I wanted to go for a record of as many flips as possible. So I boosted up to 25,000 feet; started spinning until it was doing about one flip per second; waited a few minutes; then turned on the autopilot to come into a landing.
The autopilot did a perfect job of stopping the rotation and lateral motion, so the lander came down straight as an arrow. Unfortunately, the autopilot didn't even try to decelerate! I crashed into the moon at 0.9 degrees and 770 MPH.
The target velocity is a factor of height, and the autopilot has “160” hardcoded as the ceiling, so going above that means it will never decelerate fast enough.
That's a ceiling for the speed the autopilot is okay with letting the lander descend. There is no ceiling to how much hard it will try to "apply the brakes".
I agree that the target velocity calculation is off though. I was excited that I came up with something reasonably theoretically correct for correcting rotation... and for figuring out when to fire the engines I just gave up and eyeballed it :)
The autopilot did a perfect job of stopping the rotation and lateral motion, so the lander came down straight as an arrow. Unfortunately, the autopilot didn't even try to decelerate! I crashed into the moon at 0.9 degrees and 770 MPH.