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Suicide Burns


flightmaster

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I prefer to come in as shallow as possible to most planets/moons in Manley style as CobraA1 put it. Burning off all horizontal velocity to as close to 0 as possible and then doing a "baby" suicide burn the rest of the way down. For perspective, on the Mun this usually means coming in between 8-12km for an equatorial landing (give myself some margin for error), and then waiting until around 3-4km for a landing burn. I'm fairly good at this these days, but in practice I typically drop my speed to between 30 and 50m/s by the time I am at 100m altitude, and then drop throttle down just enough that I can keep burning and kill all my velocity just before touchdown, so only 1 engine restart for the whole process.

Lately however in my new .23 career, I've taken a less then optimal tech path this time around opting for more aerodynamics and rocketry then science parts. This has stifled my development later in my career and I'm still battling with less then optimal 2.5m parts. I've made my first pancake 3man lander under these conditions that is a 4 stage launch. I do a single burn to direct munar injection which drops the first 2 stages back into atmosphere. The 3rd stage is used partially for landing and then when emptied is ditched to crash into the Munar surface. It gives me a good idea of true ground level altitude as well, should I be landing on the dark side (not yet, not with this mission anyways). When I hit 16km altitude is when I begin said 3rd stage landing burn. Velocity is usually ~800m/s at this point. The 3rd stage brings that down to ~200m/s. Then the lander completes the... landing.... and return. Hooray!! I have no idea if this is efficient at all. It is highly practical for me however provided the tech level I current have, and very fun as well :)

Edited by Arsonik
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