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I'm trying to land on the Mun in the first Mun tutorial. What I find is that I can escape Kerbal orbit and intercept the Mun, then set an orbit basically going straight down into the Mun.

But when I try to slow down to land, I always run out of fuel well before I get close to the Mun's surface, or I get too close too fast to slow down in time.

Is it actually possible to land on the Mun in this tutorial, or will there never be enough fuel?

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    don't aim straight for it, the mun has gravity which can both speed you up or slow you down depending how you use it. Use gravity to your advantage for whatever you want to do. Same for when you're leaving earth's gravity. remember that everything moves too, aim for where the moon's going to be
    – Aequitas
    Commented Oct 3, 2015 at 20:38

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I believe that you can with the proper technique, but it won't be simple because this craft inexplicably has a massive amount of dead weight in RCS fuel.

I think that if you burn all your RCS immediately you should be able to make the landing.

If you're desperate, you could also use the unlimited EVA jetpack fuel to literally get out and push, which is very slow but free.

Edit: I just read your opening post more carefully, and that is seriously not how you do it. When setting your initial interception orbit, aim for a periapsis no lower than 10k. Then when you get to periapsis, circularize. This puts you in the lowest, slowest stable safe orbit you can be in. Then when you come to land, you have a much lower amount of velocity and time to deal with, so it's a lot easier to time it correctly.

The stock craft should have a couple hundred extra m/s dv I think to make the landing comfortable for a player with the right technique, but it should not be difficult for you to make it reasonably close to landing safely if you are doing it right.

In my first attempt, I crashed on the Mun, but my command pod survived just for example.

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    No, the margin is less than 100m/s. Much less. I safely landed, or rather didn't crash the craft, but I ran out of fuel. Now, I know I could have done better, as I wasted a bunch of fuel on my decent, but I didn't waste 100m/s worth of fuel. By the time you reach Mun orbit, you're left with no more than 650m/s of fuel, which is the lower limit of how much you need just to land, including an emergency supply.
    – MBraedley
    Commented Oct 3, 2015 at 23:21
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    Kerbals don't have mass when in a pod. Throwing them out was pointless.
    – Philipp
    Commented Oct 4, 2015 at 17:03
  • I did not know they did not have mass when in a pod.
    – DeadMG
    Commented Oct 4, 2015 at 18:56
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    The margin is tight, and the right approach is called Suicide Burn - which, as its namesake says, is dangerous. Essentially, you don't enter the orbit, you don't circularize, don't slow gradually - you perform a single long burn that ends the moment you touch down. Of course this is completely impossible to do without computer assist, which calculates the precise moment when to start the burn and even then very dangerous, but it's simply The method to land when low on fuel.
    – SF.
    Commented Oct 16, 2015 at 13:32

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