Just got back from dinner
Right before I left I was pretty sure that one of my kerbinauts was dead - the guy who I thought I had to leave behind because he couldn't reach the ladder fell off and just lied there. My ride was here and I had to run - thus the rushed screencap sans the details - left my guy lying there 3 and a half hours ago and just got back.
He was lying about 150m from the ship.. huh? How'd he move there?

Either way, thanks a lot guys with the jetpack, I have seen that thing in action before, but totally forgot about it.
So I'm about to run back to my spaceship and try to get home. We'll see how that goes
Joecoolyo said:
Blech, every time I've tried to land on the Mun today this is what got me.
So just burning retrograde is the answer?
How close did you get before you straightened your lander?
That is the answer, but.. my burns varied quite a bit. For a while I didn't burn at all, then I did it on and off to try to stabilize my acceleration and make sure that I didn't speed up too much, then it was a bit of a constant very-low burn for the same reason.. then near the end you have to somehow balance it so that the distance to surface-1500m (or so) and your acceleration both reach 0 at the same time. If you keep adjusting where you burn (retrograde will move, you have to move with it), and your initial entry angle isn't too crazy, eventually you'll lose all lateral movement.. or at least most of it.
That's how I was able to land at least. I have 2 successful landings under my belt, and in the first one the whole lower part of my lander blew up. The rest landed upright and I got to go on a moonwalk, so it was a success. Then I guess there is the third time where I managed to do a flip and land sideways.
My way of getting to the moon is to just continue burning horizontally when you are trying to get into orbit initially until my orbit intersects the moon's gravitational influence. I realize that I am skipping a stage here where I'm supposed to "select" the entry point by adjusting my orbit (or whatever), but I've been winging it. It means that I might have to orbit the planet a couple times before the mun intersects my orbit at the right time, but that seems to be the only downside.
hobbsyoyo said:
Ok, I know you have some questions Warpus and I'm not ignoring them. I just got my computer unpacked and I'll try and cover the bigger questions tomorrow, I do want to take a minute to answer a quick question and post some of my own picks. (no guarantees I will get to it tomorrow, I'm visiting with family but I'll try)
No prob. Thanks to mostly you I am now at a stage where I can put things in orbit and make attempts to land on other planetary bodies. So if I get stuck with something in particular, there are many more things for me to try out.
By the way, did you say that you got that mun base there in one piece, on just one rocket? Or was that just a part of it?
Oh and.. I have temporarily switched to a rocket design that does not use the asparagus method. It seems to work better for mun-bound probes,.. but I'm really just basing that on my success vs failure ratio, and that is influenced by many other things. Either way, the simpler design is what I have been using to get things into orbit and to the mun.
Antilogic said:
My Munar landing protocol is to get in roughly a 10-15 km orbit, then kill most of my velocity so I start falling straight down. Then burn to slow down as the surface approaches and make small adjustments on the drop. This may not be the most fuel efficient way to land, but it saves the headache of killing a lot of angular momentum very close to the ground (when I want to be vertical for the landing).
For now I have combined by deacceleration burn with my mun landing burn. So for me it's just one burn.. I keep burning until my orbit intersects the muns.. Then I burn every once in a while so I don't speed up too much.. and so on.
What I do is probably inefficient for other reasons.. but it does save me a couple steps.. which means more trial & error runs.