Flip ship right side up?

[Napper]

I crash landed three times on duna

I NEED TO KNOW HOW TO FLIP IT RIGHT SIDE UP!

HALP

[42undead2]

By turning your ship with WASDQE. Unless your craft doesn't have the turning power to do it.

[Napper]

Well I tried

[Jason Patterson]

How is the ship getting to the point of not being right side up? Ideally you want to come in sideways with a low periapsis. That allows the little atmosphere that Duna has to slow you down as much as it can. Your velocity will become more vertical as the atmosphere slows you and gravity's downward pull dominates. Follow the retrograde velocity marker on your navball and deploy your chutes or fire your rockets to continue slowing as you approach the ground. You'll finish on a vertical descent (pointed upward, that is) and you can engage ASAS to lock in that orientation as you land.

You often need small amounts of off axis thrust to correct for mistakes in your vessel's alignment, but you shouldn't need to get more than 5-10 degrees off of vertical once you're on that last part of the descent.

If you have a large vessel with a small command module (or worse, a large vessel with a probe module) then the gyros in the command module might be too weak to rotate your ship quickly.

It's also possible that you've got something wrong in your design that is causing the ship to be flipped over - it's hard telling without pictures and/or a .craft file. One common problem is that parachutes mounted below the vessel's center of mass can cause it to flip over when they deploy, and except for very small vehicles it's nearly impossible to recover to an upright orientation.

[rryy]

Try putting some parachutes above your lander's center of mass. That way, your lander will flip right-side-up in the atmosphere.