rcs thrusters were enough to cancel out lateral motion.

I only had to have 1 retry to get the rocket down to the mun and this time i lost no landing legs

[Tarmenius]

Congratulations! *Throws confetti*

RCS can be a life-saver during that last bit of descent. I always bring some with me, just in case.

[kknight13]

it\'s good i am learning this now, i can\'t wait to walk on the mun. the current plan is to begin selecting more intresting landing sites so the crew have a shorter walk to intresting landmarks.

[Nomer]

Land a rover dude, add RSC tanks and a rover to ur command module,

add a decoupler under the stock cart,

a powerful descent engine, and when you\'re ready to land, release the descent engine and use RSC thrusters to glide you slowly to the surface.

[kknight13]

do you have a picture of what it looks like. A video would also be good.

that doesn\'t sound capable of getting back to kerbin.

Side question

I haven\'t seen the original Kerbal brothers in a while, did i finally kill them or do they come back?

[Nomer]

yes, I have a video of me 20 seconds before touchdown,

Aswell here is the thread I had with pictures:

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=15620.0

[Nomer]

Here is the ultimante landing:

http://beta.xfire.com/videos/58bc25

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I extremely reccomend using a rover if for newbies, it can handle lateral speed great it\'s circle so its hard to break,

and the suspension is amazing,

I did some testing and I survived a 28 meter per second drop which is about 55 MPH.

[A Fat Pokemon]

I usually just lower my orbit to about 3000 ish and burn retrograde(?), until I\'ve killed my movement, and just drop down, and throttle every once in a while to keep my speed between 50-100 m/s, then when im near the surface, which is easily tell-able when you are, I kill my speed to about 10, and have a low throttle on, slowly lowering speed, and I usually land at less then 1m/s.

When you do land, you go crazy on making your craft from drifting sideways when you\'re just above the surface, you\'ll probably mess up that way. Just land it down, and it should be able to withstand a bit of sideways movement, unless theres too much then you should probably fix it, but the point is, don\'t make on direction other than going down.

[maltesh]

Here is the ultimante landing:

http://beta.xfire.com/videos/58bc25

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I extremely reccomend using a rover if for newbies, it can handle lateral speed great it\'s circle so its hard to break,

and the suspension is amazing,

I did some testing and I survived a 28 meter per second drop which is about 55 MPH.

Well, yes. Cart-based Rovers have ImpactTolerance attributes a few dozen orders of magnitude higher than standard landing parts.