What happened when you first landed on the Mun?

[technicalfool]

First time I landed on MÅ«n? This was 0.13, with no landing legs. The engine fell off and the lander fell over.

I learned to make a 5-engine lander and make the middle engine higher up than the outers. They'd act as sacrificial "legs", most likely breaking off on landing, but leaving the central core engine intact.

[Moon Goddess]

The first time I "landed" on Mun, I hit HARD shattered my landered and left 3 kerbals sitting in a capsule

The second time I landed I fell over on my side.

The 3 time I landed properly and tried to rescue my Kerbals.

I've actually never been back since.

[Whirligig Girl]

[Spartwo]

landed,fell over,used legs to erect oneself,hatch was obstructed by ladder.:[

[Guest]

I was so focused on nulling out any horizontal velocity that I neglected to properly account for the vertical. My spindly lander wasn't built to take a 25 m/s landing, sadly.

[DChurchill]

The joy of actually succeeding was quickly replaced by utter dejection due to accidentally staging the capsule off the stack, stranding Jeb yet again.

[inigma]

First time, I missed the moon entirely with my probe Muna 1, and it went heliocentric. Apparently solar panels don't work very well when they can't be pointed to the sun, or else they were bugged, so I missed my injection burn. I also learned that when your living battery runs dead you can't turn on a backup battery. Then my son wanted me to test out his moon rocket on another save account, and well, we had a live Kerbal impact the Mun at 626 m/s. Then he fixed his rocket, and landed a Kerbal perfectly. And then stranded him when we tried to leave. In my own real save file though, I had Muna 2 impact the Mun fine. My unmanned Muna 9 probe missed the Mun but was still in Kerbin orbit, waited for a correction two months later, got into a reverse orbit around the Mun, deorbited, and landed at a soft and comfy 2.1 m/s with about a two meter slide in the Mun dust upon landing, all legs up and working. A perfect first landing! Probe fully functional - except the landing site was on the wrong side of the Mun facing away from Kerbin (I then learned that the Mun is tidally locked to Kerbin). I didn't call it a failure since I also had a Muna 3 map probe in orbit which I figured it could relay back to Kerbin the lander's pictures and I got a good screenshot from Muna 3's view of both the lander below and Kerbin on the other side of the Mun, so it's possible. But then I reloaded from a quicksave to get a better landing site to be more consistent with historical reality (and no Kerbals were involved)... except instead of a picture perfect landing like my first time, my beginners luck ran out: first attempt I lost half my lander legs, second attempt I lost all my lander legs, and my engine, and third attempt I ran out of fuel and impacted leaving nothing. I was getting worse at it, not better. I gave up and went to bed last night at 2am.

Edited June 18, 2013 by inigma

[Gojira]

I was absolutely ecstatic. I just had to show my mom and dad. They congratulated me. This was way back in 0.12, right after the orbital map had been introduced in 0.11, before persistance (and therefore quicksave/load), and before patched conics were introduced in 0.15. And then I returned back to Kerbin after everyone in the house had seen my achievement.

Before that, however, the cycle was something like this:

Launch

Orbit

Get into TMI

Get into Mun orbit

Run out of fuel halfway down

"Mk1 Command Pod crashed into Mun."

Repeat until I figure out where I'm going wrong.

[palker]

Explosion happened only thing that was left from my spacecraft was comand pod and some random debris.

[DisarmingBaton5]

I sat and thought about how next time, I wouldn't use timewarp to land.

[Gojira]

I sat and thought about how next time, I wouldn't use timewarp to land.

I did that too.

[Jacob01]

I came in burning on my side, so yeah, I went for a little skid around before the capsule came off!

[jjwb22101]

I had a similar problem to Sal, except it was the capsule that fell off after my lander fell over. The winglets i was using as landing legs (this was well before they were introduced) apparently didn't work very well to stabilize my lander. Poor Bill, Jeb, and Bob.

[RogueMason]

It was the 13^th age (0.13.3) of Kerbal civilisation. The Mun had been the very object of unattainability for a very long time, but revolutions in the understanding of orbital mechanics and ship design resulted in the Lunar Program. In only the second mission to Mun, Jeb, Bill, and Bob touched down on the surface of the Mun aboard a Lunar 1 craft. Mission control (me) stood up, took a sigh of relief and expressed elation at the accomplishment before deciding to remain on the surface for a few days, then leaving for home.

Long story short; Veni, Vidi, Vici, with extra elation thrown in

[hugix]

After my first successful munlanding I did a few more and made things a little harder, I did some precision landings. My first precision landing was within 2 kilometers of the target, I was pretty proud.

After that I started missions towards Duna and Ike. I remember one craft that first landed on Ike, on the way back it landed on the Mun, did a little detour towards Minmus and landed on Kerbin. That was a hell of a mission.

[Cydonian Monk]

The first probe I "landed" on the Mün skipped and skidded across the surface, leaving a huge trail of debris (but survived, with a solar panel to boot).

The first kerb'd craft? Well....

Edited October 7, 2014 by Cydonian Monk

[lazarus1024]

Depends on how you define first. My first was back in .13 (demo). I took about 30 tries and I hadn't discovered map mode yet. It took about 4 tries once I hit roughly Munar orbit to get down. I scattered much of my ship across the landscape on the 4th try, but the capsule survived. I got out and jumped around for a few minutes.

Soon there after I bought the game and also discovered map mode which made getting to the Mun MUCH easier.

My first succesfuly landing was in .16 (version I bought) after about 3 tries. I had figured out the RCS/ASAS stabalized landing thing, but I still wasn't very good about killing horizontal velocity.

I had a beer to celebrate first and did a victory dance.

These days landings are rather routine. I'd guess maybe only 1 in 8 I screw the pooch and crash on unless it is a relatively new body or I really messed up the lander/base design significantly, which isn't all that common either (it might boost the rate of failure up to 1 in 5).

I am close to my first ever landing on the Mun with a Kerbal mission in .20 though. I started from scratch and then bulged my L5/S1 disc about 6 weeks ago...I then blew it out completely in a fall 2 weeks ago. So instead of the 40-50+hrs of play I figured I'd have in on .20 so far...I have about 8hrs.

I have done the quikie first Mercury esque missions and the Gemini ones. I also did the first Muna probe landing. I tried and failed a couple of designs for an Apollo type mission. 3 atmospheric failures, one orbital failure and one landing on the Mun attempt failure. This design should prove sufficient though (I am currently attempting to get as close to historically designed ships as I can, otherwise I'd have been there already). I upped the fuel on the 2nd stage and an extra pair of SRBs on the first stage (2 liquid boosters and 4 SRBs now). It should leave enough fuel in my lander/CSM craft to not have to transfer fuel out of the lander to the CSM to ensure fuel for a return to Kerbal later.

First job upon landing, victory dance, second job, plant that flag!!!

I am very, very much looking forward to planting my first flag ever.

Then on to making space stations and landing on Minimus. After that, to Duna!

[koshelenkovv]

When I landed on a Mun for the first time, I started to roll. My lander-rover had airplane gears instead of legs and RCS for moving.

It was back in 0.15 when EVA was not implemented yet.

[SpacemanSpiffy]

My first Mun landing was a few weeks ago (I'm late to the party) and was relatively mishap free... but maybe that's because I took a long and roundabout way of doing it.

One of the first things I did in this game was to put stations in orbit around Kerbin and Mun as I anticipated a Mun landing in the near future. I next built two different lander designs, one single occupancy and the other using the two-Kerbal Lander Can, and shipped them over to the Mun station. After that, I built a small shuttle to ferry Kerbals between stations and sent two brave souls over as well. Once all this was done, I had a crew and lander ready for action in orbit around Mun... so I sent them on their merry way!

The landing was successful... but not ideal. I sent my single occupancy lander first and it had enough fuel to descend and make it back to orbit in one stage, but my landing skills were so piss poor that I spent ~85% of it during the landing process and didn't have enough for the ascent. Enter the B-team in the two-seater for the rescue! I swallowed my pride and used MechJeb to land this time (and watched everything it did), picked up the stranded Kerbal, then made it back to Mun station and later Kerbin.

If I had gone the Apollo route, with everything originating from Kerbin, I doubt there would have been a happy ending to this story.

[WhiteThane]

Mines kind of sad actually. My first landing was back in .12 or .13. No EVA and more importantly no multiple ships. So after a whole afternoon of trying and failing (i had no idea there was a quicksave) I landed, upright and on fins. I was so happy until i realized I couldn't actually DO anything other than look at it. So after 20 minutes and about 2 dozen screenshots I took back off and went back to Kerbin.

Looking back now I think that's why i never send kerbals back from the Mun...

Edited June 18, 2013 by WhiteThane
wow I can't spell sometimes

[TsubasaLegend]

My first "landing" went fine, until about 9,000 up where I over cooked the throttle, I didn't die on impact, I ended up skipping across the surface like a stone on water until my cockpit met a crater wall head on.

Second time was fine until the boosters exploded leaving just my pod

3rd time was the charm (mostly) decoded to try and lower my entire munar colony station from orbit at once, the boosters were massive, I had to get a mod to expand my VAB to fit ones big enough for the job, get down fine but being a colony I don't need the boosters anymore do I? So I set the throttle to full and eject them, they go up no problem...until all 8 collide and rain debris all over my colony slicing it to bits

[Baldr]

Left a trail of spaceship parts, but the Kerbals survived. Then went for a rescue mission, did a decent landing picked up the Kerbals. And then on the way home I crashed the thing and only two of the six survived.

[Tangyboxhead]

What happened? I was exited then I dreamed of putting more stuff on the mun.

[42undead2]

I did it in one of the tutorials. I exploded with only the cockpit left, and I found out you can't leave your cockpit in a tutorial!

[Johno]

My first landing on the Mun (back when it was first implemented, goodness only knows what version that was!) was after I'd downloaded a mod pack (I think it might have been NovaPunch). Back then there was no such thing as an unmanned pod; there was the mk 1 pod with 3 Kerbonauts or nothing.

I tried landing several direct ascent style ships on the Mun (without docking that was the best you could do); to no avail. My ships generally simply ploughed into the Mun, whereupon there was yet another small crater that would be forever Kerbin.

Finally, I noted that one possible mod was the unmanned pod. It was actually identical to the Mk 1 pod in its stats (and you even had the portraits of Bill, Bob and Jeb in the bottom right of the screen). However, since it was different, I told myself that the three Kerbonauts were just mission control people, and that this pod really had noone aboard. This meant I could make a really cut-down lander (No ascent stage, no life support, no [anything heavy].

When the cut down lander finally made it to the surface, I remember thinking how anticlimactic the whole thing was!