I believe the earliest landing ever recorded was AD6, because you cannot launch a spaceship before AD1 no matter what you try,
Technically, you can
launch a SS... if you
had one. The problem is that the game seems to "hard wire" (barring any relatively recent new research) the spaceship parts to only appear as build options in 1 AD or later. That means in 1 AD, your cities could build the parts for a SS (if you had at least the number of cities to produce them simultaneously) and therfore launch on the next turn (AD 0020). At that moment, the game years will switch to counting by 1's (instead of 20's), and 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 [win].
The hut restriction was an attempt to eliminate random effects
What hut restriction? Personally, I'm a fan of restricting (eliminating) huts, because too much luck can really alter some games. I noticed we had no huts in this GOTM, and assume they are gone from GOTMs now?
by Solo in his Early Landing Guide
Where is that located? If Slow Thinker (a good dude) is involved, I know where (at the other big Website... is it OK to say that name these days, hehe). Hope ST is still around here too, but I don't see any recent posts from him.
EDIT: I found it. Wow. An impressive work, going on since 2003!! A very comprehensive document did Solo make, and well-written, too. Its great to see some real work still being done in the Civ 2 world, and new "discoveries" being made. If the Civ 2 Source Code is ever released, we the Civ 2 Community as a larger whole should get together and make an agreement about what/how certain things should be fixed.