This is a tale of failure from the start. It started as a two way trip to the mun to test a new Interstellar Tug ship design ended up with three Kerbals (Barsel, Melwig and Ronner) stuck in LKO. The reason they were stuck was due to a design the plagues many of my ships, re-entry. It not to say that I cant make ships re-entry capable its just i forget to(Employee of the Month?). Because of this flaw in may of my ships I have one rocket dedicated to retrieving and de-orbiting those ships to keep the sky clear. So I launched this drone to save the stranded Kerbals, and everything started out like every other launch. I notice my drone pulling to the left a bit ~6000m not a problem only slight. While waiting for my burn point I notice the Solar Eclipse and though hey what a way to start a mission. I should have taken it as a bad omen in this case I guess. So i get me orbit to be pretty match with the stranded ship when i notice something, I have a drone controlled ship with no solar panels. Anyone who does docking understands you want to get as close as possible to the target before you actually get there, but i had to get close as possible wait until my battery is really low then do a short burn to recharge and reline up. After getting to the ship and matching the speeds, I had about 22 units of liquid fuel left and 50 units of mono propellant. After a painstaking race against a decaying battery I finally docked the two together and was able to recharge my batteries. Here is the ships docked sorry for the angle I wasnt expecting to document the mission, I just liked the mun and sun in the background like that. Now I turn retro-phase and start my burn but if you remember I only have 22 units of fuel left. Answer, I RCS my way back to Kerbin. I manage to drop my periapsis to around 40K and let the atmosphere do the rest. The drone I use for these missions has a capsule designed to just break away from the rest of the ship in order to land safely and destroy the unneeded debris but I enjoy watching the re-entry affects first so I left it in one piece until it was done. I decided to see what would happen in 4x speed and it turns out my ship is quite flexible. Note the ship is not broken just bending. Anyways I finally break off and go in for a landing with my parachutes. Normally I 4x speed to about 500m then let it run in real time to the ground to protect it from a Kraken attack. But that day I looked away for just a second and looked back just in time to watch in horror as Barsel, Melwig, and Ronner smash into the surface of Kerbin. Now I should mention that I have been at war with the Physics Kraken and it likes to attack me in odd ways. This one takes the cake, why seems like user error right? Well 120k above Kerbin was a brand new ship that was just assembled and waiting for the launch window in it was Sigfrod, Jonble, Obblad, and Jebree, I believe him to be Jeb's next of kin. At the moment of impact three things happened. The ship that crashed was destroyed, but Barsel, Melwig, and Ronner were teleported to the Complex unharmed All LKO ships were destroyed and with them Sigfrod, Jonble, Obbald, and Jebree and 3. this Ironically it was the parachute that was sent into deep space. Well that pretty much sums it up. For anyone who thinks they know how it happened I have realistic parachutes and F.A.R. installed. Also this is my introduction to the forums.
