Spaceplane landing on Laythe - how difficult is it?

[ZeroG]

So, I'm just starting to get the hang of spaceplanes - I'm tweaking a design now and testing it out on Kerbin. I was wondering, though - if I have a spaceplane that can get to orbit and land again on the KSC runway, is that same plane likely going to work on Laythe, where there is no runway? I can land a plane on the runway at Kerbin, but I've never successfully landed a plane on the ground. Will Laythe's lower gravity help me out there, or should I try to master non-runway landings on Kerbin? I suppose it goes without saying, but I'm also going to want to take off from Laythe.

My overall plan is to ferry the spaceplane to Laythe orbit, refuel it, and land/do science/take off all using one fully-fueled spaceplane. I use Mechjeb, but would prefer not to use other mods. I hope very soon I'll have my first working spaceplane finished, and I can post pictures and the .craft file. Right at this second, I have a roughly 16-ton plane.

Edited May 18, 2014 by ZeroG

[Redshift OTF]

It's tricky if you don't find a nice flat surface. You could put a lot of wing on it and parachutes so you can glide at low speeds or just make a lander with a jet engine and a couple of small rockets for orbital insertion.

[RocketPilot573]

From my experience, plane don't really handle differently on Laythe at all (80% atmosphere, 80% gravity). So your only challenge is the landing, I recommend testing the plane in some rough landings on kerbin first.

[Yasmy]

I haven't had any problems landing and taking off from the shores on Laythe as long as your plane is not tipsy.

Scouting from air should be sufficient. You may have to land on a bit of a slope, but you can find long stretches of uniform shallow slopes along the shores.

[ZeroG]

OK, cool. Inspired by Redshift OTF's post, I actually went ahead and put some parachutes on top of the plane, figuring I'd do a vertical landing by activating the parachutes right before landing, then a standard take-off. I was landing at KSC and decided to try it out - it more-or-less worked; obviously the sudden jerk upward threw my plane out of control for a little while, and it's way off-balance, but it actually landed that way (on the back engines). I was also able to take off from a non-runway as well. Here's a couple of screenshots of the landing on Kerbin:

I'll try using hyperedit and see if I can make this work on Laythe before doing my full-blown mission. Thanks!

[update]

Indeed, it worked! (with only a little breakage). I hyper-edited the plane into Laythe orbit, then used MechJeb's Landing Guidance feature; I entered some coordinates I found here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/47979-Any-flat-spots-on-Laythe-the-length-of-a-runway-other-SSTO-questions, and let let the autopilot put me into a descent path. I shut the autopilot off after the descent was plotted (I'm pretty sure it would have cratered me if I had just let it do its thing), and it put me in the general vicinity. It turned out to be a nighttime landing, and I don't recommend that; it made it way more difficult. I quicksaved before attempting to land, and botched quite a few landings before I finally started getting a few right. Really, I think the trickiest part is finding a flat area; even the coast can be pretty hilly. The nighttime aspect was definitely a part of that problem. I had several takeoffs botched as well; for some reason I went into a flat spin on several attempts, seemingly as a result of being on slopes. I finally did take off on one attempt, and I ended up breaking off a control surface. I had four in total, so now I only had three. Smart A.S.S. couldn't really cope with an uneven number of control surfaces, but SAS helped out a bit. I managed to get back into orbit, and actually found that Laythe takes quite a lot less fuel; even having expended some oxidizer to descend, I had more than enough to get back to a 60+K orbit.

If anyone's interested, here's the .craft file of the plane I used; action group 1 toggles turbojets, 2, toggles the 909s, and 0 deploys chutes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2wOLhKlE-_9cklfZVRSY3FRSTg/edit?usp=sharing. Thanks for the help!

Edited May 18, 2014 by ZeroG
Update on progress

[Redshift OTF]

Awesome mission! Glad the parachutes worked out ok.

[Kasuha]

Horizontal landing on Laythe is not hard but there are a few things to remember:

- less air pressure means less lift, and that means the plane doesn't react as fast to changes in control surfaces.

- there's no runway and any other terrain requires reduced landing speed. Make sure your plane is stable at or below 60 m/s.

My own experience is that it's easiest to land uphill on slight slope. Line yourself against bottom of the hill, then pull up, shut down engines and keep the plane reasonable distance above terrain until you bleed enough speed to be able to land.

Avoid surfaces with rocky textures. These require speeds 40 m/s or below or you'll crash on them.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I never had difficulty landing off the runway. You just need to find a flat surface to land on and not come in too fast. Always turn your engines as low as possible before landing and bleed off as much speed as you can by keeping the plane's nose up enough to fly level. I find landing on dirt easier than maneuvering to the runway. Actually I found that it was easier to design a plane capable of landing than it was to make one capable of taking off. It took me some 20+ plane models just to get in the air, and the first one that did also successfully landed (though it broke into pieces--but the pilot survived). Nowadays about 1 in 3 of my new plane designs fail to takeoff but only about 1 in 10 fail to land.

I only landed one plane on Laythe but it flew and landed very similar to Kerbin. Some things were slightly different, but not enough to warrant adjusting the plane's design.