Collecting Mountain Science! (Or a lesson in controlled flight into terrain.)

[XrayLima]

Hey there folks,

So it may be due to an overdose of turkey melting my mind but this afternoon I decided to go collect science data from the mountains just west of KSP. Built a tiny bi-plane, super stable, stalls at 30ish m/s and fitted with the little material bay, a goo container and a little antenna. All good at ground level, basically lands itself. But 4 hours later can I land it on some of the flatter areas, can I hell. At 4000 m you have to fly at about 80m/s and at landing it just can't stay stable on the uneven ground. Best I've managed was to leave a cockpit and two wing bits littering the wilderness.

Has anybody else out there managed to land an aircraft on the mountains, and even better have it in state that it could fly home again? At this rate I'm going to have to cheat and parachute a probe or something down there.

XrayLima

[Snarfster]

How is parachuting a probe down cheating? You could also just make a lander and use that to collect the science, then "recover" the craft.

Now back to your question, I think it's hellishly hard to land in the mountains best thing I've managed is put parachutes all over the plane and land that way.

[XrayLima]

Hahaha, it's only cheating because I set myself the challenge to land it!

Aye, either drop probe, detachable cockpit/science combo or whole plane on radial chutes is an option. If I just can't do it, plane on chutes is the next best option. But it would be nice to know if it is actually possible and if so how!

[BlackBicycle]

So it may be due to an overdose of turkey melting my mind but ... Has anybody else out there managed to land an aircraft on the mountains

It IS due to an overdose of turkey. Aircraft land on reasonably long stretches of flat terrain. As a rule.

[xtremespino]

I have landed a VTOL aircraft on the highest mountain, but I have not landed a proper plane, but I have to landed a SSTO on the the western side due a miss-judged de-orbit burn, but I landed in the highlands, not really the mountains.

[XrayLima]

Success!! Well, partial. Managed to parachute the plane onto a mountainside, do my science and then take off, fly back to the KSP and land. Now all I need to do is succeed at real landing. Maybe a tri or quad plane would allow me to fly slowly enough.........

[Kasuha]

When designing a plane, always check how its center of mass changes as its fuel tanks run dry. Super stable plane with full tank may turn very unstable when the tank is empty. Now you can check it easily with tweakables in SPH, just reduce fuel in the tank and watch what CoM does.

And you don't need to fly back. You can recover the plane right from the mountains with all its science.

[Cruzan]

Adding more lift to your plane will let you land at much slower horizontal speeds. Tacking on extra wings or adding vertical jets (or go full VTOL mode if you like ) will help a lot with landing on uneven terrain.

[JumpsterG]

The mountains near KSC are pretty jagged. I have not landed on them with a plane yet.

I managed to find a nice upward slope in these mountains near Kerbin's north pole, though (sorry for zoom out):

Allowed me to get a neat shot of Jeb atop the peak:

[Michaelo90]

I did it! I landed on the mountains near ksc with this:

Didn't fly it back, but i think it could do it, but i didn't want to risk losing the experiments.