My first visit to Mun! (...didn't go quite as planned)

[Hakkonen]

I have finally succeeded in doing a Munar flyby. I originally intended to do a full-on orbital insertion; but, well, I got into Kerbin orbit and found I didn't have quite enough fuel to both enter Munar orbit and get back to Kerbin, so I ended up doing a flyby instead. My Kerbin orbit was slightly inclined, due to some instability on the way up, and my final orbit ended up being both highly eccentric (extending about two-thirds of the way to Minmus' orbit) and highly inclined (roughly 60 degrees). Hilariously, when I did my retrograde burn to bring my perikee down to the surface, I actually reversed direction, so technically I never did complete a full orbit of any body.

My capsule consisted of the Mk1 command pod, with a nose chute, two goo cans and a battery attached, sitting on a materials lab with three landing legs and two radial chutes. The legs turned out to be completely superfluous, as I came down in one of the oceans, but I was damned glad I put the extra parachutes on it as the materials lab actually survived to be recovered (another first for me). Total science gained: 166, bringing me to a total of 183 and allowing me to access three more tech nodes.

[[email protected]]

Well congratulations! I believe my first Munar encounter (wow its been a year since I started playing KSP...) was an experimental manned bunker buster test. I hit the surface doing something like 3.5 Km/s, then I discovered manuver nodes.

[SyberSmoke]

Do you have any images of your craft? May be we can help with some design advice. F1 to take an image, you can use imgur as a place to put them.

[SuperWeegee4000]

The Mun is dark and intimidating.... But it's really only intimidating because it's dark.

[zynar]

Well done I sometimes wish I could recapture those moments. I had several umm unkerbaled missions to the mun before I had my first kerbals to the mun and back.

[Col_Jessep]

Congrats! Especially for making the right call and just doing the fly-by. I'm often a bit reckless and have to pick up the pieces later. Mostly in form of refueling missions...

I would recommend you try a Minmus fly-by next. It doesn't need a lot of additional fuel and you get more science. Minmus is a great target for your first powered landing as well. Good luck and fly safe!

[Vanamonde]

Congratulations on your (semi-)successful mission.

(And thread moved to mission reports, where it is more likely to find an appreciative audience.)