What's the most Kerbal thing you've done in real life?

[katateochi]

I jumped while running and fell on my face

Most of my really Kerbal moments involve quad bikes and follow in the time-honoured Kerbal tradition of turning rovers over;

(I've done this more times than I can remember)

not entirely dissimilar

Sorry for this potato, only pic I've got of me jumping one;

(partly why I'm obsessed with trying to make a KSP rover that can take the same punishment a quad can and why I think the rugged wheel in KSP isn't strong enough).

[Lord Aurelius]

Multistage bottle rockets on the 4th of July. Tape a few together and stagger the fuses so they ignite in sequence. I got a 5 stage one to work once, but 3 usually works better. Just make sure that the last rocket burns before the first one explodes or you get rockets flying off in random directions (although it's even more kerbal when that does happen).

[Geschosskopf]

I've rolled several "rovers", I've crashed 2 airplanes, I've caused many awesome explosions, I've performed fiendish experiments in the name of Science!, and I've bulit a lot of model rockets that crashed, burned, RUD'd, or otherwise failed .

[SpacedCowboy]

Me and a buddy launching bottle rockets off of the back slope of the garage to the main road watching cars trying to dodge them, laughing our a---- off!

[DBowman]

I improperly fitted snow chains and then ignored some banging sound from the rear end of the car. The gas tank 'developed' a leak and the car stalled out on a mountain in a snow storm. We had to rig a plastic tube from a jerry can held between the passengers knees to the carburettor fuel intake, then drive a few 100 km with the windows open so as not to puke from the gas fumes.

[Xannari Ferrows]

I remember once making an amateur rocket alongside a few friends with their own. I made it with multi-layered paper rolls, little aluminium winglets, a plastic base, a case filled with densely packed combustible minerals as the engine [put inside the base], a parachute made of rubber bands and a few layers of tape [folded over itself to it didn't stick], and a removable plastic nosecone [popped itself off when the internal pressure was great enough].

I was expecting it to fly a bit, but I didn't expect it to fly up as high as it did! We found it in another neighborhood...

[Red Dwarf]

I once had to bike to the opposite end of the next town over, which I did. I did it in searing summer heat, on my sister's bike. Her bike is the kind that doesn't have any breaks. Her bike is also a bike whose handlebars are not in any way attached to the rest of the bike. The nut disappeared somewhere, and the handles had a tendency to... fall off. It took me three hours, with cars blowing past me at 50 miles an hour (no shoulder, of course. This is Maine we're talking about). That's in the top 3 of Stupidest Things I've Ever Done

[hellion13]

Drove 950 miles with a busted water pump in a 96 dodge caravan. Everytime I lifted my foot off the gas all the water would spray out. Many water stops.

[Justicier]

I have another instance of Kerbal stupidity, one I was initially hesitant to reveal. But perhaps it will speak to some.

When I was in my late teens I had purchased an old battle rifle... in fact, the "last of the battle rifles" (FN Model 1949)... I was and still am a pretty avid collector and have been shooting since I was a wee lad of 5 years. Now, I was out in the woods, alone, doing a function test after a thorough stripping and cleaning of the weapon. I was getting constant malfunctions... several jams after only 20 shots. At this point I had a couple rounds left in the magazine and pulled the trigger. Click. Nothing... I wait couple minutes as it is not unheard of for a round that has had its primer struck to slowly "cook" and then fire off many seconds after the trigger has been pulled. After waiting, I try to cycle the round out. I can't move the bolt... it is locked in place. Now, a wiser person would have either taken the weapon to a gunsmith or a careful DIYer would have gotten a rubber mallet to gently tap the charging handle to ease the round out of the chamber. But I was young, annoyed at all the malfunctions, and had become increasingly impatient. So what did I do? Well naturally, I put the butt of the rifle on the ground, hunched over, put my boot on the charging handle and gave it pressure. Well... the powder ignited as I was applying pressure and sent that 8mm bullet flying at a velocity of no less than 800 m/s not more than 6 inches away from my head. It was most likely that at that very moment, the young and unwise part of my life ended. I realized how incredibly complacent I had become with regards to firearm safety, and got me to re-examine many aspects of my life that were... shall we say... self-destructive. Interesting how coming so close to death will do that to you

Edited June 19, 2015 by Justicier

[kreutzkevic]

I am a chemical plant inspector. I have a ton of photos (of the results) of engineering that might has well been performed by Kerbals.

[LordFjord]

http://sulifizika.elte.hu/Product%20-%20Photo%20-%20final/198/p198-n.jpg

Something like this. Mine wasn't that technologically advanced.

(It's a high-pressure CO2 cartridge for making sparkling water - in case you didn't live in the socialist Europe)

Hell yes, (and hello fellow hungarian) I built something like that with my dad. We span a ~50m line in the garden, built a small container for the cartridge and used some wheels from some old metal toyset to hang in on the line.

Then dad used a hammer and a nail to "start" the engine - the open end of those cartridges is only very weak metal and can be easily opened this way, then the CO2 under high pressure gives some nice thrust. The container could go up all the way to the end of the garden, which made this a great success.

Later, in my teen years we used small pipes/tubes and BBQ igniters to "fire up" these cartridges in an abandoned sand-mine. Place a target somewhat halfway up the sandstone cliff and try to hit it with CO2 cartridges.

The BBQ igniter starting method was not as advanced as the hammer+mail one, some of the cartridges burst open on the side, sometimes also crashing the tubes.

Fjord

[White Owl]

This may be the best thread I've ever seen around here!

In early childhood, conducted several unwise experiments with fireworks. Nothing too important caught on fire for too long. That was probably the beginning of my hearing damage, though.

In late childhood (known to some as early adulthood, but c'mon, you aren't fooling anybody) became fascinated with airplanes and devised a scheme to obtain a license to inspect and repair all sorts of flying machines. Immediately upon graduating from airplane mechanic school, got a job at a flight school. Spent two of the happiest years of my life (so far) turning wrenches on the very same airplanes I was learning to pilot. So as a very Kerbal way of life, I have to think that came pretty close to the ideal. I may not have been designing the flying machines, but I was living every day dedicated to the planes: learning to fly, troubleshooting what went wrong (mechanically or otherwise), devising repairs, and test flying those repairs myself.

A few times, an instructor and student pilot were landed out at East Nowhere Airport with some little widget malfunctioning on their plane, so no legally airworthy means of returning to the school. I got the instructor on the phone to describe the problem to me, and determined it was something easily repaired. So I packed up a toolbag, flew a plane to the stranded guys, gave them my plane to fly back, fixed the uncooperative widget, and finally flew their original plane back home. Felt like a hero. I loved that job.

Crashed while flying once, but not in an airplane. My budding skydiving career was cut short on my sixth jump, when I very badly botched a landing and broke my back. Not paralyzed, don't worry, just messed up. And I still absolutely freaking love skydiving and can't wait to get back into it! How Kerbal is that, huh?

[Sharpy]

Probably my Absinthe.

The first, relatively small batch came out great but ran out too fast. I decided to make a second batch, bigger than the first.

24 herbs, 3 liters of spirit (95% ethanol) bought from ukrainian smugglers, a 5-liter flask for homebrewing wine, a professional condenser (as used in chemistry)... A week of maceration of 20 of the herbs in spirit, and a time to distill it - leaving the bitter tannin in while separating spirit with all the volatile oils - after another three days of maceration of the remaining herbs, and filtering them off, the absinthe would be ready.

I set a large, wide pot on the stove, half-filled with water; put a plastic pad on the bottom to keep the flask separated, mounted the condenser, tap water in "open circuit" as a coolant for the condenser - duct-taped one pipe to the tap, ran the other to the sink. I turn the temperature up on the stove and wait for almost-absinthe to start dripping, as it did the first time over.

Well, half a hour in, and it still doesn't. A few pitiful drops. The pot is near boiling but the macerate in the flask is entirely inert. It should be boiling for a long time now.

I recall reading about overheating liquids in a chemistry book. I need a porous material to catalyze the boiling process.

I find an old porcelain bulb mount in my usual "drawer with everything". I smack it with a hammer, shattering it to shards. I pick a small handful of shards, uncork the flask and throw them in.

It worked all too well.

The overheated liquid was brought to intense boil immediately. At first, a fountain of spray springs up the bottle neck spraying hot spirits all around. Then as it reaches the stove, it catches flame. There's a two-meter tall column of fire, like from a rocket engine, flaming up towards the roof from the bottle neck, and all the spirit sprayed around (luckily not at me, I had stepped back as soon as the fountain began) is on fire.

The flaming column dies down. I rip the hose off the tap, open the tap for a strong flow, put a finger to it and direct the spray over the worst of flames, then using a towel I extinguish the rest - luckily spirit has very low burning temperature and isn't very persistent in burning, but still it leaked under and behind the microwave, there are still some flames on the hood above the stove, I bravely fight the fire.

Well, at least a liter out of the three was lost. I distilled the two remaining liters into fine absinthe, without further accidents - the shards worked like charm.

And only later realization struck: had I directed most of the water stream over the overheated flask, it would crack. Mixing the rest of the macerate with near-boiling water. Making it boil rapidly. Producing a huge fireball of spirit vapor.

[Whirligig Girl]

I tried gluing two bottle rockets together once. Only ignited one of them. And to make it better, I sent candy corns with faces drawn on it as well. Once I sent one with a larger payload structure with 20 candy cornonauts. It was a Space Station. It did a pitch program and went off to what looked like the horizon, so I can assume it successfully got into Earth Orbit. They're still there probably. Doing candy corn science and looking at the Moon with the small magnifying lens that was attached to the side.

[Mister Dilsby]

Lots of great stuff here! I have to share a second one, smaller in scope than the lawnmower incident but actually involving a rocket and a crewed vehicle.

My friends and I played with Estes model rockets as kids, and had several...incidents. The most Kerbal of them all has to be when I mounted two D-size motors under the seat of my bicycle and wired the ignition switch to the handlebars. I knew better than to expect I would get any sensible thrust out of the arrangement; this was all just for show. We rode our bikes down to a paved running/biking trail near the river and hid in the bushes at the top of a hill. We waited until we saw a runner come by and let him get about halfway down--then I emerged from cover, got going as fast as I could down the hill, hunched over the handlebars like I was Laurent Fignon coming down the Pyrrenees. A few meters before overtaking the runner I fired the rockets, screaming "HYPERSPAAAAACE!!!" Of course the motors burned out after less than a second, but not before I'd left the runner in a cloud of smoke and flame--and hopefully with the impression that I was going a lot faster than I really was. If only this had happened 20 years later, one of my friends could have taken a video.

[DuoDex]

Story time!

This was obviously when I was young and foolish, but I got this idea that you could build a hovercraft out of a leafblower. The plan was to take done plywood, bolt some heavy cloth onto it, and point a leafblower down. Surprisingly, it worked. We had to weight down the ends of the tarpaulin down do the air wouldn't escape, but we actually got a piece of plywood you could sit on floating in the air.

Obviously, this wasn't enough.

We bolted on a chair, then I got the bright idea that a fan would propel it in a direction of our choosing. We eventually found a gas operated, industrial fan, and stuck that on. A working hovercraft.

Next on the list was 'weaponry'. To operate : press badly wired button to fire water canon.

And that's probably the most Kerbal thing I've done in my 25 years.

[NecroBones]

If we're going to talk about model rocketry, yeah, I had some interesting times with those too. This was all back in the '80s: (yeah, I'm dating myself here)

* One time a friend and I were flying rockets, and he went to the pad to figure out why the rocket failed to ignite. After he got there, we realized that we forgot to take the safety key out of the controller, and the launch button was stuck pressed in. I yelled over to him while trying to pull the key, and just then the rocket launched with his hand under it. It left a nice patch of residue on his hand, but he wasn't burned.

* Most of the rockets I built would eventually fly away, never to be seen again. However, the first rocket I ever built is still in my possession, a little worse for wear. The lasting damage was caused by a flight in which the streamers never deployed, so the rocket came down like a dart, and embedded itself in the ground, only a few feet away from us. The nose-cone was mashed sideways, which crumpled the end of the body tube a little on one side. I trimmed off the damaged part and made it a little shorter, and it's still flight-worthy (though long-since retired).

* That same rocket had a great landing once as well. It came down, and landed vertically on its tail, right next to the pad, with the streamer laying across the pad's leg... after a flight of probably 2,000+ feet (600m+) in altitude. It remained standing, close enough to the pad to be touching it, which was something I could never quite repeat.

Edited June 19, 2015 by NecroBones

[Venusgate]

Used to empty out a few Piccolo Petes into a square of aluminum foil, light a fuse to it, and create mini mushroom clouds....

[Palehorse-LOA-]

Not something I did but I kinda share the blame.

Way back in the day, a lot of my friends were very much into muscle cars, Pontiacs in particular. When "Johnny" drove up in his newly-aquired '69 Firebird, we all gathered around, popped the hood, and enjoyed checking out the new toy. During our discussion, the topic of how 4-barrel carburetors worked came up and we explained to him how two of the barrels were open all the time, the other two opening up when demand on the engine via the gas pedal reached a certain point and more POWAR was needed.

About a week later, he was driving his old Toyota again. If we'd seen the gears turning in his head, we certainly would have warned him against doing what he did but it was far too late....Johnny Kerman bent a few things up on that carburetor such that all four barrels were open all the time. The car ran wicked-nasty fast for a day or two, then....nothing.

[Whirligig Girl]

If we're going to talk about model rocketry, yeah, I had some interesting times with those too. This was all back in the '80s: (yeah, I'm dating myself here)

* One time a friend and I were flying rockets, and he went to the pad to figure out why the rocket failed to ignite. After he got there, we realized that we forgot to take the safety key out of the controller, and the launch button was stuck pressed in. I yelled over to him while trying to pull the key, and just then the rocket launched with his hand under it. It left a nice patch of residue on his hand, but he wasn't burned.

* Most of the rockets I built would eventually fly away, never to be seen again. However, the first rocket I ever built is still in my possession, a little worse for wear. The lasting damage was caused by a flight in which the streamers never deployed, so the rocket came down like a dart, and embedded itself in the ground, only a few feet away from us. The nose-cone was mashed sideways, which crumpled the end of the body tube a little on one side. I trimmed off the damaged part and made it a little shorter, and it's still flight-worthy (though long-since retired).

* That same rocket had a great landing once as well. It came down, and landed vertically on its tail, right next to the pad, with the streamer laying across the pad's leg... after a flight of probably 2,000+ feet (600m+) in altitude. It remained standing, close enough to the pad to be touching it, which was something I could never quite repeat.

One time I had a scrathcmade rocket. Silver. It was big but had an A-type Estes motor. It launched up less than a hundred feet, and started down crashing within two or so feet of my dad's car.

I also once made a scratchbuilt rocket called The Obelisk. it was orange, and more suggestive than your usual rocket on account of its plastic-easter-egg nosecone. We couldn't launch it on the rail because the straw was too small for it. Instead, the rocket was resting on the launch pad until ignition, wherein it immediately pitched over, flew almost perfectly horizontal for almost a hundred feet, then crashed into the ground, shattering the nosecone.

Once me and a young kid I was tutoring (he was homeschooled) were building already designed build-to-fly model rockets. We didn't have the right stuff (ha!) so we just used duct tape. My dad assured us that they wouldn't work, and although mine pitched over and nearly flew into me, for the sake of experiment I told the other kid to twist the winglets of the rocket so that it would roll. His flew much higher and straighter than mine.

I've also had several good rocket flights of pre-made equipment. It was earlier this year, in fact, that this story happened:

I has two rockets and four motors to fire. Two were A-class motors and two were C-class motors. The smaller rocket was a ready-to-fly model that I got for christmas, the other was a big kit that i assembled, painted black, and gave it my Gregrox Space Enterprises logo and striping, and return information.

The first flight was the Ready-To-Fly one. There was a sports game going on in the field next to the parking lot I was launching from. The rocket went up, and I heard some girls in the parking lot exclaim "What the hell is that?" and "If that lands on my car I swear..." I ran over to chase the rocket and bring it back. When I came back I saw that there was a little kid who had taken some interest in what was happening. I brought the rocket back and fired it again, this time showing the kid what I was doing. When he had to leave I advertised Kerbal Space program to him and got to work with the large black Gregrox Space Enterprises rocket. This one was using a C-type motor, very powerful. It went very high, earning me a few oohs and ahhs from the sports viewing people. It glided in the wind as it came down on the parachute. It landed somewhere on the campus of a nearby Middle School. It was time for Incognito Rocketry Recovery Mission! Just in case there was any school staff there that might think I was doing something bad. My Dad drove me over to the school parking lot, where I explored for a few minutes around where I thought the rocket came down, desperately hoping it wasn't caught on the roof. I saw in the corner of my eye the parachute, and just as a gust of wind (it had become much more windy since I hit the launch key) nearly tossed it away I ran and caught it. I brought it back to the ship truck, the parachute tossing in the wind and dragging behind me, and we left, succeeding in our mission.

[SemiaCloud]

My entire PhD thesis has secretely been my impression of what a Kerbal would do if he decided to be a biologist instead of an engineer.

Sure.

[Randazzo]

Aw man, nostalgia feels!

It was only a few years ago I finally had to toss out my old Estes "Launchpad". The rest of the platform was long since gone, but I kept that charred disc for ages.

Since this landed on page two I suppose I should kerbalstory up:

My first model rocket ever (early 90's) was an Estes of course. My Dad, on the idea that giving me rocket powered projectiles would somehow keep me both busy and out of trouble, gave me a kit the day after school let out. I spent a week or so trying to assemble the thing correctly, and when he finally thought it looked good enough, we went to buy an engine for it. Naturally I wanted the biggest one possible and I was slightly disappointed to find out the model had been dummy-proofed in the engine department. So, we got the puny engines it was made for and it was off to the park.

It was really a short and anti-climactic affair, but it was still pretty awesome. I'll never forget that "PSSSSHOOOOOO.......pop". Unfortunately the parachute charge blew the nosecone and parachute clean off (undoubtedly the fault of the assembling engineer) and the rocket body came crashing back down never to be used again. The nosecone took FOREVER to fall, the wind kept blowing it back up and all around.

Very Kerbal indeed.

Edited June 19, 2015 by Randazzo

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

Well, I don't have anything related to Crewed Vehicles/Rockets/Both, but one time I expanded the capacity of a squirt gun. I used plastic tubing, inner tubes, and a bit of drip pipe to connect a big water bottle to this squirt gun, it was kind of a new squirt gun, so it had the pump handle arrangement. It is pretty small, but it shot out a reasonable amount of water, unfortunately it's water tank was absurdly small, only like 6 shots, so I attached this bottle and got more like 50 shots, very fun.

[hellblazer]

Aerobreaking (coasting) in my truck because I refuse to the use the breaks until the last few seconds. My gf thinks I'm nuts. I think its efficient.

[Michael R]

Drove a truck for about a month in Africa that had no starter motor. The starter was on order, but I needed the truck. The key is to park on a good long slope.

Oxy Acetylene as a fuel combo in a PVC potato gun is overkill. The potato traveled less than a quarter of the way down the barrel. The majority of the energy went into disassembling the combustion chamber into centimeter sized chunks and delivering them over a wide area. We were behind a wall and didn't know what happened, until we heard the sound of rain.

Go back to using hair spray? No way. A 1/2 inch thick steel combustion chamber, and 8 foot long steel barrel, and the pressure is held and directed nicely. And a golf ball flies. . . well, we don't know. Somewhere over the neighboring farm they get too small to see.

Also, I'm pretty proud of a very simple fix I just made on my lawn mower, splinting two breaks in the handle with sections of curtain rod and duct tape. You would have to see it.