Landing on the Mun - Horizontal Movement

[Nepos]

Discloser: I have only played this game for about a week

Ok I have had 4 successful mun landings (5 if you count the crashed landing one where the capsule survived). Each time I land I notice I am not just coming straight down I always have some horizontal movement. is this normal? I ask because my plane to put a rover on Mun was complicated by this and as a result of my horizontal movement during landing I broke off one of its wheels I would love to not have this happen in most of my future missions.

Thanks

[rryy]

Make sure the velocity shown above the navball is set to "Surface". If it is set to "Orbit", click on it until it says "Surface". This will show the velocity relative to the surface instead of your orbital velocity. Because the Mun is rotating underneath you, you have to account for that.

[ksheep]

It also helps if, instead of burning straight up, you burn retrograde to kill off all momentum. You can also burn past the retrograde indicator on the Nav-Ball to kill off horizontal momentum, just put the indicator directly between your direction of thrust and the vertical and burn until the retrograde indicator matches up with vertical. That should kill off most, if not all, horizontal momentum.

[Cartz]

As someone said burning towards the retrograde vector (the green plane with the x through it) until that vector points straight vertical will kill all of your lateral momentum over the surface of the world you're landing on.

For extremely delicate landings I would recommend, once you get close to vertical, to just burn vertical and use your rcs to translate out the last bit of momentum. Also for landing rovers, it might be advisable to land on legs which you then fold up to set the rover down with. You might even consider decoupling the rover and dropping it to the surface from underneath your lander.

Either way, learning the prograde/retrograde vectors on the navball, and what they imply about your momentum, is absolutely essential to any fine motion work you aim to achieve.

[Nepos]

Thanks I will have to pay more attention to make sure I am burning at retro grade. I just get so excited when I get close to the Mun surface. dang addicting game.