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What is the most HORRIBLE way one of your kerbals died


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I was aerobraking over Duna with a simple lander that was a nerv with a bunch of fuel tanks and science.  I had Bob and simple probe core that could barely do SAS.  My ship tilted slightly of center and the big science experiment exploded, tearing the ship in half and causing bob's capsule to be destroyed.  This was fine because I quick-saved just after entering Duna's SOI, but I accidentally tapped F5.  Guess I should start using named quick saves.  Spent the rest of the night designing a lander that can reenter from Kerbin orbit, ascend from Duna, and has 5km/s dV.

Other than that, my kerbals don't die.  Testing is revertible.

Edited by ment18
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Was trying to return 3 crew members in the Space Shuttle style 3 man command pod (Don't remember the exact name atm) from a failed space station when I realized I never put on the additional parachutes on it that I had meant to, in order to account for the significant increase in weight over the 1 man command pod.

So as I was coming down through the atmo I made a few short burns to get it headed for the ocean, figuring that would be somewhat safer to land in at high speed. After deploying the one parachute I put on it, it slowed to a somewhat reasonable speed, but... it was still way too high to effect a safe landing, so once I was only a a hundred or so meters above the waves I started to EVA the Kerbals one by one and have them jump overboard.

This went relatively well and they all managed to splash down safely, as I breathed a sigh of relief a shadow begin to loom over there heads and I realized with horror that the command module was going to fall directly on top of them, I begin to swim away with the Kerbal I was controlling but it was too late, it slammed down and forced all 3 of them deep under the water, when they finally bobbed up to the surface...they were deceased.

On top of that it glitched the game so hard the planet and the KSC disappeared leaving me alone in a vast empty field of stars till I restarted the game...needless to say, it was a truly terrible way to go lol.

Edited by Rocket In My Pocket
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Probably the most horrible and shurely stupid (and funny?) experience I got was during a classical rescue flight on the Mun, descent was as usual until my main engine "blows out" the Mk1-2 of the poor guy waiting for help... which lands back on him seconds after...

IMKHodA.png

7GplKiS.png

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Poor Thomfurt got stuck at the bottom of the Mohole.  He started bouncing around uncontrollably until he eventually came to rest sort of half in and half out of the terrain mesh so the game crashed every time I switched to him.

 Seeing as he had just bailed out of an out of fuel lander and, due to his trajectory taking him into the hole, was able to slow his fall enough with his jetpack it was a lucky escape turned grim death.  I had to terminate him from the Tracking Station,  poor chap.

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I was trying to get an EVA report in Jools upper atmosphere at around 8000 ms, then I accidentally opened the cargo bay doors. Jeb was instantly vaporized in a cloud of guts. I reverted and still have not gotten that report, but I will get it! 

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Poor Eduard, aboard Helios III

 

He was swinging a safe (he thought) distance past the Sun, doing science-y stuff in a low solar flyby before returning home.

Apparently he miscalculated the solar heating flux.

First to blow was the nuclear engine.

Then, as the heat slowly crept up, he started losing instruments to apparently random thermal explosions.

Not all at once though!

Only about one part blowing up per 5 minutes, as the solar heat slowly cooked his ship.

booom. This is Eduard, aboard Helios III. Can anyone hear me? overheating. The Sun is cooking my ship! there goes the Goo experiment

.

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booom..  solar panel #3

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bam bam booom... that sounded like a cargo bay, and the RCS fuel units.

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wham..  just the capsule left, maybe if i orient it so the heatshield faces the sun?

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boom boom WHA......signal lost.

Edited by MarvinKitFox
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In a 1.0.4 career, I sent some tourists up with a robotic probe in control. Everything went well, orbit, re-entry, good... ok, time to pop those chutes. No dice.

Pop the chute.

NO REALLY POP THE CHUTES OH MY GOD SPLAT

Oh. Right. Batteries. Let's bring some next time.

And I just did it again. This career I'm doing test flights first, so nobody died.

Edited by numerobis
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Only one death in 1.0.5 so far, but it was one of those avoidable ones and therefor tragic. Eva a short distance above Mun on a suborbital course to determine which Biome the craft was over, one of my rescue Kerbal scientists lost his hold on the Mk 1 capsule's rungs. Rather than jet pack to orbit (which would have been totally doable) he struggled to get back to the craft so as not to abandon all the scientific data and samples stored aboard. As soon as he was back on board a crater rim tried to board his craft too.  RIP

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A few trips into my Apollo-a-like series of missions, I was taking my solar powered lunar buggy out for a spin on the surface of the Mun with Bob and... some other guy. I was just in the process of completing the last of Kerpollo 16's mission objectives (land, pick up samples, eva report, conduct high speed tomfoolery with new rover) and on my way back to the lander (a scant 100m away) when whats-his-name went a little too fast over the rim of a crater. Idiot. The rover rolled over, both Kerbals banged their heads, rag dolled and then point blank refused to get up. There wasn't enough DeltaV in the command module to make a landing and conduct a rescue that way, but I couldn't just leave them down there, so the CMP remained as the on-orbit incident commander whilst Kerpollo 17 was being scrambled with a crack rescue crew of CDR Jeb, LMP Bill and the CMP... Well, I forget his name too. Something Kerman. Kerpollo 17 launches, orbits, and lands within 200m of the crash site with no problems. By this time, night has fallen. Jeb and Bill EVA to find one Kerbal trapped in his seat, still rag dolling, and Bob standing next to the rover, simply staring at the black, star lit horizon. Neither move. Both are listed as rover debris. Despite successfully flipping the rover back over, neither can be persuaded to move. They just stare, blankly. Batteries failing on all equipment, CAPCOM reluctantly gave the order to abort; the Kerpollo 16 command module began its long journey home. A few simple words were said on the surface by Jeb and Bill, who were more than a little weirded out by Bob constantly staring into the darkness and the rag dolling fellah on the floor. Kerpollo 17 blasted off from the Mun, never to return, leaving the dead.

Per Ardua Ad Astra, Bob and whats-his-face, your noble sacrifice will never be forgotten. Or, at least, it wasn't until I wiped the save game out of sheer embarrassment.

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Sent the MiniEeloo to Eeloo. I was excited, he was excited, that we got the tiniest craft in kerbal history to get to Eeloo

But the lander had to be modified for smallest weight. We didn't count for delta-v, however

As we stared at Eve from Eeloo orbit, we started to descend. The first problem came with the fact there was no docking port on either craft.

I said, "I'll rescue him! Bob will not die!" Of course that never was kept.

The second problem came after the landing. Bob basked in glory! He was excited to return with the vanilla surface of Eeloo.

Apparently we only had 550 m/s of fuel remaining according to MechJeb. We decided on the lander boosting him most of the way, with his jetpack getting him there on to orbit.

The fuel on the lander was gone. Bob EVA'ed and started making his final orbit.

But before he made it, however, Mission Control decided to get him as close to the transfer stage as possible. They said the fuel could be used for the rescue craft.

Before the orbits matched, he had run out of fuel. The transfer stage attempted a rescue and crashed.

Bob, ten minutes after Eeloo takeoff, 9 years after Kerbin launch, returned to the vanilla surface of Eeloo. Mission Control decided to never stick with tiny rockets ever again. 

 

The save was deleted shortly after.

 

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I don't know which "official" death was worse (so not counting the countless ones in simulations or reverts).  The one from a failed extreme EVA, or the one where a plane was accidentally piloted into the side of a mountain.  On one hand, I'd say the extreme EVA would be worse, as the Kerbal would have known that the end is coming well before he slammed into the ground, but as a pilot, I really cringe at the controlled flight into terrain.  The Kerbal was flying over to the mountains near  KSC, and started descending through the clouds.  As the plane cleared the bottom of the clouds, I found myself staring into the side of a mountain.  I tried to turn away, but I knew that it was hopeless, and only doom awaited me.  The plane crashed into the mountain belly first, killing the poor Kerbal pilot instantly.  It feels silly, but I felt honestly horrible at his death, especially knowing how avoidable it was.  I considered reverting, but decided I needed to live with my mistake instead of washing it away.

 

 

 

 

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Well, I had a routine mission set up to add another module to my WIP space station, and I thought using a shuttle was appropriate.

oeG2gw2.jpg

Complications arose during the module's docking and the eventual shuttle's undocking that ended up with one of the wings being damaged.

pyoMz96.png

Ive been using a life support mod to up the realism a little bit, and the shuttle crew had long overstayed their welcome in space, so re-entering was the only suitable option at this point.

Unable to keep a positive AOA without spiraling uncontrollably, the shuttle eventually burned up in the atmosphere, taking 4 kerbals with it.

aclnxBf.png

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After launching a probe controlled piece of a space station I realized that in order to dock I would have to decouple the command pod with Bob and another nameless kerbal in it, after some thought I decided to move them both onto a ladder. Well it turns out that kerbals have butter fingers because as soon as I throttled up they bumped into each other and went flying right into my engine exhaust. Bob managed to survive the intense heat but the other kerbal was instantly vaporized. The powerful thrust jettisoned Bob into the upper atmosphere where he inevitably burnt up.

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Got another one right behind getting crushed by a falling bus. So today when I was testing a new bus model I took it to the extreme. Put my ship in a 10 km fast orbit which burned jebs seat and he flew toward the bak of the bus. And then when he was close to hitting the back of the bus and dying the bus krashed and then jeb flew right into a pillar at 80m/s and died.

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16 hours ago, ostrich said:

One of my kerbals starved to death on reentry.

Heh. Reminds me of an old joke from Utah Phillips... "Times are hard these days. A lot of old hobos with no money and no work decide to end it all by going outside of town and lying down on the [brand name of a notoriously slow passenger train line] tracks. It's tragic--they starve to death."

Edited by AbacusWizard
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The only dead kerbal in my current save landed on the Mun in the dark with a command chair biome-hopper, which fell over. Tried to take off anyway, and accidentally used the kerbal as a bumper to bounce the rocket into a more vertical position... at very high speed. Good thing the rocket had a probe core.

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I had recently designed my first ever SSTO. I was pretty excited about it because it had taken my tons of tries, so I was flying it a bunch, trying to get some skill at landing the thing.

 

On one of the landing attempts, I clipped a wing into the ground and the plane blew apart. Luckily the capsule survived. Noticing that I was in a new biome, I figured I would have the kerbal jump out for a surface sample and eva report. Apparently, I didn't notice that the exit to the capsule was facing the ground. Poof! a little wisp of smoke and the kerbal was gone forever.

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Hmmm... Event though I probably take care of my kerbals the most I have the most horrific deaths, but I can't really scale it...

Kamikazing into a Tiger tank...

Sucked into an intake...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT0FK_6uD_8

Burned in reentry...

Ejecting out of an out of control thunderbird 2 only to be crushed by it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc5_FuRzLjI

I had a similar one like you Aser, except I was reentering... With no parachute... and survived So much more saddened

Oh I forgot getting hit by a tail of a Concord and being run over by a train, and being in a said train in a crash...

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