No, no, no, nooooooo!!!

[Jeppan74]

Just crashed my ship around 25 000 ly from my latest space-station landing, after two weeks of slowly going toward the center via some nebulas on the way... All the scanning was supposed to buy me an Anaconda and now everything is lost... I had a dream of settling or at least spend a lot of time in Colonia, but now it´s gone to pieces, just like my ASP Explorer...
Everything was going so fine, even after some misdemeanors my hull integrity was on 98% and my baby was spinning like a cat. I was on top of the Galaxy (yeah, literally. I had flown almost as far above as you can)!! Then I found this system which had the biggest landable body I´ve ever seen! It was bigger then some of the smaller gas giants. So the explorer in me said that I just had to land there to see if there was something different here - There was and I should never had tried it...
It started commonly enough, like all the hundreds of landings I´ve made on moons, but, when I came out of the glide I noticed that I still was around 15k above ground. So I started a slow decent to around 1k above (as I usually do) and then leveled out. This is where I noticed something was wrong: even though I should´ve been slowing my decent I continued to plunge toward the surface. In panic I put my ship to the sky and put the engine on 100%, trying to escape, but I was still falling. Even though I pressed the boost I could just watch when the ship finally crashed in high velocity in to the ground...
A few seconds later I´m back in the bubble (luckily I had money for the insurance).
And the strange thing is that I have no idea why this happened?? Because the game engine can´t be that good that it calculate the gravity from the size of the body you land on, can it? But that´s the only resonable explanation I have for the landing to go so wrong, that the big planet gravity pulled me down.

And I was going to use all the money from the many, many scans of all the water worlds, ammonia worlds and gas giants with water based life to buy an Anaconda... The only good thing that came out of this is that I´m in the bubble now that the Thargoid update is coming.

 

[Major Klutz]

High Gravity Landing. Unplanned Lithobraking.

Yeah. High Gravity can be tricky even if you're experienced with it. Always check the local gravity before landing.

Do you have logs from ED Discovery or another program? If you scanned the planet before landing your logs will show the gravity.

I'm curious. Always on the lookout for high gravity planets. 9.9G is the current record holder.

 

[Aura Lorell]

The game engine is that good calculating the gravity. You tried landing on a high G planet and there are special measures you need to take if you don't want to crash like that. I'm sorry for your loss, it's cruel, especially if you didn't know about it, but it is what it is. Search the youtube for high G landings to see how it's done.

Edit: Major Klutz has quite a few videos on high G landings, see his signature. Oh, and don't get discouraged by this setback. Go out and try again. You can also try landing on high G bodies in the bubble for practice.

 

[fitzsteve]

Sorry to hear that

Any idea what the Gravity was? I had a close shave on a passenger mission in my Asp on a 2g planet, left with 40% Hull or something similar and a very dissatisfied passenger who asked to be dropped off at the nearest station and then jettisoned as I bumped a second time lol

I was going down to look at some Geezers btw

 

[CaptainKremmen]

Sorry for your pancaking!

Thanks to "Stellar Forge", every planet does indeed have its own gravity. Look for the "g" value shown in the bottom right corner of your HUD when in orbital/planetary mode. It's also presented in the planet specs, accessed from the System Map.

edit: If you want to practice, go to Achenar 3. That planet is 6.7g of pure fun.

Also...

- If you have a spare analogue dial on your HOTAS, play around with configuring it as a vertical thruster dial.

- Do NOT touch vertical thruster controls that are simple "on/off" style, if you're anywhere remotely near the surface of a high-g world. You'll drop out of the sky.

- Before you take off, plot a hyperspace route to a star system that is a bit above the horizon, and orient to face in that general direction. You may well have trouble getting pointed at the supercruise "escape vector" and up to speed, so a Plan B of a hyperspace jump closer to the horizon could save you.

 

[Oggy85]

Sorry to hear that. I don't attempt landings on high G worlds unless I can aford to lose data. Having said that, I'm flying from center to Colonia and I'm 5k Ly away, so I shall use your experience as a reminder. After I reach Colonia and sell my data, I will take risk and land on nearby planet of death close orbiting White Dwarf.

 

[Shir]

Sorry for your loss. Were i in your shoes, my next elite goal would be to successfully land on that planet Go on Achenar 3 to practice high g landings in the bubble. I did it with humiliating results but i got better. Best practice really if you encounter something unusual and have lots to lose is to check a few videos beforehand

 

[Sapyx]

Surface gravity of a planet or moon is calculated from the planet's mass, and the planet's density, according to Newtonian gravity laws. SO for example, a large, high-density planet (eg metal-rich) will have a much higher gravity than an Icy planet the same size. The gravity statistic is amongst the various planetary stats reported to you after a surface scan.

You also had inertia working against you. Bigger, heavier ships are harder to stop crashing into high-G planets than smaller ships.

The record surface gravity for a currently-landable planet is just under 10 G. If you happened to save a screenshot of the system map showing the planet stats, look up what the gravity of your planet was. If you wish to practice landing on a high-G planet while you're back in the bubble, check out the Imperial capital system of Achenar; there's a 6 G planet in that system, with a dockable base on it no less. Landing there is considered quite the challenge, especially for a large ship like an Anaconda or Cutter.

 

[fitzsteve]

The other thing to consider is the thrusters on your ship, if you went for lower class module to save weight it can make planet landings very tricky!

 

[Major Klutz]

There's also planet 3 in the HD 148937 system which is only about 1,000ly from the bubble.
But it's 9.7G so you might want to practice on some of the 2-3G planets in the bubble first. Achenar requires a permit to visit which requires imperial rank.

+1 CaptainKremmen's suggestion of analog control of thrusters. See this thread for more on that https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=220859

Also some quick demonstrations of ...
Banking in High G
What happens when you use binary or on/off thruster controls ...
vs Analog control ...
an external view of what happens to thrusters as you disengage vertical thrust.
and why boosting upward can sometimes be counter productive.

The other thing to consider is the thrusters on your ship, if you went for lower class module to save weight it can make planet landings very tricky!

That's only true to a point. Even the best thrusters are overwhelmed at around 1.5-2G. So if the gravity is higher than 2G, all thrusters perform the same (against gravity, not horizontal movement)
The game “cheats” and supercharges the vertical "up" thrusters as well as the main forward thrusters so that they always have 5m/s² over whatever the gravity is.
So above a certain point, they are all 5m/s². https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=218171

 

[SciTrekker]

Sorry to hear that

Any idea what the Gravity was? I had a close shave on a passenger mission in my Asp on a 2g planet, left with 40% Hull or something similar and a very dissatisfied passenger who asked to be dropped off at the nearest station and then jettisoned as I bumped a second time lol

I was going down to look at some Geezers btw

I keep a mirror in my ship for looking at a geezer.

 

[Jeppan74]

@Major Klutz Wow! didn´t know that Major. Thanks a lot mate! The only numbers I usually watch are the altitude Will mos def head over to your channel and get educated, cause I don´t want to experience this again
When it comes to the scans I thought that they disappear when your ship explode (and I´m on a console so I cant use third party programs). But if it´s still there I´ll come back to you when I´ve gotten home.
I can tell you though that it was inside a Nebula with a generic name, that I can´t remember, but as soon I´m logged in I can se the name

 

[Major Klutz]

Sorry, I was talking about logging from third party apps, so if you're on a console, those logs are not available.
But if you remember the name of the system, someone else may be able to look it up if they've been there.

 

[Jeppan74]

Thanks guys for the support! The risk of loosing everything is the nature of this game and also probably why it´s so thrilling And I´m sure you´ve been through something similar yourselves. But now I´m going to watch the Majors videos and practice on landing on high G planets! But this time in a slightly less expensive ship

 

[rOmiLaYu]

Thanks guys for the support! The risk of loosing everything is the nature of this game and also probably why it´s so thrilling And I´m sure you´ve been through something similar yourselves. But now I´m going to watch the Majors videos and practice on landing on high G planets! But this time in a slightly less expensive ship

If it makes you feel any better, the first time I went to SagA*, I did exactly the same thing you did. It was early on in the game and I also didn't know about high G planets. I had just reached SagA*, taken the obiligatory screenshots and whatnot and then jumped to the first system out with a landable body to park up for the night. Already tired and somewhat spacemad, I pancaked at over 500km/s on a 4.8G moon. Three weeks of cartographic data down the toilet and an AspX rebuy later, I almost cried...literally. But I didn't. I got back up and kept flying.

So like I said, you're not the only one. Saddle back up and get back out there!

 

[Kzasch]

I had a similar experience the first time I went to Beagle, was landing on a high G icy planet, noticed at 1500 meters that my descent was way to fast. Managed to turn upwards, press boost, and full pips to shields. Got out with 11% hull, quite scared

 

[soddish]

As a rule of thumb, I always make sure my exploration ships can boost in case I get into any predicaments involving high-G planets. Pointing straight up and boosting will usually save you from pancaking in all but the most dire situations.

 

[Verdigris]

Off Topic but... Klutz, how is your Anaconda bridge so much more lively than mine? The displays in the secondary/tertiary seats are active and really cool. Mine feels...empty. At first I thought it was multi-crewed, but there are no legs that I see.

 

[Fanghur Rahl]

When you try to land on a high gravity world, do NOT hold down the descend button. Just quickly tap it, wait until you stop, then repeat, and keep your finger over the ascend button. I found that out the hard way the same way you did.

 

[Major Klutz]

Off Topic but... Klutz, how is your Anaconda bridge so much more lively than mine? The displays in the secondary/tertiary seats are active and really cool. Mine feels...empty. At first I thought it was multi-crewed, but there are no legs that I see.

No multicrew. I've yet to even try it.
That was recorded in March of this year, before the 2.3 patch which screwed up the Anaconda cockpit.