Stupid things you noticed too late in a Mission

[Goddess Bhavani]

My first 2.5m first stage tried to boost a 20 ton payload to orbit. Due to level 2 launchpad restrictions I could not use Kickback boosters. With 6 BACC SRBs the TWR was something like 1.2 at launch and there was a serious control issue causing SAS to try and tip the rocket on its side immediately after blast off.

This is one rocket I delayed starting the gravity turn until above 4000m when there's enough airspeed to ensure stability.

I did not want to revert to VAB either as I previously quicksaved with the rocket on the pad and then the game crashed on engine ignition.

Still, with a souposphere style ascent profile the launch went well and the second and third stages pretty much flew a level flight path at 50 to 70km altitude and circularised precisely thanks to precise vertical velocity readouts from Kerbal Engineer.

The self propelled Salyut style habitation module had in excess of 2k dV remaining, and will soon link up with two munar landers and a fuel tanker to add another 1k dV to it before doing transmunar injection with the landers attached.

Conclusion: If using stock parts use Mainsail for Salyut / Mir / Zvezda sized payloads or use moar boosters.

Edited July 22, 2015 by pandoras kitten

[Coga19000]

Those times when you successfully send a tricky rescue Mission, only to realise that my craft is already full. Many times have I left my own crew behind, just to score the most Reputation ("No, of course he's not dead. He's just... testing the survivability of Kerbals in deep space. Yeah, that's it. ")

[Technical Ben]

Solar panels now don't work too well around Jool...

[Bosun]

Today I had KSP loaded and went to do other things, like cook dinner, watch a movie and have some beers, and came back to realize I had accidentally left my Duna probe with a single ION engine accelerating at maximum throttle the whole time.

My apoapsis was 350.... billion miles from Kerbol. And I'm out of Xenon. D'oh.

[richfiles]

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..

Should be recoverable...

You'll want to transfer to the retrograde side of Minmus's orbit, so Minmus is on the correct side to gravitationally aid you in slowing down for your circularization.

<--⟲--< Minmus orbit

....↗

.↗

⟳ Kerbin

So, retrograde Kerbin orbit. basically, move to the other side of Minmus. It's gravity will pull against your vessel+asteroid, and aid in your deceleration. It's a lot like the free return trajectory used in Apollo. A figure 8 pattern.

I think...

Edited July 22, 2015 by richfiles

[obsidian_x]

Solar panels now don't work too well around Jool...

D'oh, you just made me realise the same thing. Worst of all, it's only got 2 1x6 retractable panels. Works fine on Eve so I sent same probe payload to Jool...

[xrayfishx]

I just realized that my Moon lander and command module engines all need some ullage thrusters. I didn't even know the latest version of RO included that. Luckily I discovered it in a test flight in LEO. I really hope it won't mean a complete redesign. It shouldn't need more than four 2kN thrusters in total. I hope.

[Technical Ben]

D'oh, you just made me realise the same thing. Worst of all, it's only got 2 1x6 retractable panels. Works fine on Eve so I sent same probe payload to Jool...

I've got 2 of the smallest panels only (yes I was really min/maxing and exploiting... and still aim to!). Thankfully power does not drain when not in focus on the craft. So I'm jumping in, burning (engines generate more power), switching out. I will leave it in orbit, as it's mainly a spare fuel tanker (I send a couple as a test/backup each journey now), so I can use KIS/KAS to attach some nuclear power or just drain it.

[MrWolf83]

I've got a doozy, so tonight I'm in position with my Tuggish thing, moving upgrade into position to doc with mun orbital station and nothing is docking. I know I have ports that match. So two hours late of fighting for a dock. I realize it's a sausage fest up here all the docking ports not only on the station but the upgrades including my other in another orbit, are all male end pointing out,if you know what I mean. So I head home with my crew on the upgrade set a course for home start to time warp like I have been, and all hell breaks loose, my orbital station, and both upgrades explodes. Fudge now to start all over with the station.

[Sharpy]

* Acquire 600 units of fresh ore from Minmus.

* have 600 units of ore on your ship

* land the ore on Kerbin

* maintain stability for 10 seconds.

[KingPhantom]

"Explore Bop"

Went unmanned to bop. Did an orbit around bob (check). Placed a satellite in orbit of bop. Send data from orbit around bob (check) . did a perfect landing with the landerprobe.... (check). send data from surface of bop.... "you have no communication part for sending data"

sssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh***************

[Landwalker]

Launched my first Kerbin equatorial communications satellite for my RemoteTech play last night. Spend a couple of hours agonizing over the design, tweaking things to make sure it could reach its desired orbit, that it had enough antennae, that it had solar arrays, that it had RCS for any future fine-tuning adjustments.

Got it up there. Almost exactly circular 802km orbit.

Realized I had put zero batteries on the satellite. It can only run its one weakest antenna during the "night" phase of its orbit or it'll drain the 200EC built in to the probe core in a matter of seconds.

Now deciding whether to leave it there as an otherwise-useless omni-antenna relay point, or tear the whole thing down.

[RogueNine]

Parachutes. Always parachutes!

I was docking an escape craft to my manned science/comms station, when I realized I had forgotten the blasted parachutes. Again. I couldn't revert to the VAB because I switched between the two vessels during the docking maneuvers.

Luckily I was toying with the idea of moving the station to minmus orbit so the escape craft docked with over 2000m/s of Dv left in the tanks. I ran the numbers (read guessed wildly) and decided to land under power on the engine bell. It worked..... mostly. I ran out of fuel 100m up and hit the ground at about 50m/s but the crew survived . If it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.

I'd like to add that the only reason I was in this predicament is because I forgot to add parachutes to the stations inbuilt re entry vehicle in the first place. I was running out of available crew I as well.

Edited July 24, 2015 by RogueNine
Clarification

[X-SR71]

The KER (Kerbal Engineer Redux) part.

KER has this 'feature' that will let an kerbal engineer show you the readouts so it has been more than once that I forgot to add the part and only noticed it wayyy after when I separate the vessel and Bill stays with a particular module.

[BlueCanary]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/125118-Mad-Max-War-Rig-Style-Elcano-Attempt

That whole painfully disappointing waste of time, I built a very fancy road train type thing to circumnavigate Kerbin, prepared a list of waypoints, psyched up Jeb and Val for days and days on the road, but missed two little issues with my plan:

1. The truck was a kraken-summoning abomination built from one part structural failures and one part game breaking Klaw bugs, and was impossible to brake without a few wheels escaping back to the wild.

2. My entire mission plan was physically impossible, unless I could teach 90 tonnes of truck to swim.

[Bangstry]

Sent a lander to Moho,i built it to refuel a mother-ship in orbit (i crashed the first lander) ,it took 2 years to get there,sent it down without the crew first to test it,it landed perfectly,started kethane drills and set the converter to refuel..the mono started filling up and then to my horror i noticed the fuel tanks were not filling,i had gone back into the VAB just before launching and moved some part,in doing so i removed the fuel pipes from the convertor and put them back the wrong way round..

I added the medals mod and launched a large vehicle,the idea was to get my 12 heroic kerbals in space so they all had the 'first Kerbal in space' medal,it was a troubled flight and it just made it into orbit,all looked good and i sat here laughing,then it dawned on me i could only see Jeb and Bob in the cabin,i had popped back to the VAB and KSP changed the crew rota..

Edited July 25, 2015 by Bangstry

[EdusacconBR]

parachutes on a mun lander '-'

wasted a lot of days to come back to kerbin orbit and some hours to rendezvous with it

[StrandedonEarth]

I posted this one a week or two ago:

On the next trip down, I tried landing on the drills, which didn't go so well. Some excess lateral velocity didn't help

But it still managed, with the help of Throttle Control Avionics, to make it back to the tug and back to Kerbin, for disposal by way of destructive reentry.

And then my Duna base, launched well before that ill-fated Minmus miner, finally arrived at Duna. After some aerobraking passes, the landing gear was deployed, and I *facepalmed* again.

[Guest]

The first time I used those landing legs, I put them on upside down too!

[Sharpy]

I screwed up the RCS on my tug. It had no vertical translation at all. The funny thing is I double-checked the RCS; 12 thrusters, rotation in all 3 axis, but that one translation was missing. I still wonder which set I had made redundant as 12 is the number that allows a full rotation+translation setup. Luckily that was meant for the Mun, and the tug wasn't very expensive; I scuttled it and sent another, with full set of RCS this time, draining the old one's remaining fuel and landing the refinery on Mun at last. Heh, impact into Mun surface at full orbital speed... The solar panel was ejected so hard it would take over a day to fall back down after nearly completing an orbit.

[eddiew]

Coming home from Mun... "Wait, I swapped the parachute for a docking port?"

[AbacusWizard]

No problem; just send up a small probe with a matching docking port and a parachute. Modular re-entry!

[Goddess Bhavani]

Kerbal Engineer tells me my Proton rocket replica has a first stage surface TWR of 1.36, which is perfectly fine considering fuel burn will lose a lot of mass right after liftoff.

Lo and behold I was doing and 'overweight' launch of a Salyut style space station core, and neglected to inspect the crucial atmospheric TWR before rolling out to the pad.

Have you ever tried to launch a 140 ton rocket with a TWR of 1.2? The SAS doesn't even work right and the stack wants to tip over even before tower-clearing altitude! Worse, I had already quicksaved the game and resumed it with the faulty rocket on the pad so I did not want to revert to VAB.

So how did I fly it? Probably something like the real Proton, which appears to rise into the air very, very slowly straight up, and start its gravity turn somewhere high in the air. No wonder the second stage of that rocket looks so huge. Thankfully I had a generally similar configuration (albeit the first stage has 6 outer BACC boosters instead of 6 LF engines in fairings) and the launch went without a hitch, although now the core module is short about 20% fuel needed to compensate for upper atmosphere drag and circularize itself.

No matter, I just launched another service module to act as its transmunar injection stage, after hooking up a small flotilla of mini landers and a crew escape shuttle to the station core exterior.

[BurnPrograde]

I always forget what time it is... I'll be damned if I can ever stop playing before 4am.

Blast you KSP for being so engrossing!!

[ianm1981]

Recently in a save with kerbal construction time and USI life support on I sent a 3 Kerbal mission to Minmus up without any life support supplies and only noticed when I got to orbit. Quickly having to queue up a frantic minimalist, just scrape to orbit, mission that could be built in a few hours. Containing a cargo container with one supplies pack in it and then had to EVA and use Kerbal Attachment system to stick the supply container on in orbit. All before the Kerbals on board starved.