Weekly Challenge #5 - Land on Duna - Val Level (Watney Edition) Failure????

[Gummel]

Today I was going for the weekly challenge #5. I deployed my lander on Duna, right at the north pole:

My Crew made it to Duna with a separate craft and here they are in the atmosphere ready to deploy the vehicle from the loading bay:

Special mission require special vehicles. Here are Jebediah and Valentina landed safely with their Tumbler:

This is where they landed, you can see both landing sites here:

... and here they go:

The target gets into sight, only 49,7 km left to go ....

I do not recommend anyone to do this challenge with landing sites that far from each other. It took me hours to drive to the north pole, so I suggest everyone to land closer to each other.

On the other hand I enjoyed the north pole area. You need to plan your route well and you have to watch the terrain. Sometimes there are small holes that can screw you up, if you run into them too fast. This was taking long time, but it was a fun experience, same as Watney did in the movie.

...

Now comes the sad part of the mission, when I arrived close to the landing side my lander glitched through the planet surface and started falling. I tried several autosaves, but none of them worked. I ended having the lander craft fall through the planet surface every time.

Here on the last picture you see the remains of it falling deeper under my tumbler.

 

This issue I experienced many times and I do not know if there is anything that one could currently do to avoid this.  This happened to me on Mun and Minmus, when I landed stuff there and returned to the location with other crew and crafts. The craft from previous landing fell through the surfaces and were gone.

 

So what do you think? Do I have to call this challenge a complete failure? I would have made it back to Kerbin with my lander craft, if it would not have fallen through the planet.

Edited April 1, 2023 by Gummel