Non rocket assisted methods for landing

[wumpus]

14 minutes ago, PB666 said:

This thread just keeps making more an more sense.

Here's what you do, use the coilgun like a baseball bat and whack the landing object strait up, the have it land in a whole that goes through the planet, as its going through the planet have magnets slow it down to a stop. Problem solved.

No, actually it makes a lot of sense.  It shows why we use rockets to leave Earth, even when they are spectacularly inefficient.  They are still the best we have, and the best we will have for a long time for anything in a gravity well (we have at least some hope for the in-between parts).

[sevenperforce]

45 minutes ago, wumpus said:

The catch is that on worlds without an atmosphere, I can't see how a 50km+ coilgun is any easier to land on than a runway on an airless world.  The benefits are that you can transmit the shock of landing onto the moon/planet while you have to design the 50km coilgun sufficiently rigid to handle the shock along the entire coilgun (all 50km need such robustness). 

Well, you don't have to land on it. You just have to match orbit with it. It does the rest.