Spacewrecks, Derelicts and Ghost Ships

[AlphaMensae]

Not every mission goes well, so, inspired by the title of one of the books in Stewart Cowley's TTA series, what monuments to failed missions, relics of abandoned designs, and maybe even a Flying Dutchman or Marie Celeste (if you use a life support mod) do you have scattered about the Kerbol system (or RSS) that you've never removed or recovered?

Don't count simple debris or spent stages left behind, only (relatively) intact ships/craft that may or may not be still functional.

Me, I have this little ship from the early days of my (still current) 1.0.4 Science Mode still on Minmus:

I think it was my first manned landing attempt of any kind, and I forgot exactly what happened, but it didn't end well.   I did manage to successfully rescue the pilot, but I've left the (still fully functional) craft on the lonely wastes of Minmus since then.  I'm now toying with the idea of sending a recovery mission there and getting the ship upright enough so it can finally return home, but I don't know...

Oh, after that happened I started putting landing legs on radial tanks to prevent this kind of thing.

Edited January 30, 2016 by Laguna

[Snark]

Oh, all kinds of stuff.

Whenever I'm done with a ship (e.g. the contract succeeded, or whatever), on the one hand I want to get it out of my face (because it clutters up the tracking station display); but on the other hand, I feel a kind of sentimental attachment to it, the desire to leave a sort of "Snark was here" marker out in space, so I don't want to just delete it.

So what I usually do is click the "Rename Vessel" button, edit the name to stick "Abandoned" in front of it, and changed the vessel type to "Debris".

Sometimes it's fun, after a long time, much later in the career, to go back to the tracking station and turn on the display of "Debris" category, to see where all my stuff has ended up.  The really interesting ones are where something's ended up somewhere unexpected, because it got an accidental gravity assist from the Mun or Ike or Tylo or whatever and got slung way the heck away from where it started out.

[tater]

That first craft on Minmus could almost certainly right itself just by retracting the legs and using SAS.

[Mitchz95]

I don't really hold on to saves long enough to accumulate debris, but I have occasionally left decommissioned ships drifting in high Kerbin or solar orbit. I plan to start using the Orbital Decay mod in 1.1, so anything I leave up there probably won't stay for long.

[Skorpychan]

There's a small fleet of probes and a cruise stage floating around the inner system from a failed Eve exploration, because I didn't have enough dV to actually orbit, and couldn't aerobrake because kaboom.

Duna's got a semi-lost mission around it, but I will get back to it. It's a work in progress.

Really, it's my earlier saves that are littered with issues like that. Abandoned missions, empty stations I sent up on a whim, fields of debris scattered over munar plains from a learning experience, and the like.

[FungusForge]

On one of my older saves I probably had twenty or so munar landers left in orbit. Most of them still had fuel in them too.

[AlphaMensae]

3 hours ago, tater said:

That first craft on Minmus could almost certainly right itself just by retracting the legs and using SAS.

Or I'll just turn it into a historical site, complete with a fence and plaque (flag).

 

[The Optimist]

There's this one 100 ton massive ring interstellar ship that I abandoned when it got flung out of the Kerbol system by a unlucky gravity assist from Laythe. It and its crew of 5 kerbonauts are doomed to float forever in the void. Or at least until I get to the massive orbit's apoapsis, which is in 230 years. 

[AlphaMensae]

42 minutes ago, The Optimist said:

There's this one 100 ton massive ring interstellar ship that I abandoned when it got flung out of the Kerbol system by a unlucky gravity assist from Laythe. It and its crew of 5 kerbonauts are doomed to float forever in the void. Or at least until I get to the massive orbit's apoapsis, which is in 230 years. 

That sounds like something right out of the Cowley book.    

[LordKael]

I have half a dozen derelicts in orbit around Duna, from my abandoned base attempt using USI-LS

[Rath]

I've got an low solar orbit 'sundipper' craft orbiting Dina, because after getting Veeeererrrryyyy close to the sun on an elliptical orbit and using up all of the heat shields ablative shielding in said sundive, it got an gravity assist from Moho so    I decided to make it a Duma orbiter.  It's also planned to be picked up and turned into a museum price at KSC2 because its historic 

[Hell_Raiser]

Here is my first and only mission to Duna.  The landing was a little hard and damaged the legs, so in an act of pure brilliance, a Roald Kerman jumped out and fixed one of the legs.  This resaulted in the flipping of the lander.  Erfry Kerman then took charge and attempted to use the thrusters and rcs to flip the lander back upright.  This resulted in a rapid unplanned dis-assembly of the craft.  This is the largest remaining piece.

Edited January 31, 2016 by Hell_Raiser

[Findthepin1]

I have like 5 or 10 Mun landers still up there, very old Munshot Program ones like 50 years old, just sitting there on the Mun. They had people in them, but eventually I launched a giant rescue mission to clean up the Kerbin SOI. I brought everyone back in a modern ship, my Orbital Activity Vehicle. Same goes for Minmus. They all probs still work.

[jhousen]

1/3 of mun's commsat constellation is just hanging out in kerbol orbit without fuel after I used it as a booster stage(interesting failure there, dumped it into a highly eccentric kerbin orbit, and a mun intercept kicked it into a solar orbit. it even got me the fly by the sun contract complete, so I'm not too disappointed)

[Malich]

On this play through I don't have much as I'm trying to run it at least semi-reusable (I have yet to successfully how to de-orbit the remains of my 4200 ton Jool mission launcher.. that may have to be just deleted) space programme. All my interplanetary missions are designed with docking ports on the long axis so I can connect one of my Transit Drive probes to either move them to a new location or to being them back to Kerbin. Currently I have a semi-cluttered 125km parking orbit around both Kerbin and Duna waiting for me to decide what to do with it all.

My goal for this play through was my first Kerballed mission to Jool which is almost complete. After which I am debating a restart and adding in a Remote Tech comms network... which could easily lead to me with probes all over the place because they ran out of comms range!

[the torturer of kerbals]

I had a huge space station i had worked on for about 2 weeks i then updated my game and all the kerbals dissapeared.

[SuperRandomCompany]

I have a half dozen ships in Kerbol or Eeloo orbit when I tried to make an Eeloo base. They either ran out of fuel or got flung out of orbit.

[cubinator]

On 1/30/2016 at 5:33 PM, The Optimist said:

It and its crew of 5 kerbonauts are doomed to float forever in the void. Or at least until I get to the massive orbit's apoapsis, which is in 230 years. 

I did some stuff with ridiculously high trajectories a few days ago (trying to get high reentry velocity, managed 18km/s), and I think it always says t- 230ish years. I don't think that craft is ever going to reach any apoapsis. It is possible to slow down and orbit if you have enough fuel though, even at those kinds of ridiculous altitudes.

For the sake of staying on topic: in my current career save, Bill Kerman was stranded in solar orbit shortly after I started the save due to a Munar gravity assist. I will one day go out and save him...I'm also not deleting anything, in the hopes that I might one day take a bunch of Klaw-equipped ships around the system, retrieve everything, and bring it all back and make a giant pile of spaceship parts near/at KSC. The island airfield might be a good place for that.

[LordKael]

17 hours ago, Malich said:

On this play through I don't have much as I'm trying to run it at least semi-reusable (I have yet to successfully how to de-orbit the remains of my 4200 ton Jool mission launcher.. that may have to be just deleted) space programme. All my interplanetary missions are designed with docking ports on the long axis so I can connect one of my Transit Drive probes to either move them to a new location or to being them back to Kerbin. Currently I have a semi-cluttered 125km parking orbit around both Kerbin and Duna waiting for me to decide what to do with it all.

My goal for this play through was my first Kerballed mission to Jool which is almost complete. After which I am debating a restart and adding in a Remote Tech comms network... which could easily lead to me with probes all over the place because they ran out of comms range!

Make sure that your pile of debris is far enough away from KSC that it's outside of the physics range. Otherwise, you'll be playing Kerbal Space Powerpoint

[AbacusWizard]

On 1/30/2016 at 2:24 PM, Laguna said:

Or I'll just turn it into a historical site, complete with a fence and plaque (flag).

 

In some of my previous saves, I had a general policy of leaving any decommissioned interplanetary ship in high Kerbin orbit and appending "Orbital Museum" to the end of its name. I like to imagine spacebuses full of schoolchildren going on field trips to visit them.

Edited February 1, 2016 by AbacusWizard

[samstarman5]

10 hours ago, the torturer of kerbals said:

I had a huge space station i had worked on for about 2 weeks i then updated my game and all the kerbals dissapeared.

Did you rename it the Andrea Doria?

[nosirrbro]

In one of my earlier saves I created a crewed eeloo mission that was assembled in orbit, however when a weak docking port caused part of the ship to snap I abandoned it, and the remaining parts are still in orbit around kerbin

[steuben]

almost makes me want to hyper up some large ships and stations and "accidental collide them with each other, smaller ships, and a rock or two.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

An experimental, single engine, nuclear lander, based on mk2 parts.  It was really sexy looking, looked like an airplane without wings, but only had enough fuel to land on the Mun, but not take off!

Had to rescue the crew with a conventional rocket powered lander. 

Just left it there.

[AlphaMensae]

On 1/31/2016 at 4:29 PM, the torturer of kerbals said:

I had a huge space station i had worked on for about 2 weeks i then updated my game and all the kerbals dissapeared.

 

14 hours ago, samstarman5 said:

Did you rename it the Andrea Doria?

Or Marie Celeste   That sounds like something out of the Twilight Zone!