Can I somehow simulate munar gravity to test landers?

[guitarxe]

I wanted to test some lander designs I've made to see how well they would handle on the munar surface. Is there any way to accomplish this through the debug console or something like that, instead of going all the way to mun to find out it doesn't work?

[FenrirWolf]

You can hack gravity in the debug console, but the result is something more like Gilly's gravity than the Mun's.

[Moar Boosters]

There's the hyperedit mod which allows you to teleport stuff to wherever you want. You'll probably have to wait for it to be updated to work with the new patch.

[Kerba Fett]

I usually guess based on info from MechJeb. You can have it show your TWR for various bodies in the solar system. You want to have a twr of 2 or better for Mun landers. While you can land with anything over 1.0 you have to start your landing burn at very high altitude and burn a lot of fuel getting down.

For instance, I made a lander with 4 ion engines that has a twr of about 1.35 and about 6300 dV, but it will burn almost half of it getting to the surface of the Mun from orbit. Normally getting to the surface from orbit takes under 1000 dV.

Low TWR craft are best used for point to point travel on the surface as they can hover for a long time and you don't need to bleed off that much velocity when you slow to land.

I'm pretty sure Kerbal Engineer Redux also shows your TWR for various bodies but I've never used it.

[Superfluous J]

I use KER for the raw numbers, but nothing beats on-site testing. For this I use HyperEdit. Make a quicksave, do all your testing and hyperediting without ever quicksaving, and then restore from that quicksave.

If you want to be totally hardcore on it, copy your .craft files into a sandbox game and use hyperedit there.

Another mod that I've not tried yet has "test mode" where it essentially automates the whole "quicksave and hyperedit" thing for you, restoring you back to where you were when you leave the simulation. That mod is Kerbal Construction Time. You can - from what I read - disable all the parts of that mod EXCEPT the simulation part.

[cantab]

In real life they used a jet engine, rigged on a gimbal to always thrust straight up, to counter 5/6 of the weight of the test vehicle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle

This couldn't be done in stock KSP, but I wonder if there are any mods that could enable it.

[EtherDragon]

I wanted to test some lander designs I've made to see how well they would handle on the munar surface. Is there any way to accomplish this through the debug console or something like that, instead of going all the way to mun to find out it doesn't work?

One way (this is what I use, as I go 100% stock) is to:

1. Use the hack menu (ALT+F12) and activate unlimited fuel and hack gravity.

2. Fly your ship to the Mun.

3. Turn off hack gravity

4. Establish the rest of your test condition (in orbit, or landed, or whatever).

5. Turn off unlimited fuel

6. Quick Save

7. Conduct your test.