It seemed like a good idea at the time...

[X-SR71]

"I don't need all that dV - I'll just aerobrake in Jool."

[Hazelnut]

agreed, though it's after work for me.

i tend to think about problems or designs on my drive home from work. when i get home, i make a mad dash upstairs to start working on what i thought about, stopping only for a quick smooch from wifey and a hasty explanation of "i got kerbal stuff i gotta do before i forget." this usually ends with the wife tapping her foot in the office doorway several hours later (while holding back 2 screaming kids) and me quizzically looking at her and saying "what? i just got started."

thank God she loves me...

I know this so well. Don't miss out on time with kids though, they grow up really fast! (my youngest is now almost 12 8-o)

[Thomassino]

Duna has an atmosphere right? So 1 chute for 10-ton lander would be enough right? ... Boom ...

[Edax]

Thinking it was a good idea that this thing could be propelled by a Mainsail at full power. At the time, I was unfamiliar how floppy docking ports could be since the wiki said a tri-dock connection was sturdy, and I was sick of low thrust burns at the time and the idea was that high thrust meant more accurate burns. Even though it was a F5 test, it was somewhat embarrassing to crash a straight station into itself.

[ajburges]

Thinking it was a good idea that this thing could be propelled by a Mainsail at full power. At the time, I was unfamiliar how floppy docking ports could be since the wiki said a tri-dock connection was sturdy, and I was sick of low thrust burns at the time and the idea was that high thrust meant more accurate burns. Even though it was a F5 test, it was somewhat embarrassing to crash a straight station into itself.

http://i.imgbox.com/pzEQ3B2o.jpg

I did something similar with a ring lifter with a Mammoth powered core stage (for recovery). Okay plot circularization burn. Give me full power in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, mark-- BOOM!

Jeb: "Guess the ring can't handle 25 G's of shear force, eh director? Maybe you'll give up on these unmanned rockets now."

[PanzerAce]

Building my current Grand Tour ship. Sketched it out on a notepad "This'll be easy!"

...

Four days later (and five designs later) and I still haven't finished the very first step: My mining landers...

[Merinsan]

I had this brilliant idea of sending a mission to Eeloo, and the final stage had an ion engine for capture/circularization using solar panels... thankfully I had a quicksave and could use the previous stage to save it.

Also, I had a survey mission on the moon, so I sent a rover. That should have been fine, but I landed a long way a way, and just said never mind, it's a rover. 5 hrs later and I finally got to the first survey site. That rover has been abandoned now - it had an escape system for the pilot, and he was gone as soon as he finished.

[MaverickSawyer]

Putting Jeb on the end of a tether, 15 meters up the side of a VERY large lander on Minmus, tossing rover parts down to Bill for him to tuck into the storage module in the base.

Yeah... that didn't go very well. Two pieces were already in motion before the first one hit the ground and promptly exploded. Jeb, of course, was grinning like the pyromaniac that he is. Bill... was very sad.

So now I have to wait a few days for the new parts to make the 9 day trip to Minmus before I can build the rover and go exploring. All because I let Jeb be the one on the tether.

[Adamczuk]

Sending a boat load of Kerbals out of the Kerbin Local Space for the first time; it seemed a good idea in theory!

After sending them on their way, I realised I'd completely neglected in adding any RCS to my transport.

Then, more worryingly, I realised that since I was running a Life Support mod, I hadn't packed enough lunches for the entire trip! Sure they would get to Eve / Gilly orbit eventually on this Magical Mystery Tour, but they wouldn't survive the wait for more food.

Rapidly, I launched a Food Delivery (And RCS! PRAISE KAS/KIS!) Satellite to deliver Pizza to the Kerbals on board the transport [Was slightly waylaid as someone had ordered peperoni...]! Planning my probes interception path, it became increasingly apparent that it wouldn't ever catch up with its target in any reasonable amount of time and that I really didn't know anything about interplanetary transfers.

To this day, I'm still trying to figure out how to solve the problem in this save. What seemed like an alright, if not a little bit on the crazy side, idea turned out to be one of the worse decisions of my KSP career.

Should have started with a probe...

[Hagen von Tronje]

Sending a boat load of Kerbals out of the Kerbin Local Space for the first time; it seemed a good idea in theory!

After sending them on their way, I realised I'd completely neglected in adding any RCS to my transport.

Then, more worryingly, I realised that since I was running a Life Support mod, I hadn't packed enough lunches for the entire trip! Sure they would get to Eve / Gilly orbit eventually on this Magical Mystery Tour, but they wouldn't survive the wait for more food.

Rapidly, I launched a Food Delivery (And RCS! PRAISE KAS/KIS!) Satellite to deliver Pizza to the Kerbals on board the transport [Was slightly waylaid as someone had ordered peperoni...]! Planning my probes interception path, it became increasingly apparent that it wouldn't ever catch up with its target in any reasonable amount of time and that I really didn't know anything about interplanetary transfers.

To this day, I'm still trying to figure out how to solve the problem in this save. What seemed like an alright, if not a little bit on the crazy side, idea turned out to be one of the worse decisions of my KSP career.

Should have started with a probe...

You should be fine unless it's mandatory that you attach RCS before closing orbit. Just get there, enter orbit, wait for the probe to catch up. It should only be as far behind as the delay of its launch. I'm having a hard time imagining how it would be physically possible to catch up mid-transfer without infinite fuel.

[Fred Cop]

At one point I was re-entering Kerbins atmosphere, but I forgot the Heat Shield, so I thought I might as well use the bottom of the Pod as a Heat Shield...

That idea resulted in several reloads before I properly touched down without burning up the Pod in the Atmosphere.

[CG_Kerbin]

Taking this to Mun...

http://i1184.photobucket.com/albums/z335/annallia92/screenshot13_zps9daa3lhh.png

Ok actually that part worked quite nicely once I found a good way to get it into orbit... Trying to use it to return to kerbin on the other hand...

I'm going use that all the time! My "it seemed like a good idea at the time" was me trying to get a plane to land on the top of a mountin. I was doing this because I wanted to rescue a kerbal stuck on the top. But it ended up as a rage-fest against the mountain (I wi beat you one day mountain!)

[User Unrelated]

Going on EVA seemed like a decent idea at the time...

Booting up the cloning machine, on the other hand...

"Fish Taco Crater" was a flag...

And... "Joncan Kerman DEBRIS"?! Something VERY wrong happened.

Geofdon seems to have gotten the worst of it...

Edited August 3, 2015 by User Unrelated

[lazarus1024]

Seems like rovers being mind-numbingly awful is a consistent theme here... I had a survey contract on Eve, and I thought a rover would be the best way to do it. The points of interest were on the equator, but I miscalculated my entry and landed on the south pole. It took forever, and in the hours it took to make it up to the mountains, I became intimately familiar with just how bad the current wheel physics are. Very often I would find myself tacking to compensate for bizarre phantom drifting, which would cause my rover to skitter all over the place like marbles on a glass table. After I finally made it to my destination, I vowed to never use rovers again. Good riddance.

It has been awhile since I've made a rover to run missions with. About the only time I really use them these days is if I am building a processing/fueling base on the dirt. Need something to move fuel between the base and a lander.

Beyond that, yeah, IMHO, if you have to go more than about 3-4km, it gets painfully boring. I do build rovers sometimes just to tool around an area of interest. Example, I'll sometimes put a lander down near the edge of a crater and some mountains on Mun/Duna. Then it is nice to be able to get around a little. Drive up to the top of a mountain, put a flag up there, drive back, etc.

It would be nice if there was a cruise control option.

[Gaarst]

Some time ago, I landed a mobile base on Eve with everything: science instruments, enough wheels, power... aaaaaand I forgot the antenna :/

Luckily I had a probe that did not seem too far from where I landed that had an antenna, so I thought: I'll get there, and use the probe to transmit any science I gathered.

300 km, 5 IG hours (I didn't know I could use physics timewrap at the time, so over 5 hours IRL) and a few dozen crashes/F9 later I arrived at the probe only to realise it is not possible to use it to transmit data from an EVA'd Kerbal...

In the end, slightly frustrated by having spent quite a few hours piloting a rover (gosh this is boring) I ended up smashing the small probe with my 15t mobile base

[PB666]

Seems like rovers being mind-numbingly awful is a consistent theme here... I had a survey contract on Eve, and I thought a rover would be the best way to do it. The points of interest were on the equator, but I miscalculated my entry and landed on the south pole. It took forever, and in the hours it took to make it up to the mountains, I became intimately familiar with just how bad the current wheel physics are. Very often I would find myself tacking to compensate for bizarre phantom drifting, which would cause my rover to skitter all over the place like marbles on a glass table. After I finally made it to my destination, I vowed to never use rovers again. Good riddance.

Hmm, well from my experience a rover well lacks the power to get it out of the average munar crater. If you think just in terms of science you want a processing lab at every biome, it takes forever for the lab to process anything so why move it, but their aren't enough scientist in the game to man them, the science is compromised by logistics. So basically all the science processing needs to be done in a mobile lab, but the problem is it needs to be reliable, and since the landers have to refuel in space anyway, its better to have the lab in space (and the best value is in getting the Sci back to kerbin). About the only thing a mobile lab is good for then are the seismic, temp, gravoli, pressure and soil samples (leaving the goo and mat sci behind). Here's the catch if you land on the edge of a biome, it cost almost no delta-V to move to the adjacent biome, so what is the advantage of a rover? (for example a landing cycle cost 1200 dV, and a well planned hop only cost 100dV). In addition, if you simply want to rove, connect to pods together by a mgs with panels, when it turns over, roll it whereever you like.

If KSP wants people to use rovers they should place valuable uniques in the domains that you have to search for and recover for $, rep, or Sci.

[Geschosskopf]

Long, long ago, I took my 1st successful Minmus lander, added more weight to it, and thought it would work for Mun, too. After all, it was a shorter trip. Didn't realize there was such a difference in gravity

[KerikBalm]

Adding on to my Mun station, instead of deorbiting the thing and launching a new one.

It started with just trying to launch a fuel depot to the Mun, early in career, with a lab and a dockingport Jr.

First compromise: instead of jettisoning the 2nd to last stage and circularizing with the poodle, I transfered fuel from the upper to the lower stage so I could complete insertion with the lower stage... now I had 2 orange tank's worth of capacity, and I could fill them up later (anticipating SSTOs bringing the fuel to LKO, with the science unlocked by the lander).

Resulting in something longer, with more parts, more dead weight, and a less efficient engine for when I want to change orbits.

Then the MPL took too much power, the Ox-stats weren't enough, nor was the battery enough to transmist most of the science, nor had I added any monoprop storage.

So, as part of training a kerbonaut, I sent the lander off to minmus, and brought a new lander + some spare fuel to Mun.

Along the way, I brought a unit with a jr port on both ends.. a stack of batteries, a small monoprop can, and solar panels.

Then I unlocked grav detectors, and sent a new small probe to cheaply pickup the grav scans from the sites I already visited...

Now I needed two docking ports, and while I was at it, I wanted to add a 1.25m docking port for docking with my new crew transfer SSTOs with the shielded docking ports...

So... another addon.... a jr connected to a fl-t200 tank, with a 1.25 meter docking port on the other end, and 2 jr's on the side...

Looks nice, no?

No....

when docking the fully loaded ISRU ship with the fully fueled station massing in at nearly 100 tons, a 1.25m docking port connection, followed by a .625m connection, followed by a stack of about 6x .625m parts, followed by another .625 docking connection... is very very very flimsy/spingy...

and those solar panels sticking out and docked craft nearby as well... can do bad things.... you have to dock very very very gently....

And don't even think about re-orienting it with a large craft docked.

Its a PITA... I'm thinking about de-orbiting the whole thing and launching a new station from my 100+ ton, 8m diameter 2 orange tank in lenght capacity SSTO...

It seemed like a good idea to do addons to extend the utility of old hardware... but I think it was more trouble than it was worth.

I have an expensive station that I don't actually want to use anymore

[Esme]

Had a tiny base set up on Minmus, and a combined ship/rover was sent to join it. Landing went badly, very badly (I was a lot less experienced then), and the pilot of the craft was lucky to survive the crash. At which point I made a daft decision. I walked the crashed pilot to the base. All of 12 kilometres (well, he jetted for about 3 - I was very inefficient with jetpacks back then - and walked the other 9). Then launched another rover and had just got it onto its trajectory towards Minmus when I had that facepalm moment of realisation.

[LostOblivion]

My "It seemed like a good idea at the time" was when I decided to slap an extra materials bay onto the already (top) heavy Mun lander, completely shattering the already stretched out delta-v budget. After a few failed attempts, I realised that in order for Val to land and still have enough fuel left to reach orbit again, she had to not only land on the highest terrain in her orbit, but also have the Pe set to about 50 metres above ground, burning retrograde like crazy before quickly turning the lander upright for a hard touchdown. After finally being able to do the actual materials experiment, she had to burn directly into Mun escape and back to Kerbin to save fuel, and even then, having the Pe stop short of 70 km, she had to get out and push the remaining few km.

[Jim Kernan]

"I should go to bed. I'll just start up KSP to finish one last thing..."

This ^^

[RogalDorn]

This ^^

The bane of my working days!

[A_name]

Seems like rovers being mind-numbingly awful is a consistent theme here... I had a survey contract on Eve, and I thought a rover would be the best way to do it. The points of interest were on the equator, but I miscalculated my entry and landed on the south pole. It took forever, and in the hours it took to make it up to the mountains, I became intimately familiar with just how bad the current wheel physics are. Very often I would find myself tacking to compensate for bizarre phantom drifting, which would cause my rover to skitter all over the place like marbles on a glass table. After I finally made it to my destination, I vowed to never use rovers again. Good riddance.

Wouldn't it be cool if we could instruct the rover to go to "x" location and the rover will keep doing its thing even while not focused?

[Sharpy]

"The Klaw attachment is the weak point. Not like these big, durable flat surfaces of MK3 tanks. I'll anchor the craft to the asteroid with a long, flexible arm stretching to the side, so when the three Rhinos are activated, they will press the three MK3 tanks against the asteroid, while the klaw on the flexible arm will only prevent slippage".

Everything worked well - the klaw caught right, the flexible joint flexed, I refuelled the MK3 tanks from the refinery, I turned the asteroid retrograde, then started the burn.

The flexible arm flexed and all three tanks with the engines sunk under the surface of asteroid. No self-collisions.

For a time I tried just ignoring the failure, using it as a static power source with the few gigantors it had. Unfortunately the flexible arm was too flexible. During the next burn something got messed up, the arm twisted into a bagel and the whole pusher craft clipped into the refinery, flipping almost upside down and refusing to budge.

Well, time to get rid of the junk. I folded all radiators and gigantors on the refinery, activated the rhinos, performed a burn until it was entirely sunken into the asteroid, then detached the klaw.

I spent next fifteen minutes in Tracking Station cleaning up the debris. Luckily the refinery survived undamaged.

[LostOblivion]

Some time ago, I landed a mobile base on Eve with everything: science instruments, enough wheels, power... aaaaaand I forgot the antenna :/

Luckily I had a probe that did not seem too far from where I landed that had an antenna, so I thought: I'll get there, and use the probe to transmit any science I gathered.

300 km, 5 IG hours (I didn't know I could use physics timewrap at the time, so over 5 hours IRL) and a few dozen crashes/F9 later I arrived at the probe only to realise it is not possible to use it to transmit data from an EVA'd Kerbal...

In the end, slightly frustrated by having spent quite a few hours piloting a rover (gosh this is boring) I ended up smashing the small probe with my 15t mobile base

Funny story! You could have used KIS to steal the antenna and bring it back to the base.