So I built a rocket, command module stage include decoupler, Advanced SAS, RCS fuel tank (4 symmetry RCS thrusters) 2 liquid fuel tanks, a half liquid fuel tank and the vectored liquid engine. second stage was 8 liquid fuel stacks with 4 tanks each and the nonvectored liquid engines as well as 8 solid rocket boosters and winglets (the pivoting ones), I made sure to use struts to hold the liquid tanks together. After a shaky liftoff I get into a comfortable 100km orbit around Kerbin with about 1/4 fuel in the last set of second stage tanks which i use to get a boost towards the Mun. I end up using the half tank of my command stage to get into Munar orbit because I just about missed it completely. I still had 2 full tanks of fuel so I orbit Mun a couple times before making a return attempt, the first attempt I burned too soon and it would have sent the capsule way off from Kerbin so I retroburn to fix my orbit around Mun and wait for another opportunity. Next time around I burned later and it looked like I might make it to Kerbin so I speed time up and wait. Once I got far enough away from Mun, my orbit shifted to around Kerbin....with a Periapsis of 9.8 million meters and a Apoapsis of 22.9 million meters.... Alright, at this point I still got a little over 1 and a half tanks of fuel left, so I figure I\'ll do a spiraling orbit by retroburning at each Periapsis to shrink the Apoapsis. my Kerbonauts have already been in space for about 1 day MET and it takes about a day and a half MET to shrink my orbit around Kerbin. I get my Apoapsis to 150k and my periapsis to 100k when ::dun dun dunnnnnnnn:: my liquid fuel runs out, Ok no biggie, I still have a little over half a tank of RCS fuel, I can use that to shrink the orbit some more... so I retroburn on that until it runs out, and I get a periapsis of just under 57k, now the waiting game began. When I reached the Periapsis I was a little sad when my parachute didn\'t deploy and my capsule started gaining altitude again, however that was cancelled out when I noticed that my Apoapsis had shrunk from 150K to about 138K so I figured I might as well see what happens, sure enough as my capsule approached the Periapsis again, not only did it the Apoapsis shrink another 20K, but the Periapsis shrank by about 1k, each subsequent orbit continued to decay until finally after 4 days and 7 hours in space, the parachute finally deployed and my Kerbonauts splashed down safely. Anyone else got any similar experiences of barely making it home after a mission?
