Rough landing on Laythe

[Bekiekutmoar]

You'd say when you hit the SOI of Laythe, landing would be a piece of cake. Go into orbit, carefully pick your landing zone and descent. But Laythe was about to give me a nasty surprise.

Laythe orbits Jool with high velocity and I basically traveled in the opposite direction. With a speed of around 7560 m/s, I had absolutely no chance to perform a nice and stable orbit around the moon and was just 15 minutes away from being shot out of the moon's SOI. Violent atmospheric breaking was the solution and I adjusted periapsis to around 9 km.

Speed increased to 7750 m/s ...

To make a long story short; the brave kerbonaut survived the extremely rough descent but now floats in a massive ocean with land at least 60 km away, and not even a stunning view on Jool ... ! To make matters worse, the gravity is too strong for the jetpack to function. Looks like he's gonna swim for a while.

[Gamergull]

Dang! Heh I've always wanted to land on Laythe, but I haven't looked into factors like this. The Gs must've been a killer.

[MET?]

Hey it looks like we're in the same "boat" ahaha Laythe humor...same thing happened to me and i posted like a thread up

Edited September 27, 2012 by MET?

[Accelerando]

I've done this maneuver before at such speed, and perhaps had more incentive to reload after an insertion that took me directly to the ground because I was piloting orbiters. If you had dipped into the atmosphere at 16-26km, you probably would have been able to make it into a stable orbit prior to descent. Laythe's atmosphere is a lot tougher than one may think on first approach.

[Markus Reese]

Wow, that is pretty intense. I have been planning a joolian mission, but maybe I have underestimated the velocity needed to escape jool. More fuel possibly needed in my return phase. Jeb. Get out there with moar boosters and find out what is needed.

[Jay_Em]

I did this yesterday. Stuck on the side facing away from Jool as well, kilometres from land. Would be awesome if you could add little inflatable rafts to your ship for Kerbals to use in splashdowns.

[Luxmaster-CZ]

I was performing my first trip to Jool, and was about to land on Laythe. When I got to Jool I aerobreaked in it's atmo to lower my Ap to 21,000 km (so it touches Gilly), and several orbits later, when I was about to join Laythe's SOI, I also aerobreaked to change my AP to around 100 km. Then I raised my Pe to over 50 km(height of Laythe's atmo), and picked landing spot. I landed around 30 KM away from water, but I had mun rover on my ship, so I deployed it and went there:)

<iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/Iqq2I/embed"></iframe>

Edited September 27, 2012 by Luxmaster-CZ

[Bekiekutmoar]

Well, I have a second ship en route to the Jool System. See if I can aerobreak decently now ...

@Luxmaster: nice pics ... !