Release your stress here. Whats the worst thing/fail that you faced in ksp???

[Space boy]

12 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

While hardly the worst thing I've done, I haven't done this in a while:

Launching a small remote rover to Eve - which is to replace the first attempt that burned up during atmospheric entry - and I forgot to set the control point to the transfer stage instead of the (horizontally mounted) rover.  The REALLY bad part is I have action groups set for the control points to easily switch.  Surprisingly, the entire rocket flipped & slammed into the ground clear of the pad and the rover inside the fairing survived intact.  The next attempt was successful, but I'm beginning to think my contract to land a rover on Eve might be cursed.

 

Hahaha, I always feel like the contracts are cursed they are like made to be unsolvable! 

[Bev7787]

I tried to launch a craft into LEO in RSS/RO, and I loaded my rocket too heavy- so it was unable to reach orbit. I was playing RP-1... Other than that it's probably my 0.90.0 Jool 5 attempt, which I attempted as a single launch mission before the entire thing went to bits because not enough struts

[BrianInAustin]

2 very similar fails.  The first was my first manned (Kerbaled?) trip to Duna, left Duna orbit to come home and left the lander crew and all the science behind.  This was a quite a while ago.

 

The second was a few weeks ago, I was trying to see how few flights I could do to unlock the tech tree.  It took 12 with no science coming from KSC other than launchpad.  The reason it took 12 instead of 11 was I had to go back to the Mun to get the science I left on a lander.

 

I don't have any idea if 12 is an impressive number or not.  I never went farther than Minimus and hit every biome there and all but 3 on the Mun.   This was pretty easy as I concentrated on the top and bottom of the tree for science experiments and big fuel tanks in the early stages.  2 of the flights were refuel depots in Mun and Minimus orbits.

Edited October 31, 2019 by BrianInAustin

[PositronLance001]

I was doing a practice orbit of the Z-MAP Satellite Launch kit, and as I was deorbiting the orbital stage I collided with the satellite and sent it spinning away at escape velocity  

[KerbolExplorer]

This was on my first minmus trip witch ended REALLY bad

So i decided to make a minmus trip taking the original 4.3 of them were going in the lifepod and the other when into the hitchjaker(idk how to type that).Now there was a slight issue with this design..I originaly decided that only the lifepod would be saved so the hitchjaker module would be jetisoned.

So i spotted the mistake too late,I don't remember why but i refused to revert flight

So i was stuck there with 2 choices

CHOICE 1:Sacrifice a kerbal to save 3

or

CHOICE 2:try to save them all with a 80% chance to kill them all in the process.I think you can guess what happened next....

So i did the only correct thing to do!

I chose the second choice!(it was 1.2.2 things were crazier back then)

So you must be asking yourself what happened?...Well read the title of the thread this didn't had a happy ending.

The vessel whent ok during re-entry untill the ship decided to go head first(becuse ships are that suicidal)it started gaining speed....the faces of the crew were white...the whole planet was silence...untill contact was permanently lost....

Well the ship crashed in the middle of the ocean going god speed.Nothing survived...no one survived....

I'm really curious of what a real space center would have done

[Zedwardson]

Get mission to rescue Kerbal.

He is in a intercept with the Mun, and I not launched anything more then 150 km beyond the main planet.

 

 

Thanks KSP.

[RizzoTheRat]

£&$*ing Ike is a pain in the £&$*ing %^$&!

I have a KOs script that calculates a Duna intercept and then performs the burn to get the initial intercept.  It then goes on to a second section of code to bring the Ap down to the required altitude...Except it keeps getting an intercept with Ike and messing up the flipping calculations!

My current thinking is to try and sneak in underneath it by adjusting the velocity to get the horizontal component of the offset first, and then bring the intercept up to equatorial afterwards, still a risk of Ike involvement but hopefully not enough to thow out the calculations completely.  Otherwise I guess I'm going to have to circularise at about 4Mm and then time a further burn to bring the Pe down and then circularize based on where Ike is.

I don't remember having this much hassle when flying there manually.

 

[Space boy]

18 hours ago, BrianInAustin said:

2 very similar fails.  The first was my first manned (Kerbaled?) trip to Duna, left Duna orbit to come home and left the lander crew and all the science behind.  This was a quite a while ago.

 

The second was a few weeks ago, I was trying to see how few flights I could do to unlock the tech tree.  It took 12 with no science coming from SKC other than launchpad.  The reason it took 12 instead of 11 was I had to go back to the Mun to get the science I left on a lander.

 

I don't have any idea if 12 is an impressive number or not.  I never went farther than Minimus and hit every biome there and all but 3 on the Mun.   This was pretty easy as I concentrated on the top and bottom of the tree for science experiments and big fuel tanks in the early stages.  2 of the flights were refuel depots in Mun and Minimus orbits.

There is this one Youtuber, bradely whistance and he went interplanetary on the second flight. https://youtu.be/HXrHsjJcTa0

[Boris Kerball]

I have been playing KSP for 5yrs now, and it is the most satisfying game ever. I am in it for realism, I don't want aircraft that fly into space, from the tarmac, the most realistic component as seen on the news and you tube with the latest rockets to the ISS IS the Docking camera. yesterday i watched Scott Manley (again) his 1st recommended addon is the Laser docking camera, alas i went to down load it and a warning stating it does not work with 1.8. just has my docking camera stopped working after 1.4 came along. Dev;s why is the most realistic item of all time, not available.  The docking camera should be in the main game as standard, watching tutoriels of the top teachers of this game docking from a third party camera, bing bang bosh, docked is not in any form realistic. oh and by the way since steam upgraded me 1.8 my kerbals have NO lights on helmets, plus i have no height meter when in orbit.  The price of progress i guess you can keep your frills, coloured suites, futuristic engines. I will attempt to go back to 1.3 when everything worked.

regards Boris

[vossiewulf]

Forgetting to fix the staging on like 47 consecutive test launches of a vehicle. More than once.

On 10/18/2019 at 12:25 AM, RizzoTheRat said:

I don't remember having this much hassle when flying there manually.

Chance of intercept is inversely proportional to the desire for one.

[Cavscout74]

Well, I just found a new way to destroy a manned rocket - with the (jettisoned) LES tower!!!!  Talk about irony.....

I don't have screenshots yet (different computer) but while launching a Gemini-ish rocket (but with a mod LES tower), everything was going smooth, and passing 35km I jettisoned LES tower - which fires its rockets while decoupling, boosting the LES tower quickly ahead of the rocket.  But it keeps a nearly identical flight path and this time, it was a little too identical - it slammed into the rocket somewhere around the coupling between first & second stages, destroying the second stage engine, decoupler & some of the first stage fuel tank.  The only saving grace was it killed all thrust, so the pod was able to just decouple from the wreckage & splashdown "normally" less than 300km from KSC. 

I'm pretty sure the small object in the distance above the capsule is the LES tower, still intact after destroying the rocket

Edited December 9, 2019 by Cavscout74

[Chakkoty]

I seem to have developed a very stressful immune response to rendezvous and docking. MechJeb helps. When MechJeb failed, i just sort of sat there amidst the floating parts of my (planned) orbitally assembled interplanetary vessel, cursing at MechJeb before realizing I put the Konstruction! welding port on THE WRONG WAY.

So I had to get everything into orbit again after saving the crew from the now useless habitation module - except my rescue vehicle had no room for them. I thought "okay, I can still salvage this!" and sent Jeb to EVA, attempting to manually transfer him to the rescue vehicle. Due to my non-existent EVA skills and knowledge of how to control Kerbals in space, he drifted off into space, smiling all the while so i wouldn't be sad.

I refused to let it end like that and Thanos-snapped the safe out of existence.

Another time, I had to #SafeBobKerman from another failed crew module. Val went to get him and they safely returned to Kerbin.

I really need to stop resetting the Kerbal universe.

[Fierce Wolf]

On 10/18/2019 at 4:25 AM, RizzoTheRat said:

£&$*ing Ike is a pain in the £&$*ing %^$&!

I have a KOs script that calculates a Duna intercept and then performs the burn to get the initial intercept.  It then goes on to a second section of code to bring the Ap down to the required altitude...Except it keeps getting an intercept with Ike and messing up the flipping calculations!

My current thinking is to try and sneak in underneath it by adjusting the velocity to get the horizontal component of the offset first, and then bring the intercept up to equatorial afterwards, still a risk of Ike involvement but hopefully not enough to thow out the calculations completely.  Otherwise I guess I'm going to have to circularise at about 4Mm and then time a further burn to bring the Pe down and then circularize based on where Ike is.

I don't remember having this much hassle when flying there manually.

 

[noname_hero]

When this topic caught my eye today, my brain wandered back to my first Mun landing. I guess it wasn't my most spectacular fail, but it is one that got stuck in my mind. And I'm a new-ish player, so it is still fresh in memory. The whole mission was as nerve-wracking as the first Mun landing of a newbie player with a lvl1 tracking station is, and the surface of the Mun was getting close, so I made (another) quicksave. Surprisingly, the landing was perfectly balanced, as all things should be. Another quicksave. And then...

The lander tipped over the moment I tried an EVA.

Quickload.

EVA, lander falls over.

Quickload.

Again. what?

To be honest, I'm not sure if took me two quickloads or more, but after a while, my brain finally began to *think* instead of quickloading. And I took a good look at my lander.

 

Yup, my landing *was* perfectly balanced. On *two* landing struts, not the four I thought the lander had.

Poor Jeb had to stay perfectly still in his seat while he said the words he planned to broadcast while planting a flag, took whatever measurements he could, wrote a scathing crew report, and blasted back into Munar orbit without opening his capsule's hatch.

 

 

[NotARobot]

On my first interplanetary mission, I tried to send a probe and relay satellite to Duna, both on the same rocket.

Upon arrival at Duna, I ditched the relay early since I put it in between two stages, and I had forgotten about transferring fuel between stages.

So the relay left Duna's sphere of influence to orbit Kerbol, even if the relay was in Duna's orbit it was too weak to communicate with Kerbin.

The probe however, got into a very elliptic Dunian orbit, but sadly lost connection due to the weak relay.

I called the mission a failure and went to focus on something else, I later saw that the probe got ejected from Duna, due to Ike.

I now give every relay probe its own rocket, and many dishes.

[putnamto]

Trying to land at a specific spot on kerbin for seismic tests. 

 

Flew the ship four times before I got close to the spot,  on the fourth attempt I remembered i was flying a retrofitted mun rover. (No chutes) 

On the fifth attempt (now with 10% more landing capability)  I touch down 10km away... On mountains,  I'm up for the task though.... A few cliffhangers,  two broken weels and a lot of time later I reach the destination to find that I don't have the equipment on the ship.... 

 

I stopped playing for the night after that. 

[LittleBitMore]

My worst failure was probably Minbase, a Career Minmus surface base with Breaking Ground robotics-powered docking ports and lander legs. it was my first Career surface base. Ever. So many things went wrong here.

Below is the long-ish story, spoiler-ed so nobody yells at me to use a spoiler.

Spoiler

I launched the original main module, with a crewed command module (holding 2 kerbals, room for 2 kerbals) and a ton of docking ports. All went well until landing. When I deployed the lander legs, everything seized up.

I had sufficient power, and the robotics worked well up until then (while descending or doing maneuvers, I often messed with the legs out of boredom), but the lander leg and docking port robotics suddenly had very erratic and weak movements, so weak that the landing legs couldn't hold up the 1.75m payload (back then, the largest Career payload I had).

So, there it lay, sideways, with all of its docking ports and landing legs splayed out to all sides, in one of the "dots" of Minmus (my most common landing target on Minmus would be the "dots": very, very small flats. I use them because they're easy to spot).

But no, the agony doesn't end there. I thought, "Wow, that was a bummer. But I can still make use of this and turn it into a base!" I realized I forgot electric generation and communications on the base module, so I sent an unmanned module with some solar panels and a comm dish. It had the same foolish and weird landing legs.

It too succumbed to the Kraken, landing legs and extendo-docking-ports flopping about. However, due to reaction wheel spam, I was able to roll it towards the other base module, until I realized it would literally take real life days at the current distance (this was one of my first surface rendezvous experiments), and I gave up on it.

Now I'd learned my lesson, and I sent a rescue mission for the poor 2 kerbals. The landing legs were not Breaking Ground robotics, so it landed safely. Both base inhabitants were about to get out and meet Jeb in the return capsule, but sadly the base was rolled onto its exit hatch and there was no battery charge left to roll it back over.

I EVA'd Jebediah and had him ram himself into the lander until the fuel tank exploded, throwing the command pod away and letting the kerbonauts escape. They got into the return lander and returned home without a hitch.

The second module, the unmanned one with solar panels and a dish, is still there to this very day, providing as a Minmus surface relay. It's great for that, since it has a big enough dish, and so I can send missions to Minmus with low comms range. However, it's also inside of a valley, so it has limited field of view.

And then there was Minbase 2. My first career orbital station not around Kerbin. Also no bueno.

Yet again, spoiler contains story.

Spoiler

This one is a bit shorter, since I don't remember it as well.

After the failure of Minbase, I decided to go for something easier: Minbase 2, an orbital station. It'd also get me that pesky "Rendezvous/dock two spacecraft around Minmus" contract and let me get a contract for Eve or Duna or something.

The first module was pretty big. Also my biggest career payload at that point in time, I think. it was a Rockomax hub thingy with a Hitchhiker on top of that and a Cupola on top of that. It had medium-range comms (enough to travel to Kerbin), docking ports on all 4 sides, and a few weak solar panels.

My next module to add were some solar panel struts. The struts had some big comms dishes as well. There was also a RCS tug, which lacked any antenna.

I decoupled the struts next to Minbase 2, and detached the bicoupler. I tried to redock the tug to one of the struts, but I forgot communications on the tug, so it kinda didn't do well.

That docking was horrifying.

Once I docked the tug to a strut, I tried to dock the strut and the tug to the station.

That failed, because I forgot to check the RCS thruster placement in relation to the CoM when the strut was on. And so it never sailed straight, and I eventually gave up.

I rescued the poor kerbal who was in the Cupola and recovered them safely. (They might have been one of the two who got stranded in Minbase. If so, they must be really done with Minmus.)

Moral of this story: don't use Breaking Ground robotics landing legs unless absolutely necessary, and remember to use logic to determine what to get antennas on and the RCS thruster placement before you send something to rendezvous.

(A close second was a huge asparagus-staged nuclear engine (yes, asparagus-staged nukes work amazing, you should try it) Jool mission I set up in Sandbox, except the patched conics messed up and didn't tell me I was on a collision course with Laythe while I was waiting for a good encounter to it. It didn't even tell me I was going to reach its SOI (it said I'd do that next orbit, and barely skim it at that).)