Stupid things you noticed too late in a Mission

[Redbeard88]

So...

I just landed on Duna for the first time, go me! Thought I would take a rover to max out the amount of science for my career mode save. After many failed attempts and 3 hours playing KSP tonight, I finally get myself into an orbit around Duna, "yes, finally I've done it" I tell myself.

I realised my first mistake as I land on the planet, I had attached my solar panels to the decoupler, so when I ditched the engine, I lost my power source! I was gutted that I couldn't take advantage of all the science jr and fluid Specto tests I bought along. Ah well, I'm still on Duna, so all is not lost.

I open up the service bay and get ready to unleash my unmanned rover only to find i have blocked it in with a slightly overhanging puff mono propellant engine!

I dunno whether to laugh or be mad right now! Feel like I've wasted my night but laughed so hard when I realised my flawed rocket design

[NJP]

Someone's probably said it before, but during career mode I had sent two probes to scan the Kerbal satellites for ore, I set up the alarms and went back to design and launch a orbital station, do sciencey stuff, etc etc etc, until I finally got back to the Mun probe and realized for both probes I forgot to deploy the solar panels and both craft were dead $100k+ chunks of debris, and I couldn't do anything but terminate them and grab a few other contracts before I could launch anything else. Huge setback in my game.

[ygarl]

Made a nifty under-slung Mun probe, under-slung beneath a manned lander on a 3m fuel tank with a Jr. docking port - shut off the probe brain, so the rocket didn't fly sideways (LESSONS LEARNED!).

Landed on the Mun - all was well. Dropped the probe all of half a metre...

Forgot to turn on the probe core, so dropped a totally dead probe with no way to control it or turn it on, and too far below the main craft to re-dock it....

REVERT!

[Moh1336]

Tourist Mission: Forgot tourists

I did that yesterday. Fortunately I realised while still on the launch pad.

[Sampa]

forgot to install a couple of large batteries on a space station core stage, causing it to constantly lose power.

[Geschosskopf]

Made a nifty under-slung Mun probe, under-slung beneath a manned lander on a 3m fuel tank with a Jr. docking port - shut off the probe brain, so the rocket didn't fly sideways (LESSONS LEARNED!).

Best lesson: Instead of deactivating the probe core, just do "control from here" on the part you actually want to do the steering.

[Violent Jeb]

errrg. Last night I sent a 14t lander with an "orbital refuel cell", so I could accomplish 3 landings on the mun with munar orbit refuels.

I've been working on the design for a day or so. Finally succeeded at making the craft controllable, so we head out for the mun mission

To further demonstrate my k-peen, I successfully navigated a direct insertion (without getting into orbit). I got all the way to mun orbit before I realized that the lander doesn't have a docking port so I can't refuel, wasting the fuel cell and ending the mission. D'OH !

Revert to the VAB!

[linuxgurugamer]

I did that yesterday. Fortunately I realised while still on the launch pad.

Doesn't count, you didn't launch :-)

[Wemb]

Last week - getting a useful class C asteroid near Kerbal and managing to capture it and slow it down to a sufficiently good, near circular co-planar orbit to arrange a hoffman transfer to Minmus where the contractors wanted it delivered. Then realising I was orbiting clockwise..

[maceemiller]

I recently sent Jeb to Duna on a supposedly return mission.....landed with no delta V left, so decided to send a rescue party.....all went well until I realised my rescue ship had room for only 1 Kerbal in the pod.....

Sent another rescue mission.....this time with a 2 capacity pod.....only to get into Duna's SOI befire I realised id took 2 Kerbanaughts with it.....again, no room to rescue Jeb....

As I stand at the moment, I have 3 Kerbals stranded on Duna. Jeb is located 67.3km away from Bill and Bob. Val is NOT happy with me as she will have to go pick up the pieces and rescue them all, unless she becomes the latest member of the Duna debacle!

I have a wife in real life.....maybe she'd like to go to Duna?

[linuxgurugamer]

I recently sent Jeb to Duna on a supposedly return mission.....landed with no delta V left, so decided to send a rescue party.....all went well until I realised my rescue ship had room for only 1 Kerbal in the pod.....

Sent another rescue mission.....this time with a 2 capacity pod.....only to get into Duna's SOI befire I realised id took 2 Kerbanaughts with it.....again, no room to rescue Jeb....

As I stand at the moment, I have 3 Kerbals stranded on Duna. Jeb is located 67.3km away from Bill and Bob. Val is NOT happy with me as she will have to go pick up the pieces and rescue them all, unless she becomes the latest member of the Duna debacle!

I have a wife in real life.....maybe she'd like to go to Duna?

You do love your wife, don't you? If not, then send her to Duna

[nsgallup]

No rcs on parts that need to dock, no control on mission essential modules, no landing gear on landers.

The mission must go on! (with much quickloading)

[kiwi1960]

You guys make all Kerbal's proud.... Keep up the good.... errrr..... work.... if you can call it that.

[Zaryulenko]

The other day i did my first manned mission to Mun in career mode, it was a partial success, the only thing that failed were the instruments i brought..... Low energy supply for them at the landing site :T

[Terwin]

No rcs on parts that need to dock, no control on mission essential modules, no landing gear on landers.

Meh, RCS is optional for docking/Klaw maneuvers. Just make sure you do not approach so fast that your reaction wheels cannot turn you in time for your braking burn.

Half the time I send up a rescue-probe(tiny rocket with a Klaw and chutes, just enough fuel to Klaw and deorbit), I don't even use RCS if it is installed(the other half it seems to malfunction and some or all of my thrusters do not work)

[Geschosskopf]

In the long wait for the Duna transfer window, accepting contracts during different game sessions over the course of 2 real weeks to do a variety of things. And then immediately building and launching ships for these missions into parking orbits to wait on the window. And then realizing that their functions could have been combined, thus saving a lot of time and money .

[Hazelnut]

I love all these stories. Have quite a few of my own, but the one that re-occurs again and again is forgetting to set control to the ockto2 on my Mun Tanker after undocking from the station and then activating MJ autoland... several times I was paying so little attention that it nearly reached escape velocity. (note I only even load it with just enough fuel to land, has ~1 unit of LF left)

[Bev7787]

I sent a probe to Jool in 1.0.2... with solar panels and no RTGs.

[Landwalker]

Picked up a couple of simple, single-site visual survey contracts. Already had a stable, reliable single-propeller monoplane designed, so I slapped a couple of Goo canisters under the wings to pick up some science data on the way, threw Valentina in the cockpit, and away she went.

The plan was to fly to the two sites, then back to KSC to either do a regular landing or a parachute landing and recover the maximum value of the plane. Easy peasy.

Well, because the plane is so stable, I just turned on SAS once I was pointed at the first site and at an acceptable altitude (around 2km) and then went about my internet browsing. A while later I hear a crash and jump back into the gameâ€â€the plane is flying nearly vertical up a mountain, missing its right front landing gear and right tail fin. Whoops. But hey, no problem, it still flies pretty well, so I situate everything and get it heading back on track. With landing gear only on one side of the plane, the plan is definitely of the "parachute landing" variety now.

Get to the first site, take the report, head off to the second. Reach the second (in the middle of the ocean), report, and do a quicksave. Less than two seconds later, the plane runs out of fuelâ€â€completely off-guard, because I had not been monitoring the fuel even a little bit. I just assumed it was fine. It was not fine. Okay, well, we got our contracts, time to parachute this thing down to the water.

I didn't put a parachute on the plane.

So now I have a monoplane with no fuel, 2km above the ocean, and only half of my landing gear.

Val goes into a steep dive to maintain speed, then yanks up at the last minute to try to coast down to the surface... The resulting impact (at 25m/s or thereabouts) destroyed the whole plane except the cockpit. Goo results? Gone. Salvage value? Gone. Valentina: Still alive! Parachute? Never existed.

******

Edit: And upon post-mission review, not only was there never a parachute, I haven't even researched the technology necessary for radial parachutes yet. >_>

Edited July 10, 2015 by Landwalker

[Nothalogh]

I built a Dyna-Soar replica, got it into orbit without a hitch, whereupon I realized I had no landing gear on it

[irichey25]

It took me three to four tries to get one satellite into orbit today because I kept forgetting small things. One being batteries, another being solar panels, and the final one being a damn antenna.

[Hazelnut]

I sent a probe to Jool in 1.0.2... with solar panels and no RTGs.

Erm, so did I - it's not going to get there for another 200 days or so, it never occurred to me panels wouldn't be sufficient. Damnit.

[Cairol]

Yesterday I built a gorgeous satellite deployment vehicle for two large long-range sats.

At the first launch, I forgot to add batteries. I saw it after I deployed the fairing of the payload in orbit and immediately told KSC about the issue.

Good thing they had some spares ready for the next launch.

Then on second try, while approaching my first drop position in polar orbit, I realized I had also forgotton to add probe cores to those Mk2 satellites.

KSC was not quite amused...

[Sharpy]

Erm, so did I - it's not going to get there for another 200 days or so, it never occurred to me panels wouldn't be sufficient. Damnit.

Depends on the size of the panels, the energy requirements, and how much fuel it carries. The panels work poorly but still do, and you should have decent alternators in most of your engines. And if it's kerbed you can activate the engines even without electricity.

I forgot panels on my "shuttle". Each maneuver consisted of: a short, weak burn in a random direction to recharge the batteries enough to turn, fixing the node spoiled by the "recharge burn", turning for the maneuver, then the proper burn. Annoying, wasteful and cumbersome, but it worked.

[_stilgar_]

I created a supply ship - with large tanks, ISRU unit. It was VTOL spaceplane, capable of landing and launching from any planet/moon without atmosphere in kerbol system (and some smaller ones with atmosphere).

I made a test landing on Minmus, only to discover that ISRU won't work without ore tanks...