I've had only a few fails in my KSP career, but boy were they epic. My KSP career is odd in that I've never landed(sucessfully) on anything other than Kerban, or even gotten a paticularly circular orbit, but not because it is too difficult, but too easy. I took a look at circular orbits, the Mun, Minimus, and the near-Kerbin planets (Duna, Eve, and so on), and though "bah, too easy. I promised myself the first planet I would land on would be amoung the hardest, and that I wouldn't cheat my way there, via (potentally unfair)mods or otherwise. I've been fairly successfull in achieving this via determination, and the eternal mottos of "needs more struts" and "MOAR (BOOSTERS)". My first attempt was Moho, at least I think thats the name, the Mercury-equivelent. Nothing too special, I got a simple, small ion propelled probe into such a eliptical orbit that it intercepted nearly perpandicular to Moho's orbit and waited a few hundred orbits(over 2~) rl days for a near-intercept, then adjusted to directly intercept Moho. As I approached Moho at 14 km/s, I realized something. I knew Moho was a Mercury-equivelent, but I failed to realize(or remember) that Mercury lacked a atmosphere. And I certainly didn't see the haze of one on Moho. Seeing as I was planning to aerobrake and then parachute to land, this was a bit of a issue. And I realized this all about 5 seconds from landing. My next attempt was more substantial, and I switched targets to the slower Eeloo, aka Pluto equivelent. This time, I built a monstrous craft(400~ parts), dubbed Plutos, that was still unmanned and still used ion engines. This time though, it had eight of them. And carried 150k units of xenon gas, as well as a small detatchble ion-propelled probe. Needless to say, its Delta-V was more than sufficient. After nearly a week of constant thrusting, I successfully reached and orbited Eeloo. -reached a letter limit, sorry, will continue in another post-