Ironic

Tomorrow, I'm leaving here to drive to Dallas for BGG.con.

Today, my copy of The World's End on Blu-Ray shipped from Fort Worth, to be delivered tomorrow evening.

We'll each arrive at the other's starting point within a few hours of each other.

Actually doubly ironic: if it's here when I get home from work tomorrow, I plan to take it with me to watch in the hotel tomorrow night. So it's going to rush overnight delivery and then I'll immediately drive it back to where it came from.

(I didn't do this on purpose; it comes out tomorrow and I preordered it a couple months ago)

Cricket

Ladies and gentlemen, the Cricket lander.

This is what I was talking about before: three modules, an orbiter, a descent stage, and a command module. Launched in two parts (the bottom descent stage on one booster, the orbiter and command module on another). A little intricate docking dance in low Kerbin orbit to arrange them (orbiter docked to the bottom of the lander, command module on top like you see here), then fly them to the Mun.

What went right: it did actually work, obviously. The launches went off perfectly, the rendezvous was easy, the landing was perfect (more on that later).

What went wrong: The thing is absolutely a beast to handle in space. The orbiter is an enormous fuel tank with a not-rigid-enough connection to the lander. The lander has its mass spread out in those four tanks, so it really does not want to rotate. If you throttle up the orbiter enough, it actually rips the entire spacecraft apart. Docking was slow and frustrating, and I ran dry of RCS fuel long before I landed. So it works but it's tricky to fly. It was not designed with Wookiees in mind.

The landing was perfect though, thanks to a Youtube tutorial I watched. It changed the way I do that in a small but important way:

I used to make a deorbit burn that would have me intersecting with the ground, so that when I landed, my velocity vector would be pointing diagonally forward and down. I'd need to kill that velocity before I landed, but in such a way that I killed the forward velocity first, so that I was heading straight down over where I wanted to land. And, I had to do this while picking a nice flat landing spot. Lots of things that had to be done all at once that were very touchy, and if I didn't do them right I'd either crash or end up hovering over a hill.

The new way is much easier: make the deorbit burn not quite enough to actually hit the ground. Then, you'll fly low over the landing area totally horizontally (maybe 5 km up, going about 600 m/s). When you pass over a good spot, kill all your forward velocity. You don't need to worry about the downward velocity because you don't have much. Then just slowly descend, throttling the engines to make sure that you land softly. Much easier.

Edit: And I just brought it back to Kerbin, and landed within sight of the space center where I launched. Landing in a particular place is the next thing I want to get good at, so I can build up bases and such.