Mün Landing?

[andreas1xd]

The problem is not to get to the Mün it is landing. Does anybody have some tips and tricks to do it?

[sal_vager]

I like to get into a low orbit first, maybe with a periapsis of 5 to 10km.

Then when at periapsis I burn retrograde to stop my horizontal velocity, I point upwards and descend vertically on my engine thrust.

I land at less than 10m/s and I correct and horizontal movement by tilting my craft slightly.

Don't forget landing legs

[Philip Omnis]

I've had a similar experience to Sal. I originally used MechJeb to demonstrate how a good landing works and using all the additional information to understand what it is attempting to achieve, I'd perhaps recommend that if you're new at landing crafts!

[capi3101]

If you've got a manned pod, go IVA before you begin making your braking burns and set the camera so that you're looking at your radar altimeter. Every so often, check that gauge to see how close you are to the deck; it'll give you a good estimate of how much further down you have to go (e.g. if your altimeter says 3500 and the radar altimeter says you're 1500 above the deck, you know the deck's somewhere around 2000).

Then it's just a matter of watching your speed. Until you get good at it, begin a braking burn at about 8000 meters; you're trying to get your velocity down to about zero. Be sure to follow the retrograde marker. Start cutting back on the throttle to about 2/3 when you're at <100 m/s and to 1/3 when you get to <50. Throttle it to about the second or third notch to maintain your speed when the retrograde marker is about to go vertical. Deploy your landing legs and touch down at less than ten m/s or you'll definitely break something. Make sure your lander is squat and wide, or make sure it's got plenty of RCS blocks situated so you can upright the thing.

And practice, practice, practice. Hit F5 before you begin, recite the Sheppard's prayer, try to land, curse and hold down F9 to try again when you screw it up. And trust me, no one gets it right on the first try.

Cheer loud enough to wake your neighbors when you get it right.

Edited April 30, 2013 by capi3101

[RawChicken]

sal vager explained it pretty much..get to a low orbit, then kill horizontal velocity and control vertical speed with your rockets till you land. Like everything in ksp, it will take a couple tries and then piece of cake

[KSK]

What these good people have said. One other thing though - trust your instruments. It's much easier to use the Navball to zero out your horizontal velocity than to try and do it by eye. When you're heading vertically downwards, the Navball should be entirely blue with your retrograde marker dead centre. If it's not you can tilt your lander a bit to push it to the centre. Takes a bit of practice but it's not so bad when you get the hang of it.

Last thing - sometimes it's easier to just stop your engines a couple of metres above the surface and drop, rather than trying to fly right down to the surface. Just make sure you're not doing more than about 5m/s when you touch down, maybe slightly less if you're landing a probe on those spindly wee legs.

[Mufasa]

One other thing though - trust your instruments. It's much easier to use the Navball to zero out your horizontal velocity than to try and do it by eye. When you're heading vertically downwards, the Navball should be entirely blue with your retrograde marker dead centre.

Pretty much this, my first few landers I crashed into the Mun because I was trying to eyeball my landing (noob move). Look at the navball and pay attention to which way your craft is moving. Ideally you want to cancel out all horizontal movement, then lower yourself down.

[Hovis]

Using Mechjeb I find the stages to be:

1. Set an intercept course.

2. Circulate the orbit.

3. Land.

I don't actually know how, in Mechjeb, to just adjust the orbit size (I'm a nub) but once it's in orbit the Mechjeb autolander seems to be okay. If I don't start from a stable orbit things can get painful.

On the plus side the Mun is really forgiving. If things go bad just pointing up and hitting the throttle usually makes it all better.

[Temstar]

One important trick is to switch your navball to surface mode before you begin your powered descent. You do this by clicking on the velocity indicator, this will toggle between orbit/surface/target(if you have a target set).

If you leave navball on orbit mode you're in for a nasty surprise when you get near the surface and it automatically switch to surface mode. You may think you're falling down to a vertical landing according to your orbit mode navball and the map may look like you're falling straight down, but when you near the surface and that navball auto-switch happens you will suddenly realise you're actually moving laterally across the surface. On some bodies (Ike for example, due to tidal locking and hence its fast rotation) this lateral velocity is significant and you may not have the time to kill it before you slam into the surface at shallow angle.

The reason is because the thing you're trying to land on is rotating! Orbit mode measures your speed against the centre of the body you're orbiting while surface mode measures the speed against the surface. To land without any lateral movement on the surface you must match the velocity of the surface.

Funnily enough NASA once made the same mistake during Project Mercury. They had the Mercury spacecraft to perform a retroburn but forgot compensate for the fact that the Earth will rotate under the spacecraft during the re-entry (ie, the exact same thing as "forgot to switch to surface mode" in KSP) and as the result the capsule missed the intended recovery site by quite some distance.

[Alistone]

Remember downward facing lights for nightside landings (and a power supply for them).

Remember parachutes for the trip home

Remember to verify your landing legs and ladder with a test landing on Kerbin before you try your munshot.

[(An Original Name)]

Pretty much this, my first few landers I crashed into the Mun because I was trying to eyeball my landing (noob move). Look at the navball and pay attention to which way your craft is moving. Ideally you want to cancel out all horizontal movement, then lower yourself down.

I had a similar problem when I first got KSP, but instead of trying to land on the Mun by eye, I was trying to get to Kerbin orbit and adjust it by eye. This was before I actually decided to learn how the navball worked, and I was so inept at reading the instruments that I tried to point prograde and retrograde for burns by eye, completely ignoring the simplest marker on the navball Though that doesn't seem so stupid when compared to my antics in KSP before I even understood orbital mechanics at all! (which I am grateful for KSP for teaching me in a entertaining way ) I even got on a Kerbin escape trajectory on my first rocket when I didn't even know that you didn't need to use ALL of your fuel for your ascent to orbit no matter what

[stibbons]

It helped me a lot to get my camera alignment sorted. Orient the lander retrograde, then align the camera so that it's looking retrograde as well, and oriented so that changes to the attitude happen in the same direction as the navball (navball goes left, lander tilts left on the screen). That helps avoid last-minute panicking and over-correcting.