Landing?

[Novastar]

How do I properly land? Easy question, hard to do... I just start with a small rocket, go to 5000m with a random, small sideway speed, stop my engines and try to land anywhere on Kerbin, but that's hard. I drift sideways? Try to negate, but shooting over the goal or just don't properly reach it. It's very hard to get really NO horizontal speed, because even a small value will make your rocket falling to the side. Getting down is also hard. Trying to get the rocket to ca. 2 m/s down is not easy. Too much thrust = starting to raise. Too few thrust = crashing into the terrain. Even with a small speed, you just bounce from the ground and fall sideways, because you horizontal speed was 0.02 and not 0... Getting all of this right on the same time is incredibly hard.

Edited December 28, 2013 by Novastar

[Deathsoul097]

Yeah, landing is hard. But if you are trying to land on kerbol, you are going to be having a bad time, 'cause I'm pretty sure you cant land on the surface of a star.

Lol, I assume thats just a typo though, and you really meant kerbin. (One of my pet peeves is when people call kerbals kerbins or kirbins, or kirbils, or kirbals. Also when people call kerbin kerbal, kerbol, or kirbin, etc.) However, if you are trying to land on the surface of a planet, or moon, you can normally deal with a couple of cm per second sideways (Barring moons or planets with ridiculously low gravity, like gilly or pol.). It seems you woes are more to do with a poorly designed lander. You dont want a lander to bee too tall or top heavy, or have the landing gear too close together. Overall, a good lander will have a low centre of mass and a wide stance with the legs deployed, and shouldnt be too high off the ground with the legs deployed. Also, dont try to slow down too early, That just wastes fuel. On kerbin (over KSC) a good time to start slowing down is between 100m and 50m, depending on your TWR. Also, parachutes on atmospheric bodies help a lot, and most of the time you wont need to use engines.

[JiWint]

why do you want to land on kerbin using engines? that's why parachutes are for

[Markus Reese]

There are three basic tips that can really help with landings.

The first is your lander itself. They will bounce or have slight horizontal, no way around that. As result, make them low and wide. Below will be my usual lander setup. Even if you have a slight horizontal or bounce, center of gravity makes it quite tough to tip or flip.

Second is your landing power. The ability to set commands really helps with this and is very good for the final stage of lunar landing. You need lots of power to decelerate, but that power makes thrust control way to finicky with 2% meaning difference between crashing or flying back off. What I do is set a toggle to toggle on/off some of my landing engines once close to ground to give me more throttle control. I like my final landing throttle setting to hold speed to be near 30 to 50%. This will give you much better landing speed control. Less bump, and more focus on maintaining orientation and position.

Lastly, camera position. When you are flying, if you are in third person, try to keep camera positioned so that you can naturally control that way. Ie, the overhead view, not looking at underneath or side, etc. This really helps you fly more intuitively and make fine adjustments to keep horizontal control.

Example lander. When I am landing on the mun, the outside four engines I toggle off during the final slow bits of my decent.

[Novastar]

@Deathsoul097: Yes, Kerbin, not Kerbol. ^^

@JiWint: Yeah, normally I land with parachutes on Kerbin, but I would like to start again and fly anywhere else. Currently I play in career mode, so I can't use many objects in the beginning. ^^

Thanks for the advices, I will try to use all your advices.

[MBobrik]

I recently found an extremely simple way how to do powered landing reliably and efficiently. The surface view of Engineer Redux contains a 'time to impact' indicator. Just keep the craft straight retrograde during the last phase and when the 'time to impact' indicator hits 10 seconds, start your engines and stop throttling up when the indicator stops decreasing. then throttle down/up to keep yourself at 5-10 seconds before impact until you reach the desired landing speed. then switch to maintaining it and you will land swiftly and smoothly. Almost as efficient as pure suicide burn but waaay less risky.

[MBobrik]

Lastly, camera position. When you are flying, if you are in third person, try to keep camera positioned so that you can naturally control that way. Ie, the overhead view, not looking at underneath or side, etc. This really helps you fly more intuitively and make fine adjustments to keep horizontal control.

Unless you want to land on some exact spot (like top of a mun arch, bottom of a crater, or near something ), just ignore the camera view and land all by the navball and terrain height indicator.

[LethalDose]

why do you want to land on kerbin using engines? that's why parachutes are for

One word: Practice.

I launched dozens of tiny probes into the grasslands and highlands west of the KSC to practice powered landings in preparations for Mun landings. I didn't want to get there and realize I had no idea what to do.

In my experience, small amounts of lateral velocity aren't a major problem when landing on higher gravity bodies, like Kerbin. It's more an issue on low g worlds, and it's worse when relatively high centers of gravity (my landers tend to be taller than is ideal). I tend to deal with this by using more control methods (SAS, RCS, etc). It's a trade-off that I'm happy with, though when I get back from holiday travels, I may play with some alternate designs.

Something that I've found works well for zeroing out small amounts of lateral movement during landing is the translational controls on the RCS. I just keep the ship as horizontal as possible, roll so that N is straight up on the navball and use IJKL to keep the retro marker dead-center of the navball. I've had lots of luck with that. This should work on Kerbin, too, but it's probably just not as important as it is on the Mun.

But yeah, practice practice practice.

[Kasuha]

First of all, there is no good way (known to me) in the game to see what is the slope of the terrain below you. You need to zoom out really far to be able to see it and by the time you do it you might be already crashed. So just hope you're landing on an acceptable slope. Making your lander really low and wide helps a lot.

Assuming you're landing on horizontal surface, all you need to land is your navball and notion of the distance to surface. The altimeter on the top of screen is mostly useless for that as it shows distance to sea level. There are several ways how to see your distance to actual surface:

1/ command pods have often IVA view with "radar altitude" instrument. You can switch to IVA using the C key, adjust your view to point at the altimeter and switch back pressing C again. To check the altitude, you then can just press C twice.

2/ In daylight, you can use ground texture and ground scatter to estimate the distance. Also the distance of your ship's shadow helps.

3/ During night (but also in daylight), it is very useful to mount down-pointing lights (Illuminator Mk1, NOT Mk2 as that has way shorter range). You'll be able to see it appear on the surface when at about 450 m. It allows you both to see the surface texture, and to estimate the distance from size and shape of the light circle.

For actual landing, I found it good to completely forget about ship's orientation. Use the ship view only to estimate the distance to ground, nothing else, and land using just navball. Normal direction to point to is at the middle of the blue half, to kill eventual horizontal speed you need to point between that middle and the retrograde marker. If you see prograde marker, you're not landing anymore. Also get ready for the fact that the lower your vertical speed is, the bigger your horizontal speed appears to be, but it does not mean you need to keep killing it. When below some 30 m/s total speed you point within 5 degrees (1 tick on the navball) off the center all the time. Regulate speed by short taps on Shift/Control keys, don't forget these things affect your thrust, not the speed - so one short tap on Shift will not make you brake instantly, but it will start decreasing your speed or at least decrease the rate at which you're gaining it. You need to tap them both to keep your descent at certain rate.

And landing speed of about 6 m/s is perfectly fine.

Keep your SAS on during landing. Kill your engines (X key) as soon as you touch the ground. If you have RCS mounted, keep it on as well, it will help SAS to keep the ship vertical after touchdown. After things settle down, you can shut down both RCS and SAS to stop wasting resources.

Decent powered landing training instrument is the top stage of Kerbal X Stock craft. Put it on launchpad, launch, get to about 500 m height, then kill engines and stage 5 times to get the lander out. Throttle up again to get the lander out of the rubbish and deploy landing legs.

Edited December 28, 2013 by Kasuha

[LethalDose]

[...] just ignore the camera view and land all by the navball and terrain height indicator.

Be REALLY careful with this advice!!!

You need to watch the camera to know where the ground is, you can't rely on the altimeter to tell you how much further you have to go unless you have you have a great estimate of your LZ's ground elevation.

I've crashed more than once because I ignored the camera like MBobrik advised and thought I had 800 more meters to land... I didn't. That crash could have been avoided by, y'know, looking out the window.

Really after about 3-5km of height (at least on the Mun, where I've don't the majority of my landings), I don't trust the altimeter anymore and watch the camera and look for my craft's shadow.

OH! ANother trick to estimate LZ elevation: my landers usually have a stage that drops during my approach. You can ball-park your distance to the ground (and, in turn, LZ elevation) by noting the stage's distance from you when it crashes. Works great!

[Col_Jessep]

Be REALLY careful with this advice!!!

You need to watch the camera to know where the ground is, you can't rely on the altimeter to tell you how much further you have to go unless you have you have a great estimate of your LZ's ground elevation.

I think he was referring to the terrain height indicator in Kerbal Engineer or the radar altimeter in IVA view. You can land without seeing the ground and it is more reliable than looking out of the window and hoping to see your shadow in time, especially at night....

[viktorserecros]

I understand your pain. It took me forever to learn how to land without mods. My issue was poor lander design. As stated already several times:

1) Wider is better. Top heavy tends to cause falling over and general stability issues.

2) Keep your TWR low. A high TWR tends to make steering issues more problematic. Once I started building the initial rocket like a Corvette and the lander like a freight train, landing became easy.

3) Pack extra fuel on the previous stage. Use the previous stage to burn off most of the lateral speed and a significant chunk of vertical. My lander lands with nearly full fuel tanks, which helps with the previous point.

4) Load up a craft from the forums that can achieve the landing. Use it, play with it, and figure out how to do it yourself. Sometimes its helpful starting with something that you know works before tinkering with something you think works.

5) Practice my friend. After several dozen failed landings, everything came together and I landed perfectly on the first attempt.

I know that it isn't easy to get right. I read several posts similar to this one and watched a few videos. I resorted to shouting at the computer a few times "Why can't I do this?! Everybody else can!" I was dumbfounded the first perfect landing without quick saving. Everything I had seen and watched came together and I just did it.

[koshelenkovv]

It's hard to land on Kerbin using engines.

It have high gravity and because of this require precise engineering and/or cat-like reflexes.

Better practice landing on Minmus first. It's much, much easier. Then try to land on Mun.

[Dedjal]

Navball is your friend. Use rcs to keep your decend steady and nullify any sideway movements.

I usually only watch the altitude meter and navball.

Unless landing a plane.

[Kasuha]

Currently I play in career mode, so I can't use many objects in the beginning. ^^

Oh and about this, to train your landings, I definitely suggest you to start a Sandbox game and do your training there. It won't break anything in your career but you'll have better things available for your training.

[LethalDose]

I think he was referring to the terrain height indicator in Kerbal Engineer or the radar altimeter in IVA view. You can land without seeing the ground and it is more reliable than looking out of the window and hoping to see your shadow in time, especially at night....

Yes, he may have meant that, but I'm still going to say "Ignore the camera" is dangerous advice, especially for a beginner having trouble making landings for all the reasons I posted above. If you're experienced and are doing kamikaze suicide burns, yeah, you can land without glancing at the camera once, but you don't do your first landings like that (unless your name is "Scott Manley"), and I don't think it's very helpful to recommend beginners try it.

Also, you don't have to "hope to see your shadow in time", the shadow only helps eyeball how much further you have to go. You watch the ground so you know when it's getting close. That's why I said "DON'T LAND IN THE FREAKING DARK" 3 times in my first post on this thread.

Performing your first landings on the Minmus is great advice. The low gravity is very forgiving and the dark green areas have near 0 elevation.

But still don't try to land there in the dark.

[Novastar]

Estimating the altitude of my lander was never a problem for me.

Okay, thanks for all the help. I think training works for me, crashing less and less. Also I have used some "Modular Girder Segment" to make my lander wider. Falling to the side still happens, but it's better than before.

The advice "practice on Minmus, it's easier than Mun" sounds weird. It's hard to get to Mun, and then going to Minmus because it's easier? Minmus is further away and its orbit is inclined. Well, I think I need to search a tutorial to better use the features of KSP, like the maneuver. ^^

[Markus Reese]

Estimating the altitude of my lander was never a problem for me.

Okay, thanks for all the help. I think training works for me, crashing less and less. Also I have used some "Modular Girder Segment" to make my lander wider. Falling to the side still happens, but it's better than before.

The advice "practice on Minmus, it's easier than Mun" sounds weird. It's hard to get to Mun, and then going to Minmus because it's easier? Minmus is further away and its orbit is inclined. Well, I think I need to search a tutorial to better use the features of KSP, like the maneuver. ^^

Well, that is the funny thing about minmus. You can try doing the straight shot, but that is too much work for me, even still, the fuel difference from mun to minmus isn't too much more. The maneuver nodes and targeting makes it easy to know when and where to burn in order to align orbital planes. Lastly, minmus has lower gravity than mun meaning less fuel burned and less velocity as you come in to land. Speed control is a bit easier since it won't be accelerating due to gravity to the same extent. A bounce can be worse, but since slower, if you toggle your SAS and have any rcs before you touch down, should keep you stable, or you can burn upwards if it bounces bad.

[Kasuha]

The advice "practice on Minmus, it's easier than Mun" sounds weird. It's hard to get to Mun, and then going to Minmus because it's easier? Minmus is further away and its orbit is inclined. Well, I think I need to search a tutorial to better use the features of KSP, like the maneuver. ^^

Minmus is only a little further from Kerbin in terms of delta v - you don't need to add too much to your already highly elliptic Mun intercept trajectory to raise its apoapsis to Minmus level. And Minmus has way lower gravity, meaning you will spend way less fuel on landing and eventual takeoff.

Kerbal X stock craft is capable to get to Minmus, land there, and return to Kerbin. You cannot return from Mun with it, though.

[Roastduck]

You can kill horizontal motion and keep on trajectory for your target LZ by burning just above the retrograde marker on the navball. Once you work the retrograde marker all the way to the top, then you're moving straight down. From there, switch to your internal cabin camera. There is a radar altimeter in there that will show you your actual elevation above the ground, instead of above sea level. Use that and your cabin instruments to ease your way to the ground.

[koshelenkovv]

Estimating the altitude of my lander was never a problem for me.

The advice "practice on Minmus, it's easier than Mun" sounds weird. It's hard to get to Mun, and then going to Minmus because it's easier? Minmus is further away and its orbit is inclined. Well, I think I need to search a tutorial to better use the features of KSP, like the maneuver. ^^

Easier.

It will take only 50-100 m/s dV more to reach Minmus than Mun.

It will take much less dV for circularizing orbit and especially for landing.

Really, Minmus is much, much easier to land on and return than Mun.

Inclined orbit can make interception harder, but it's 0.23, we now have maneuver nodes! You will not get to any planet until you at least practice and understand how to use them. (not speaking about reaching anything _without_ nodes, as everyone was forced to to till 0.18)

Try flybys and return before attempting to land.

[technion]

. (not speaking about reaching anything _without_ nodes, as everyone was forced to to till 0.18)

Try flybys and return before attempting to land.

Seriously how was anything more than the mun possible at that point?