How do I correctly land on the mun?

[Clockwork13]

Whenever I try to land on the mun, I end up just increasing my orbit until I'm out of fuel and I crash.

[sal_vager]

Tell us exactly what you do when you are trying to land, that way we can help where you are going wrong

[Cerberus738]

what do you mean by increasing your orbit? if you are increasing your orbit you shouldn't crash.. you should be going farther away from the moon... You should start by burning retrograde to bring your orbit down into the surface. then you just wait. once you get close to the ground switch your speed indicator to SURFACE and burn retrograde to slow yourself down. if you have the fuel you can keep burning the whole way down to maintain your speed. otherwise you have to time it right and burn hard at the very end to slow yourself enough for landing. always retrograde when landing. depending on your craft design you want to be under 10m/s. i'm sure others might say different but i always lose bits if i come in hotter than that

[Claw]

I'm guessing he/she means they over does it with the throttle and accelerates away from the surface when trying to land. Then ends up crashing during corrections.

There are lots of youtube demos out there. This one is a bit long, but very complete. It actually targets Minmus, but the concepts are the same.

More details or a screen shot would help.

[Taki117]

Setup your normal descent (burn retrograde to lower your periapsis/set up your landing) as you get closer and closer to the surface burn horizontally to decrease horizontal velocity (you might want to also add a vertical component in there as well to slow your vertical velocity) Follow the Retrograde marker on the Navball here, it helps. Also, be sure you pop inside your cabin every now and again to check radar altitude, just take it slow, and if you touch down at anything less than about 10m/s you should be fine as far as everything being intact is concerned. (12 is the absolute limit, or you start breaking things)

[benzman]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/25029-A-moon-rocket-for-newbies

This is the best guide I have come across for landing on the Mun.

[Name Lips]

This is a very fuel-inefficient way to practice landing:

Start from a circularized orbit over the moon. At any point (it doesn't matter exactly where, since you're circularized) burn retrograde until you have completely killed your horizontal momentum. On the map it will look like you're hovering in place with the "orbit" lines pointing straight down under you. This means you are falling straight down at the moon.

Quicksave.

This might not leave you with enough fuel to return, but that's not the point.

The point is now you can practice keeping your lander level, adjusting your throttle so you aren't falling too fast, and not accidentally shooting back away from the moon again. When you get close to the surface you will notice you are probably still drifting slightly left or right, so you can practice how to fix that.

If you crash, quick load and try again.

Once you have managed to do this, try again from the circular orbit without stopping your lander first. The idea is to shrink your orbit until you are landing, then keep yourself pointing retrograde so you can throttle up and break your fall at the right moment.

Once you do THAT, you will have discovered how hard it is, but you will know you can do it, and now you can feel justified downloading Mechjeb to automate the process for you.

[RSwordsman]

This is a very fuel-inefficient way to practice landing:

...completely killed your horizontal momentum. On the map it will look like you're hovering in place with the "orbit" lines pointing straight down under you. This means you are falling straight down at the moon.

If you're talking about fuel efficiency, I'd also recommend against killing all velocity this way. You can as easily pick a landing spot while using all that horizontal speed to carry you towards it, making adjustments with light burns in between retrograde and vertically up to gradually kill your velocity.

I can't actually promise that this way works better fuel-wise as I haven't tested the comparison in person, but I'm working on the assumption that landing is like taking off. You don't go straight up then straight sideways; you do a gravity turn. Just be careful that before you actually hit the dirt (in a flat spot for best results), you are going straight down at ~5m/s or under.

Edited January 28, 2014 by RSwordsman

[SpenSpaceCorp]

If it is the case that you keep over burning and "jumping up" as you are about to land, try to use less powerful engines. They may slow you down slower, but you generally want a low-medium powered engine for landing on the Mun. For example, a mainsail or skipper is probably too powerful, while an LV-909 or something similar is probably more suited to the task.

[Markus Reese]

Hiya, first off, at the end of this, I will have an example of my lander that will give precise control over your landing.

First, you say that you keep increasing orbit. I will have to make some assumptions of things until we get more info of design, screenshots of lander would be a big help. One thing that can happen is that the direction of the pod faces isn't the direction you apply thrust. This means that even if you are facing retrograde, your thrust isn't.

Other assumption would be power related. You either have too little, or too much power. Both are equally plausible. The too much power is usually caused by having the craft built for being able to decelerate. Once decelerated though, the engines are too finicky to be able to control your speed on landing. Ideal control is that 50% will hold your speed as you approach ground. This is nowhere near enough to decelerate.

Best option in the latter is to make use of engine toggles. The best lander setup when inexperienced is to have your core pod with a single engine and tank. Radially around this, you place lander engines. This will get you back to kerbin. Even if you run out of fuel on the lander engines, you go oops, jettison the lander engines, and make your return trip not having landing. This has a couple benefits. One, is that you have plenty of thrust to make your deceleration in a timely manner. Second is that it widens out the craft for your landing legs, making it much more stable when touching down.

The core design is to make use of activation keys to toggle on and off the inner return engine, and the outer lander engines. You get decelerated, then you toggle off the lander engines, and just use the return engine to control speed. This offers much more throttle control. Ideally, you have fuel lines to run your return engine off your lander tanks. If you don't have fuel lines yet and are still early in the science tree, To make manufacturing simple, put small radial engines onto the lander tanks. Toggle off the lander engines, and toggle on the radial engines. If your power is not enough, just jettison the lander tanks, return to kerbin.

Here is my design to maybe inspire. It is a bit more advanced version for moons, but gives an idea of layout. I use all five engines to decelerate, then once down to where I am close to landing, I toggle off all outside engines, and just use the center one. This was also in 0.22 before we could transfer science experiments to capsule, so now, I would have it separate at the capsule and those secondary landing legs are not needed.