Just venting

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The worst part of KSP is when you combine your own stupidity with game breaking bugs... and that's exactly what happened here.

You know how it goes in career, you plan your mission, piling contracts while you wait for the transfer window, Oh man this is gonna be great, all these contracts I'm gonna do in one mission to Duna... I need to get down there with a guy, then go put 2 satellites in orbit around Ike, and do 6 temperature scans and one gravity scan contracts... Everything's in place, I'll do this and then that and then... Feel like a boss.

Well, the day comes and I leave Kerbin... Only to arrive at Duna SOI and discover my separator won't separate. It just stays there attached to my engine...

Also, staging the separator for some reason activates my fairings, TWO STAGES ABOVE. I need the fairings to protect stuff when aerobraking... Dunno why, I moved the fairings to stage 0 and somehow the space bar finds a way to magically get to activate the fairings but nothing else in the middle. Sorcery I tell you!

I finally get the separator to work after many reloads and retries (with right mouse menu of course, not space bar).

Once in Duna atmosphere, I'm aerobraking like a champ thanks to Kobymaru's Trajectories mod... only to discover that my vessel wants to go retrograde, exposing the engine instead of the bullet like tip made by the fairings... It tumbles out of control but fortunately Duna's atmosphere is not that thick and the engine and pretty much anything survives.

Get to the Ap and drop the lander, rise my Pe above atmosphere so it will stay in orbit and go land with the lander.

Wait, who's piloting the freaking thing? Jeb! Noooooo! Again... Rosco my man, I thought you would have learned by now... Jeb can't repack parachutes, I need them to land on Kerbin... Well, I'll have to leave the capsule in LKO and send an engineer to repack them before landing. Again.

Landing goes well, I underestimated the amount of chutes I needed, but the engine made up for it. Even the Kraken inducing bays work and all! Also, amaizingly Jeb hitting the landing legs seems to be enough to tip the lander... Watch out there my fried. You hit F5, right?

Ok, I'll leave Jeb for now and will go deploy some satellites!

I get to Ike only to discover that my two satellites are NOT connected with separators... I just forgot about them when I imported them as sub assemblies and mounted them directly with their engines. I can't deploy them, I'm screwed.

Fine! Go * yourself! I'll just go back to Duna orbit and take off with Jeb, rendezvous and go back to Kerbin. Lost a couple 100k here but what you're gonna do.

Stage the freaking satellite assembly altogether and let's go. No no, wait, wait... No... I forgot to add a probe core to the rest of the ship! Now my return stage has become an orange high tech asteroid.

Daaaarrrrnnnnnn... Well, good thing I have like a gazillion backups so I'll just revert to a time before I have even put the ship in Kerbin orbit and I'll start over.

BTW, this is what I love about KSP, if I managed to do everything I did wrog, right, I'd have felt like the king of space and everything in it... Next time... Next time.

[Mikki]

... Daaaarrrrnnnnnn... Well, good thing I have like a gazillion backups so I'll just revert to a time before I have even put the ship in Kerbin orbit and I'll start over...

Hi

I really feel with you man, i really do.

Without masterbackuping every bigger journey i would have probably give up my career (2. start... still...), and i had a lot of situations where could have bite off my right hand due to incredible stupidity from me or.. the game mechanics side.

Take it easy. Unless your Kerbal crew is somewhere around unharmed... what gives? Head up

[Starwhip]

Murphy's Law would like to have a word with you.

KSP in a nutshell.

[Hotaru]

I know exactly what you mean. If I'm honest I'd say I've had to revert more due to my own stupidity than due to glitches, and it's almost always something decoupler-related. Can't even remember how many times I've stacked decouplers and Procedural Fairings bases in the wrong order. Just the other day I had to revert a launch because I had the wrong size docking port. Unfortunately I wasn't using stock ports--which are easily distinguishable--but Tantares APAS ones--which all look kind of the same and are thus easily confused. Hence, reverts.

One of these days I'll do a no-reverts career save, maybe that'll teach me to use checklists.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Well, my previous mission to Duna required a rescue because of the wrong size docking port problem... Maybe I would be better off avoiding Duna altogether. That place is haunted for me.

[Volix]

Nothing to the level you just described in the OP, but Duna has been cursed for me as well. First probe lander didn't have enough solar panels to maintain my remote tech link, so I got science until the battery drained. I also learned atmospheric scattering reduces solar panel efficiency in 1.0. Second lander I had in orbit, but noticed I didn't have landing legs.... No problem, I think, as long as the solar panels are retracted it can fall over. I decouple and switch back to the parent craft to boost its PE up (it's meant to return to Kerbin). Forgot the probe core on that side....

[problemecium]

Indeed. Sometimes "F5 for safety" still doesn't cut it and you need backup quicksaves xD

[TimePeriod]

Tough luck.

Soldier on.

[sal_vager]

Modkey+F5, helps a lot, and modkey+F9 to load

[Endersmens]

Modkey+F5, helps a lot, and modkey+F9 to load

I swear I read "monkey+F5"

[SkyRender]

This story pretty much exemplifies why you should always always always test your craft's functionality before you do a mission with it.

[serolrom]

You know what?

I'm still struggling and wishing to have that kind of problems... Once I manage to get near Duna.

[mikegarrison]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Probing_difficulties

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

This story pretty much exemplifies why you should always always always test your craft's functionality before you do a mission with it.

I can't. It breaks immersion for me. I can play test some things, but not too much or I feel like I'm not really launching stuff into space but playing a game about launching stuff into space, I you know what I mean.

That's why I always said I would pay for a mod that gave us a sort of "simulation computer" the Kerbals would have. Where you upload a model of your craft and put it into different situations in what looks like a gray sphere with whatever parameters you like but it doesn't *look* like the body you are going to visit. We could integrate this into career with different levels of accuracy or things you can do. And it cost a little money to run it too... One can dream.

Also, many of the things here could have been prevented just paying more attention. Who's the Kerbal in the seat? Do the satellites have a decoupler? Legs? Ladders? That sort of thing. After a number of failed launches and game restarts you loose some of that to the "let's just launch the thing" feeling.

- - - Updated - - -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Probing_difficulties

Galactic Ghoul! Even in real life they have a Kraken!

[luizopiloto]

That's why I test and review the entire project before sending it up... Nothing goes up before certifying everything, stages and struts, is in place...

And I didn't test everything in space... 90% of the things I do I test close to KSC...

[HafCoJoe]

One stupid thing you can do to avert some problems is using Whack-a-Kerbal to break off/separate bugged things... I may or may not have used that before...

This story pretty much exemplifies why you should always always always test your craft's functionality before you do a mission with it.

But where's the fun in that?!?

Edited June 8, 2015 by Avera9eJoe

[Snark]

I can't. It breaks immersion for me. I can play test some things, but not too much or I feel like I'm not really launching stuff into space but playing a game about launching stuff into space, I you know what I mean.

Yep, totally get that. I hear there are actually folks who play with quicksave disabled. Thank heavens I'm not one of them, I'd go nuts. For me it's about striking a balance between immersion (and the hilarity of some failure types) with frustration (if I've sunk many hours of preparation and end up with something that totally hoses the mission).

My most gleeful KSP moments come when I realize that I've screwed up my ship in some way, but I'm already at Duna or wherever, and manage to Apollo-13 it by figuring out some ingenious-but-crazy way to work around the problem. ("Oh damn, not enough chutes... okay, I'll use my engines. But then not enough fuel to get home, but wait, what if I transfer fuel out of just one of my radial tanks and jettison it, and then fly lopsided at low thrust...")

Also, many of the things here could have been prevented just paying more attention. Who's the Kerbal in the seat? Do the satellites have a decoupler? Legs? Ladders? That sort of thing. After a number of failed launches and game restarts you loose some of that to the "let's just launch the thing" feeling.

...Galactic Ghoul! Even in real life they have a Kraken!

Yeah, it really is amazing just how many things can go wrong, both in KSP and in real life. (The engineer's report they added to the VAB/SPH is a nice 1.0 touch. I hate it when I launch and then later realize I forgot to put RCS thrusters on the damn thing.)

Some of my personal favorite (yes, really sad, but they're so insane you just have to laugh while you're crying) examples of real-life space program screwups, in no particular order:

- When the Hubble telescope main mirror was carefully engineered to nanometer precision in an astounding feat of engineering persistence and ingenuity... and they only discovered after launch that they'd accidentally used the wrong equation for the shape and it was off by something like a millimeter.

- Failure of the Genesis spacecraft, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_%28spacecraft%29. Brilliant successful mission, everything went off great, then when it was landing on Earth, the explosive bolts to release the parachute never fired, and it slammed into the ground and the precious sample container broke open. The reason turned out to be that an acceleration sensor was installed upside-down. Simple guy-with-a-screwdriver problem.

- Failure of Mars Climate Orbiter, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter. Two different organizations needed to talk to each other to specify the size of a course correction burn. One assumed metric units, the other didn't. Oops.

- A failed test on the space shuttle in 1985, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/20/us/laser-test-fails-to-strike-mirror-in-space-shuttle.html. Shuttle computers supposed to automatically orient the shuttle by pointing it at the correct location on the surface of the earth, but somebody mixed up "feet" with "nautical miles" for altitude. Result: the spacecraft spins around and points at the sky instead of the ground.

...And the thing is, none of the people involved in all of these problems were idiots. It's just that spacecraft are such insanely complicated things, that have to do such amazingly difficult tasks to such ridiculously tight precision, that it's a true testament to human persistence, ingenuity, and sheer bloody-mindedness that any of the damn things work at all. I think KSP does a pretty good job walking that line-- making it hard enough to give you a taste of "oh, there's a lot of stuff that you have to get right" to get a feel for why space travel is hard, without making it so hard that you just weep in frustration.

Most of the time.

And I bet there's a lot of guys at JPL and NASA that really wish they had an F5 button...

[SkyRender]

I can't. It breaks immersion for me. I can play test some things, but not too much or I feel like I'm not really launching stuff into space but playing a game about launching stuff into space, I you know what I mean.

Sure, and that's fine. Testing doesn't have to be so extensive as "simulated launch before the real thing". Just doing a basic staging check before going to the launchpad, combined with a sanity check on all components before launch, should suffice. I personally also test landers and rovers for functionality on the launchpad before finalizing their design too, because really, that's not something you want to discover has a basic design flaw when you're half a year away from Kerbin and without the means to fix the issue.

[jwenting]

if the game not compensating for your stupidity is a bug, KSP is indeed bugged.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The mission had the following important points:

1) Me forgetting decouplers for the sats.

2) Me forgetting the probe core on the return stage.

3) The game not letting my separator go.

4) The game activating fairings 3 stages ahead of the current.

5) The game having a separator that won't do it's job at keeping the above stage solid in its place (which motivated a lot of redesign, which in turn increases the change of mistakes in other areas of your design).

6) The game having a SAS that doesn't really stabilize, making 5) even worse.

7) Not the right pilot. I'm willing to take the flame on this... but not sure if the game didn't assign another pilot again.

All in all, Rosco 3 - KSP 4. I win.

Also, when I arrived to Duna my rocket was red hot after weeks in space as if I just shut down the engines. But I'll let that pass because I'm not sure how it would work in real life and because it didn't cause any troubles.

(I'll also ignore the multitude of things I had to guesstimate or look elsewhere because the game wouldn't give me that info, but there are so many it should be included in a 3-5 really).

[xtoro]

I've directly attached things to engines without decouplers more than once. My solution was to sacrifice the attached part by firing up the engine full throttle till the attached part overheats and explodes. Sucks because I lose a part and waste fuel, but I try really hard to not quickload if I can get away with it.

[GeneCash]

I can't. It breaks immersion for me. I can play test some things, but not too much or I feel like I'm not really launching stuff into space but playing a game about launching stuff into space, I you know what I mean.

That's why I always said I would pay for a mod that gave us a sort of "simulation computer" the Kerbals would have. Where you upload a model of your craft and put it into different situations in what looks like a gray sphere with whatever parameters you like but it doesn't *look* like the body you are going to visit. We could integrate this into career with different levels of accuracy or things you can do. And it cost a little money to run it too... One can dream.

Nah, for me, copying the craft file to a different save and using Hyperedit *is* my "simulation computer" as far as I'm concerned.

You should have seen the couple hundred times I tried out little tweaks to an Eve ascent vehicle before I got one that'd make it into orbit, and the associated couple hundred times Jeb "died" fiery re-entry deaths or massive "part a smashed part b at staging" deaths.

Basically I *suck* at building rockets, so there's no way I'd ever toss an untested design at a Duna first flight. I'd might as well take those funds and hold them right in the engine exhaust. I've only recently figured out (with the help of a forum post on center of mass/drag) why my rockets flip all the time.

[Defenestrator47]

1st post here.

Build 6-seater spaceplane, vertical booster launched. Test it without booster. Unstable, pitches uncontrollably upwards and crashes.

Tweak. Crash. Repeat a few times.

Throw away everything behind the cockpit, rebuild from scratch, a lower-part count design.

Crash. Tweak. HOHO it works! I can steer! I can land!

Build launch booster. Test. It works! Land.

Fill passenger cabin and copilot seat with 6 of my current 7 kerbonauts, to get them some sweet orbital XP cheap, have them do spacewalks, etc.

Get to orbit, do the things.

Re-enter, lined up on runway. Overshoot, but survive atmobraking. Turn 180. Some parts still hot.

Game crashes.

Learn about heating memory overflow.

Relaunch game, discover that I have lost all six crew, apparently when the game crashed, the craft was destroyed.

Eyeball the one scientist with no experience I have left.

Kinda broke my heart. Haven't deleted the career. Debating fighting my way back. Haven't decided yet.

Still love the game as a whole. Looking forward to a fix for the heating memory leak.

Edit: A happy resolution! Turns out I had quicksaved during a prior mission. Since this loss of crew was to a bug, and not actual gameplay, I continued from the quicksave with heat gauges off and all my kerbals are back.

Edited July 7, 2015 by Defenestrator47

[tossha]

Ok, here's my story.

I've sent an Apollo-style mission to Duna, and I even haven't forgot any decouplers or probe cores. Landing went well, I did the science and started the ascent to meet with the interplanetary stage in orbit. But as it turned out I did some calculation wrong and I was lacking about 500m/s of delta v to catch up with the ship. At that point I didn't have enough fuel to land back so went it ran out I quickly went EVA, grabbed all the experiments with me and started to use my own jetpack. Then there was a very intense journey to the ship with lots of going back and forth between the main view and the map view and I barely made it with literally 0.05 fuel left out of 5 I had.

And then I realized that I can either go home right now or wait another 1.5 years. The problem was that I didn't have enough delta v for the first option, so I had to use the jetpack again. And I've decided to go for it, just for the fun of it. Kerbal way, right? So now I have a kerbal doing an interplanetary flight in a spacesuit with about 0.10 fuel left and I will have to slow him down about 3km/s to get him into orbit. I've managed to reduce that number a little by using moon gravity assist.

So now I'm working on a ship that will orbit Kerbin somewhere around Minmus and have about 7km/s to catch up with the kerbal, let him in and then slow down. Wish me luck ^^

[magnemoe]

This reminds me of my first Eve mission where everything went wrong. Plan was to drop one rover on Eve, leave an satellite in orbit before going to Gilly with another rover. I had three rovers so one spare in case one hit water.

This was back in 0.18 with an mod rover so it worked on Gilly.

Two of the rovers was facing backward, plan was to release it do the deorbit burn and drop the stage an land with parachute.

Drop rover one, found that the decopler was mounted the wrong way and the weak engine was unable to destroy it. Got the idea that I could do the deorbit burn with the probe carrier and then release the rover, it worked but rover splashed down.

Of to Gilly, This left the probe carrier out of fuel so i used the last part to put it on an impact trajectory. Figured the skycrane would have enough fuel to get into orbit an land. Press space to release the lander, press space again by accident to separate rover and skycrane watch all three parts impacting the smallest body in the system