Mun: Tips to avoid failure resulting in you crying in a hole.

Tips even Jebidiah will want to follow to the letter to avoid becoming another wreck on the lunar surface. Crashing insn't fun, unless you meant to.

Aims Of This Guide

The goal of this guide is to provide a sort of "checklist" for all of your Mun missions, even simple probes or maping satelites. It's not always fun to watch your creations crash, especially so when you are trying to reach a personal goal in your space program. These tips are aimed at helping you to keep Jeb alive until it's time to come home, or leave stranded on Mun, whatever floats your space boat.

The Tips:

(1) Practice landing If your mission involves landing something, such as a rover or rescue pod, practice landing on Kerbin. If you're not sure it will leave Kerbin, you can always do the following: First, make a new save, this will be a "testing" save, where you can make sure your landers will work, and can iron out issues before performing the real thing. all you need to do is load your lander, or whatever you are sending to space, on the launch pad, DO NOT LOAD THE ENTIRE ROCKET, unless you are testing the orbital delivery system. Open the debug menu( cheat menu), by pressing ALT+F12, this will give you a menu with options such as: Infinite RCS, Infinite resources, and weight hacks, use this to get your vessel to Mun. Once at Mun, disable all cheats, and proceed to land (or whatever) as normal.

(2) Action grouping
While not necessary, action groups can make normally time consuming, annoying tasks quicker and easier. The abort group can also save Kerbalnaut lives, at the press of a button, all the necessary actions, such as shutting down engines and decoupling stages that could otherwise threaten your Kerbalnauts can be done quickly and without much hassle.


(3) Determining where to land
The lunar surface is a very uneven place, and 3/4 times, the place you land won't be what you had in mind. So, for larger landers, such as bases or miners, you can use rovers to locate a nice, flat-ish landing site. Once you have found a location suitable, it's a simple matter of landing at the rover.

(4) The perfect time to land

Never try to land on The Mun at night. This can make it difficult to judge distances, and you can end up burning too late. B-B-B-Bo-BOOm-B-BOOM!!!
The altimeter can not always be trusted, so try and wait until daylight, when you can see what you're doing.

(5) EJECT!!!

OK, so something went wrong, you may have run out of fuel or an engine overheated, and you can no longer control your craft. Obviously, The first thing that comes to your mind is "♥♥♥♥! I have to save these guys somehow..." So, a couple of things you can do, if you are in lunar orbit, is use RCS. I know, I know, you are problably thinking "How is RCS going to help me establish a stable orbit?!?!?" Well, RCS is alot more powerful than you think. Don't bellieve me? Take a small craft up to space around Kerbin, once your gravity turn is complete, shutdown your engine, you won't need it. Instead, once you are at apoapsis, use G,H,J,K,I,L to focus monopropellant out of your RCS ports (DONT USE WASD!!!!) prograde. If you have done it right, you can circularize yourself into a stable orbit around kerbin. Now, since Mun is alot smaller, and has no atmosphere, depending on your ship's size, you should not need very much monopropellant or RCS thrusters to abort a failed landing attempt. If your ship does not have RCS, then grab a kerbal, go EVA, and land him with the EVA pack. At worst, you can save 1 life (to most likely be forgotten, and left to die, clinging to the lies you told him relating to rescue)

[Dutch]

As irrelevant as you might consider Number 4, it's entirely possible that not clearly seeing where there might be a hill or crater results in unexpected anomalies that may or may not make you regret going in anyways. Lights don't help you plan that either.

[Forever Offline]

Number 4 is irrelevant now, since the altitude meter is precise when not in sea level mode. Though, after 7 years still good to read for beginners.

[FakobKilla.]

for #4 i use lights that point down

[plr]

| |
THX SO MUCH FOR MAKING MY LIFE EASIER
|____|

[Ad Hominem]

I usually try to land during the daytime on any planetary body for the sole reason of using the craft's shadow to judge the landing. The shadow and craft will always meet at the ground. The shadow might be closer or further depending on the angle of the sun at that particular time, the shadow's distance will be relative but it's approach is linear.

[SolarFlare1234]

I remember first playing KSP, have always been a bit of a nerd so I picked up the mechanics real fast.

My first orbital rocket accidentally ended up having so much DV I ended up getting to the Mun and back just by slapping landing legs on it.

[RealOfficialTurf]

I use Illuminator Mk1 to land on night safely by pointing the Illuminator downward and lighting it up. There, now I can land by judging how close the light to the ground. :D

[Plakvar]

And gets 600 science

[Plakvar]

First Manned Mission to Mun: 1.) Launch 2.) Orbit Kerbin easily 3.) Come into Mun's orbit with the boosters from kerbin still 4.) Relize boosters made things worse 5.) Detaches everything except landing engine 6.) Lands on mun 7.) Relizes your out of Fuel :P

[Alexis]

I'm the kind of guy to leave em' on Mun to rot until I come the next time with a successful ship. At that point I pick em up with a rover and let the poor guy take the first transport ship back to kerbin XD