Lunar landing game madness

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(04-07-2024 06:55 AM)EdS2 Wrote:  Maybe the problem is in the lack of fine control.

Exactly. Computation of the landing burn is undergraduate stuff once you have had your first lectures in differential equations. It is easy to show - at least it used to be easy to show 40 years ago, by now I have forgotten most of it - that the least fuel is required if you burn as strongly as possible as late as possible.
So all that is really required is to go to full throttle at exactly the right moment and perform one single burn at constant trhrust. If you look at the landing burns of SpaceX Falcon rockets you can see that they last not longer than two or three seconds, so clearly a one-second time step is not enough to enable a soft landing.
Vintage pocket calculators did nothing but turn a problem of physics into a problem of quantisation...

Regards
Max