Early Munar Far-Side missions.

[TheTripleAce3]

Not much reason to do them early on unless you're like me and you saturate every biome with probes before leaving Kerbin SOI, but what do you do when landing on the far side of the Mun? Do you wait for a few satellites with Communotron 16 antennae (assuming you don't have dedicated relay antennae yet) to fly by or do you build a small chain of landed relay probes along the Munar surface?

[Superfluous J]

Well you have 3 (viable IMO) options:

1. Pilot
2. Relay
3. Level 1 or better Probe Core for retrograde SAS aim.

I generally go for #1. It's the easiest. I frequently already have relays around Mun before I'm going to land there as I like satellite contracts as much as you like sucking biomes dry of science, so often I can do #2. #3 is dodgy because you ALSO need to stick the landing with no throttle control, but it's doable. I've even landed on Tylo under those conditions.

Edited February 23, 2019 by 5thHorseman

[TheTripleAce3]

2 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Well you have 3 (viable IMO) options:

1. Pilot
2. Relay
3. Level 1 or better Probe Core for retrograde SAS aim.

I generally go for #1. It's the easiest. I frequently already have relays around Mun before I'm going to land there as I like satellite contracts as much as you like sucking biomes dry of science, so often I can do #2. #3 is dodgy because you ALSO need to stick the landing with no throttle control, but it's doable. I've even landed on Tylo under those conditions.

I rarely do manned missions that involve landing (I've done more manned Duna-Eve flybys than I have manned Mun landings), so I often do some pretty unnecessary (bordering on stupid) things like I mentioned above with building a small chain of Omnidirectional beacons on the surface to act as comm relays for an orbiter that is part of a landing package for really early far side missions. Once I get gravity sensors and dedicated relay antennae (RA-50 is usually first oddly enough) I build a One-Size-Fits-All lander thing with immense relay ability and turn the mun into my personal ball of commsats like Dannny's 1.2 preview video. From there I can go to any planet I need to usually and have already done something on Minmus (probably a manned lander there if not a small hopper), etc etc. I think one time I even did the whole "chain of relays" on Eve's surface before I built my massive commsat package for Eve and Gilly (Single launch left something stupid like 8 commsats in that system and farmed every possible science point I could transmit from gravity scans). By that point I had been to Jool, put an accidental Cassini style orbiter there, and had 2 rovers on Duna (fun fact, the Jool Orbiter was supposed to be a Duna Orbiter that turned into an Eeloo flyby after I had to go afk while the ion engine burned).

[Snark]

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

[bewing]

I generally go for #3. Or for #3 plus a scientist -- which gives you full throttle control, full WASD rotation,  and retrograde hold through the probe core.