Stupid things you noticed too late in a Mission

[tntristan12]

I'm just gonna leave this here.

[Bev7787]

"SAS not available on this module" #mechjeb

[GeneralVeers]

Here's my current one: playing Career mode, and I'm doing my second mission to the Mun with six rookie astronauts on the roster (Bill, Jebediah, and Bob have 1 star, the other three are new hires fresh outta boot camp). I want to grind exp for them, so I create and launch an orbiter with space for five astronauts, dock a one-Kerbal lander to it (this will turn out to be a problem later!), and I throw all six astronauts at the Mun.

The plan is to have each astronaut jump in the lander, land on the Mun, plant a flag, and thereby give all six of them exp for planting a flag on the Mun. Remember how it's a one-Kerbal lander? Well, when the Kerbal flying the damn thing is either an engineer or a scientist, and when there's no robot command module, you cannot engage SAS even if the craft has a reaction wheel! I keep finding this out the hard way, and I keep forgetting it shortly after finding it out.

Guess what, folks: landing on the Mun without SAS to keep you vertical is quite challenging. There was a lot of lithobraking involved......

And now for my best ever: a mission to Minmus with an overbuilt lander that had a huge fuel reserve. The plan was to land, do science, take off, land in a different biome, do more science. At the end of it all I had logged a gigantic amount of science to take home. Turns out I got greedy and did one landing too many--then I took off for home and ran out of fuel with the lander stuck in a Buck-Rogers style Kerbin orbit with a periapsis of something like then thousand kilometers.

Multiple facepalms occurred. Mostly because I had quicksaved AFTER doing one too many landings...... (two stupids for the price of one!)

Then Jebediah saved the mission, and what he did was something straight out of a movie. He went on EVA, flew around and planted his face against the back of the ship, and fired his jetpack until it was almost empty. Then he hopped back aboard the ship, refuelled his jetpack, and did it again. And again. And again. And again. One guy at Mission Control was wondering where Jebediah got all the EVA fuel from, while everybody else in the room was telling him to shut up and stick to the script.

Literally half an hour later, Jebediah had dropped the ship's periapsis into Kerbin's atmosphere. And the day was saved. Cue Michael Bay music!