Need help to go to the Mun/Moon

[Andrezado]

Arrrgh!!! I tried of everything, from modded parts, editing the game parts, watching 2000000 tutorial videos, reading 500 posts of tutorials... and YET I CAN\'T MANAGE TO GET TO THE MUN! :\'( the problem starts:

first, i make a stable ship.

reach kerbin\'s orbit, but can\'t make a circular orbit, because i\'m bad

then, i follow instructions on vid tutorials, posts, and etc.

try to make a 270º curve/90º, but controls are pretty hard, even with winglets

manage to do it, then try to do the trans-orbit thing, make it 11million .... kilometers? miles? from kerbin

but i can\'t manage to keep orbiting until i reach mun\'s orbit, because one time or another the fricking ship does a collision orbit with kerbin.

any suggestions or help? :-[

oh, and i\'m a kind of new player to the game, already understood some of the physics, but didn\'t got AT ALL some of the tutorials, and the instructions. (i\'m from Brasil, so its kinda hard sometimes to understand some words :-[ )

EDIT: Thank you all for the help now i shall train a little bit then follow up the tutorial thank you

[Tarmenius]

Welcome to the Forums!

Getting to the Mun is definitely a challenging task early on. I would recommend being comfortable with making stable orbits before trying to go further. It doesn\'t have to be pretty at first, as long as you don\'t come crashing back to Kerbin. As you do this more, it will become easier to make more circular orbits.

Here\'s a simple method:

Make sure your rocket has an ASAS to help keep you pointed in one direction. Activate it with the [T] key before starting your engines. After liftoff, wait until at least 10,000m before turning ASAS off for a couple seconds to turn a little East (90^o) using the [D] key, putting ASAS back on when not turning. Continue making little turns every 10,000m or so (doesn\'t have to be exact). Between turns, check the map and turn off engines with the [X] key when the highest point of your orbit (marked 'Ap' in Map View) reaches more than 70,000m. Then, keeping your rocket pointed at the yellow circle with the upside-down T mark (prograde), wait until you\'re almost at Ap. Once you\'re pretty close (20 or 30 seconds away) turn your engines back on until the lowest point of your orbit (marked 'Pe') is also more than 70,000m. You should now have a stable orbit!

I hope that helps you.

When you\'re able to do that consistently, getting to the Mun is as easy as waiting for it to rise on the horizon and burning until the Ap of your orbit reaches a little higher or lower than the Mun\'s orbit (so you don\'t crash into it when you get there). Then wait until the Map view shows you\'re almost at your Mun orbit Pe. Point your rocket at the green circle with an 'x' in it (retrograde) and burn until your orbit becomes a circle.

[AlexL]

Some basic orbital information may be usefull for you.

The periapsis is the lowest point on the orbit, apoapsis is the highest point.

If you speed up at one of these points, the other will go higher.

If you slow down at one of them, the other will go lower.

Changing speed in between them will affect both.

In case you didn\'t get it, press [M] to go to map view, and move your mouse over various icons to display information about them, you can also bring up the navball and control your ship in map view by clicking the icon at the bottom centre of the screen.

There are two yellow icons on the navball, the empty one is the direction you are going, and the one with a cross in it is the opposite direction.

A simpler (though slower/less fuel efficient, but that\'s not important now) way to get orbit is:

1 - Fly straight upward (with ASAS turned on) until your highest point is at about 80,000 m (80 Kilometers)

2 - Turn to 90\' on the horizon (where the blue and orange meet on the navball) and burn until you have an orbit

3 - Burn again until the lowest point in the orbit is above 70Km (the top of the atmosphere) all the way round.

4 - Speed up untill your apoapsis is near mun height and wait for your ship to get caught.

Once your ship has been captured by the Mun\'s gravity, you can try to orbit, land, or whatever you want. A good landing may take several tries. If you do try to land, make sure your backwards pointy icon is pointing almost straight up though, or you\'ll be going sideways, which isn\'t helpful.

By the way, an orbit can be perfectly stable without being perfectly circular. Stable just means it won\'t go back into the atmosphere.

Good luck, welcome to the forums and happy launchings!

[Khrissetti]

Hi, welcome to the fora

First thing\'s first, I reccomend practicing orbital maneuvers first. There\'s a reason that the ship which landed on the moon in 1969 was Apollo Eleven!

First just practice getting into stable equatorial orbits at about 100km high, keep trying to circularise your orbit by following AlexL\'s little guide above. Remember that the atmosphere stops at 70km up, if your pe (or ap) is below 70km, you\'re on a collision course with Kerbin.

Once you\'ve gotten a feel for how to adjust your orbit and you\'re comfortable with changing your AP and PE, I have a 30-step guide below for getting into Munar orbit, Landing on the Mun, and getting home.

POW ZOOM! Straight to the Mun!

1) launch your rocket straight up until you reach 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.

(This assumes that you\'re running a paid version of the game (Versions 0.14 onwards) if you\'re using the demo, then the game won\'t show you when you\'ll be captured by the Mun, just get to 11 million metres, and cross your fingers. If you miss then just time warp until you DO get captured by the Mun, it will happen eventually.)

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.

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.

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.

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!

[Capt'n Skunky]

Welcome to the KSP Forums!

Happy Launching!

Arrr!

Capt\'n Skunky

KSP Community Manager