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Your hardest missions


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I want to know what was your hardest mission in KSP. An mission in that something not planned happened, and that have great chances of gone wrong, but in the end you managed to fulfill it sucessfully.

My hardest mission was an probe that i sended to Eve, the Kernera 2. I not prepared the probe to make an aerocapture to orbit Eve, so i braked with an engine. I orbited Eve, but i wanted to low pretty much the orbit to get an safe athimospheric entry.

But i overestimated the amount of fuel nedded, and i didn't have enough fuel to low my orbit. So i lowered my periapsis to below Eve's athimosphere, and started to aerobrake to low my orbit.

But this operation was pretty long. I make at least 30 passages by the athimophere, and this number didn't was bigger because of 2 time warp bugs that lowered my apoapsis of 78.000 km to 20.000 km.

And besides that, all the ablator of the heat shield of the probe gone during the entries, so i had to rotate desesperally the probe during the final entry, to dissipate the heat.

But the final reentry was a sucess. The ship fulfilled his mission of land in one of the Eve's oceans (but very close to a island), and i gathered many science points with the entries.

And you, what was you hardest mission in KSP?

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I think the hardest I've had that I've managed to finish successfully was when Lufrid was landed on the Mun with tourists aboard; the lander tipped over (too much slope in the landing site, and too much horizontal velocity on contact).  No RCS (craft wasn't built to dock), and the reaction wheel wasn't strong enough to even raise the nose.  Retracting the landing legs had no effect.  The command pod hatch was down, so Lufrid couldn't even get out of the pod to plant a flag and take a surface sample.

I had the landing legs mounted on fuel tanks that, in turn, were attached with radial decouplers, but blowing the (empty) tanks didn't solve the problem either -- but it did allow Lufrid to roll the craft so the hatch wasn't blocked; she was able to plant her flag and take her sample and EVA report.

With that done, I made a quicksave and made a few attempts at the old "slide up the crater wall" Munar launch method.  No good; the fuel tank or decoupler kept exploding before I'd slide 100 m.  I finally tried maximum pitch/yaw upward (using both the reaction wheel and the gimbal of the Poodle engine), and that would in fact raise the nose rapidly enough to get off the surface before anything exploded.  Three or four more tries, and I managed to get SAS turned on to keep the craft pointed upward (Lufrid was still 1 star, so didn't have "radial out" as a hold option), then shut down the engine, oriented horizontally to the east as the craft coasted upward, and burned for orbit.  Lufrid and her tourists were off the Munar surface, still with plenty of fuel to get back to Kerbin.

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I was sending a big food delivery to a base on Minmus by tweaking a standard shuttle, and when it came time to launch, I accidentally loaded it with tourists instead of leaving the back seats empty.

A few days out from Kerbin, I got the alert that O2 & H2O were running out.  I burned almost all the remaining fuel to redirect into a very high energy transfer and catch a 1km/s flyby of Minmus.  Bill, already on Minmus, spent the 5 hour ETA using KAS to bolt together a 909, a set of fuel tanks and a capsule from the scrapyard, and then scraped together all the dregs of fuel in the area for a completely hand-crafted rescue ship.

Fighting the lopsided craft with no SAS, popping up above Minmus and hovering until it was time for the rendezvous burn, he was able to slap on a spare can of air with 9 minutes left on the clock, and then docked to share fuel and prevent the ship from swinging off into interplanetary space.

 

Some say he did it for the 5 years worth of snacks, others say he did it to show off his skills with the wrench, but really it was just following the Kerbonaut's Kode.

Edited by suicidejunkie
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