Munar landing

[Omnivore]

Simple challenge, land on the Mun. Bonuses for making a successful landing, making a return trip, successfully landing on Kerbin, and for using stock parts.

My first attempt, came in too low and too hot with not enough fuel. Not entirely sure landing is possible, especially with stock, but will try again!! Correction: landing is possible, at least one person has done it.

[SteevyT]

This is my Mun Rocket 4. All stock parts.

Take off

Parking orbit around Kerbin

Landed on the Mun

Taking off from the Mun.

Unfortunately I didn\'t make it back to Kerbin, I kind of launched off the Mun in a polar orbit and got stuck in some ridiculous orbit around the Sun.

[Zeroignite]

Attempt 1: Screwed up my Kerbin orbital insertion, decided to abort and retry.

Attempt 2: Realized after making my Hohman burn that the Mun orbits east, not west. Aborted.

Attempt 3: Boosted into Hohman trajectory without incident. Thought I\'d miss the Mun, and ended up changing my orbital plane due to navball confusion. Managed to wrestle myself into Munar orbit and get on a descent trajectory.

I thought everything was going well until I realized about 5km up that I had badly misjudged my altitude/descent rate due to a much more sharply curved horizon. Ended up lithobraking hard.

[Omnivore]

Unfortunately I didn\'t make it back to Kerbin, I kind of launched off the Mun in a polar orbit and got stuck in some ridiculous orbit around the Sun.

Maybe you didn\'t make it back, but you *did* make a good landing - much more than I can say yet! Congrats

Attempt 3: Boosted into Hohman trajectory without incident. Thought I\'d miss the Mun, and ended up changing my orbital plane due to navball confusion. Managed to wrestle myself into Munar orbit and get on a descent trajectory.

I thought everything was going well until I realized about 5km up that I had badly misjudged my altitude/descent rate due to a much more sharply curved horizon. Ended up lithobraking hard.

Sounds pretty much like my last two attempts, congrats on making it there though!

The attached picture shows a Munar orbit that is highly *not* recommended.

[feanor]

Done!

nice descend orbit, eh?

and back aswell.

[SteevyT]

I found the trick is to kill as much of your vertical velocity as you can around 100km so you can easily see on your navball what you need to do with your horizontal velocity.

[Blexie]

On my first attempt everything looked good.

Right up \'til contact. One leg snapped off, I panic-throttled up. Things went from bad but survivable to munar-coffin quite quickly.

They came to rest a few kilometers away. Alive. Until the oxygen runs out.

I nailed it on the second attempt, but buggered up the return. I would have gotten into Kerbin\'s zone of influence, but my brain was buzzing from the fact that OH MY GOD I JUST LANDED ON THE MUN. Much fuel was wasted. Ahwell. Tomorrow will do, I got halfway there.

[frenchie16]

Attempt 1 (after some rocket debugging): Didn\'t burn lander soon enough, crashed at a few hundred m/s into the Mun.

Attempt 2 (after more rocket debugging): Everything was going absolutely perfectly-perfect launch, orbital transfers, Mun interception, and cancellation of non-towards-mun velocity, and managing speed nicely with the lander, when suddenly KSP froze.

Attempt 3: Pending launch upon completion of calc homework.

[Omnivore]

Congrats feanor, looks like an interesting landing

Thanks for the tip SteevyT, I\'ll have to give that a go.

Blexie, maybe you\'ll get a rescue lander on site before they run out. Congrats on making it there though!

Tough luck on your second attempt there frenchie16, your first one sounds familiar. Good luck on the next attempt and congrats for making it to the Mun!

Btw, would the next crew to land lend my guys a welder?

[frenchie16]

I am having almost no trouble cancelling horizontal velocity once arriving at the Mun (just having no luck landing on it...). All you need to do is:

If you intercept the mun in a hyperbolic (escape) orbit or an elliptical that doesn\'t hit the surface: wait until Periapsis and burn retrograde until your velocity is exactly zero. Tweak with RCS.

If you intercept the mun on a collision trajectory it\'s less easy, but just draw a line between the zenith and your retro-velocity-indicator (green with cross through it) and continue a bit past the retro velocity indicator, point there, and burn. The retro-velocity-indicator will inch towards the zenith.

Finally, when you are near the surface, hover and use RCS translation (with SAS enabled to cancel out rotation) to nullify any remaining horizontal velocity.

Now, back to calc homework so I can try it again myself...

[NovaSilisko]

I did it late and live!

[Tiberion]

Props to Nova doing it live, performing trial and error (with some spectacular errors!) with an audience had to be awkward.

My first launch got into a nice munar orbit, but due to a build error my lander was shorted a tank, so I didnt try it. Apollo 10 dry run!

Decided not to try again immediately, waiting on Nova\'s new release.

So I am messing my F-35 Vtol spaceplane - I launched it on a booster setup and have it in orbit, we\'ll see if I can land it with RCS.

[Zeroignite]

Attempt 4: Got just a bit ahead of the Mun on the transfer, was able to burn retrograde enough for capture, then inserted into a 50km circular Munar orbit. I picked one of the biggest mare/craters, did a plane change to intercept, waited until I was over, then killed almost all of my orbital velocity. Turns out the new Orbital camera mode is great!

Everything\'s looking good. This time I\'ve set firm velocity targets for a given approach altitude, to try not to slam uncontrollably into the surface. Seems to be working well as I descend. RCS is almost enough to give me a TWR of >1 all by itself.

At about 50m above the surface I realized I\'d left the flight computer in orbital mode. No wonder I had strange horizontal velocity! (Turns out it\'s about 10m/s worth of surface velocity on the Mun). Fortunately I had a quick throttle finger and was able to do an Aldrin-esque re-approach. Landed!

Time to head home! Looks like there\'s plenty of fuel in the tanks to get back to Kerbin, especially if I aerobrake from a free-return.

Everything\'s looking good and I get on a nice return trajectory... and then KSP crashes > > :\'(

(program went unresponsive I think as I left the Mun\'s sphere of influence while on rails)

I am not a happy spacemonaut, but I think I\'ve got mun landing technique down now.

[Omnivore]

Definately congrats to Nova, I caught part of his live webcast, excellent stuff!

Tiberion, at the rate I\'m going, you\'ll probably land before me.

Zeroignite, ugh hate when the game freezes especially at a time like that, but big congrats on the landing!

I\'ve finally got all the trajectories sorted out, just having a timing problem with deceleration on final Munar landing.

[what-the]

Tried landing but crashed. Sent a rescue mission. Also crashed. Should of let the first crew refit the engine to the craft. I\'ll post again when I complete a successful mission to the moon.

[Inquisigor]

Will post pics of my first successful trip there and back.

Was wondering what parts feanor used on his landing. I really like the visual style.

[foamyesque]

I can get there successfully consistently, but my first lander fell over and my second lander lost the engine. =(

[Entroper]

Very tricky to land without gear. I think my next design is going to use radially-attached SRBs as a kind of crude landing gear. That\'s really going to increase the fuel budget for landing, though. Still trying to do it with stock parts.

[SteevyT]

This is my second attempt at landing from last night.

[Jarnis]

I can get there successfully consistently, but my first lander fell over and my second lander lost the engine. =(

I too tried an 'arc' close to ground and then braking, but it was very hard to get things stable for landing. Some Kerbonauts died (or ended up stranded on the Mun) during the first tries.

But no more - I\'ve found that the trick is to carefully kill all lateral movement fairly high up. If you initially get into orbit and set it up so that the perigee is at something like 10-20km over the site where you wish to land, then just kill :all: orbital velocity at that point until you are falling straight down.

At that point it is fairly easy to look at the ship from straight up and, with navball assisting and RCS thrusters correcting, ensure it is going straight down - there is plenty of time to fine tune everything while keeping the engine off or at something like 1-2% to manage velocity. Then brake to hover at about 400m then just inch down until touchdown. Rapid, short RCS 'up' (H) tapping is useful as a way to control the descent with the main engine throttle set to a figure that gives you a consistent 10-20m/s falling speed. That way you touch down softly with an engine setting that isn\'t enough to lift you off, so there is no risk of getting toppled over until you can get the engine shut down. Kill engine, landing complete.

(Granted, these are based on landings with Nova lander parts. Fully stock is just a tad hard as the ground is fairly rugged and it is very easy to topple over a pod+coupler+LFT+LFE 'lander'...)

[Alchemist]

Was supposed to be a soft instrumental landing. But 9 m/s of Mun\'s rotation decided something other - forgot about switching the navball.

Photos here

[spite48]

Good news: Successful landing on the mun, no Kerbals lost.

Bad news: We landed a bit too hard, and the engine was destroyed. I hope they packed a lunch.

[Letum]

An all stock landing and return.

the side fins make landing much easier.

[frenchie16]

I have had success. Landed on a bit of a slope, but kept upright with SAS, and was able to lift off and maneuver around with RCS. In so doing I knocked off two of my lander legs but stayed upright thanks to SAS. It was a bit strange.

My mission profile was something like this:

Boost to an apogee of around 80km with the first stage and its boosters, angle slightly eastward. At burnout wait until apogee.

Just before apogee, begin burning second stage to circularize orbit, trimming with RCS (no real reason to but I take pride in my orbits) to between 99km and 100km.

When the angle between a line from the spacecraft, through Kerbin, to the Mun\'s orbit would form a 70-degree angle angle with the line from Kerbin to the Mun\'s current location, boost into a transfer orbit to 11400km. The angle is hard to estimate, but if you go a little higher than 11400km, you get two chances at being captured, and with a little luck it\'ll work.

Once within the Mun\'s gravity, burn last of second stage to kill off all velocity, eject second stage, and start dropping towards Mun.

Carefully keep velocity below around 500m/s. Reduce speed as you approach the surface. Be careful not to go too fast or run out of fuel. Also, keep nullifying velocity (relative to surface at this point).

LAND!

Fly around with RCS

Lose a few legs

Eject descent stage, fly away with ascent stage, into Mun orbit, accelerate to escape velocity

I ended up on a very elliptical Kerbin orbit. Did a very inefficient thing and burned all my fuel about halfway back, which put me into a wonderful and gentle shallow entry into Kerbin\'s atmosphere. Totally by accident, I landed just a few klicks north of KSC!

So that was fun. Now to try some fun Mun orbits...

[Omnivore]

Finally a successful Munar landing!

Followed by an abysmal failure at returning to Kerbin...