Narrow escapes?

[Mister Dilsby]

Yeah, I know, totally ripped this ship off from Kuzzter, including, as it turned out, a bingo fuel landing on Ike.

No, that's not the Hummlebee--for one thing, you have the brakes on the right way!

[Aloriel]

I had one just the other day.

I miscalculated the delta-v I needed for the grand tour Kerbin 3 (Kerbin->Mun->Minmus->Kerbin) by about 60DV, and didn't realize this until I was orbiting Minmus on my final return flight. With 1.6 million riding on the mission, I was darn sure I was going to make it back. I reviewed my systems to see what I still had that could be used as thrust. Fortunately, I hadn't used all of my monopropellant. I figured, it's only 60DV, right? This rocket is pretty light... maybe it's enough?

I managed to finish my Minmus escape and finalize my Kerbin Periapsis to 25km. Re-entry was a bit hot, but I spared the capsule much of it by keeping my Minmus lander stage attached until parts were about to explode off of it.

[Mr. Speed]

I recently built a new shuttle system for my career mode for 40 ton payloads. to make it economical it is basically a big rocket plane with two huge drop tanks on the side, inspired by the phase II shuttle. My ascent went nominal and I even had some fuel left in orbit for maneuvers.

as it was a test flight I reentered it bone dry, to check its glide scope and aerodynamic stability, stuff that's very important because I want to recover the shuttle at KSC. As I come over the KSC at around 23km altitude I do some hard braking turns, each more aggressive that the last. When I finally pitch it fully to the north it starts to flip and it just keeps on spinning. As all the engines are on the shuttle it is very tail heavy so as a last resort I try to stabilize it backwards, hoping the body of the shuttle will cushion the "landing" for the cockpit. at around 5km I had it tail first heading to the ground as to my amazement it reacts good to my control inputs. so well in fact I was able to get it level, flying backwards. flying tail first is one thing, but landing tail first was not something I dared to try so I pitched up into a stall and got it flying forwards again, landing safely after my most idiotic reentry ever.

[Warzouz]

Back in beta 0.9, I was targeting Tylo. I was also very fond of SSTO landers. I wanted to try a low TWR SSTO lander to Tylo (there was ISRU at that time. At the begining of the mission, I wasn't sure my SSTO would make it. So I brought along an additional stages lander.

I tried landing the staged lander first. I fell short of fuel few meters above the ground and hit it at 40m/s. The ship didn't bounced back and I didn't break anything, luckily. The very small second stage could bring my kerbal to the tug orbiting Tylo.

Then the SSTO lander. It had 6050m/s and a TWR of 0.95 when deorbiting at 30km. I managed to land, do science. The ascent was very short. I ended at LTO with only 50m/s left. The tug had to do the rendez-vous.

On Tylo, success is very near failure...

[RA3236]

Like a couple of months ago (someone might have heard this) I performed a gravity assist of Eeloo. Problem is, I misjudged and by a couple of CENTIMETRES the probe core missed the surface. The RTGs were destroyed so I used my emergency solar panels to power the craft once out of Eeloo SOI. The probe is still heading in interstellar space, and the gigaantenna from Remote tech is the only thing that is still active along with the non-functioning solar panels and emergency RTG.

[FyunchClick]

No, that's not the Hummlebee--for one thing, you have the brakes on the right way!

Hehe, and it has no antenna clipped through the wing either.