Contact Light

• The rate switch (▲ ▼, or the ↑ ↓ keys): the computer holds whatever descent rate you set, and each click changes it by a foot per second. That's P66, the program every Apollo commander landed in.
• The hand controller (drag it, or hold ← →): left, toward BACK, tilts the LM back to slow down; right, toward FWD, speeds you up. Let go and it stands upright again.
• The numbers: altitude, how fast you're coming down, speed along the ground, and fuel. The marks under the LM show where its footpads will land: green is good, amber is rough, red is no.
• Fuel: the low-level light comes on at 5.6%. Houston calls 60 and 30 seconds to Bingo, and at Bingo you have 20 seconds to land or abort.
• Contact light: the probes under the footpads, 67 inches long, have touched. Hold steady; the engine stops when the footpads do.
• Plaques: every number gets gold, silver or bronze, and the plaque is the worst of them. Gold needs 3 ft/s or softer, a foot per second or less along the ground, upright and level, nothing under the footpads, close to the target, and down before Houston's 30-second call.
• Arcade is the 1979 way: raw throttle and rotation, no computer. Free flight rolls new ground every time.

The six landing sites are drawn after the real ones, from the mission reports and the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, not measured from them: the big craters are about the right size and in about the right order along the approach, and the small craters and rocks are made up. Fuel loads are set for the game, not copied from the flights.

The calls during your descent are made from your own numbers in the style of each crew. The lines after touchdown are the real ones, from the air-to-ground transcripts. The beeps are Quindar tones: they keyed Houston's transmitters, which is why only Houston's lines have them.

The plaques are this game's own. Nothing here is from or endorsed by NASA.