What was your most epic disaster averted moment?

[Sanic]

KSP is a game fraught with danger. One second of burn time could cost you an entire mission. I'm sure everyone who's played KSP for a reasonable amount of time has had one of these moments. What is your most epic disaster averted moment?

Here's mine: My fifth career munar landing mission was going fine. My lander, laden with fuel, had a TWR of about 3 on the Mun, had just dropped off the transfer stage. The descent burn, however, began way too low, at around 10km. In a panic, I ditched the drop tanks, and tried to save the craft. The craft, with only the central tank on, didn't have very much DeltaV remaining. There was only one way to save Jeb from dying (TAC-LS), as he only had enough life support for 3 days (probably should've brought more, but I was totally unprepared for such a disaster). I had left an interplanetary cruiser, the Kraken, in low Munar orbit, sciencing away until the transfer window to Eve. Only a couple hundred meters off the surface, I tried to get the lander into an orbit around the same inclination as the Kraken. Much of the fuel was used up trying to get into orbit. The craft made it into orbit, though with a tiny amount of fuel left and on the opposite side of the Mun as the Kraken. I maneuvered the craft into a higher orbit, but it already had too little fuel (3 units of LF) to get a proper intercept. The intercept was 2 hours away, so the EVA suit could sustain him Jeb the intercept. I maneuverd Jeb into a 0.2km intercept. I shot by the Kraken at 50 m/s, but eventually I cancelled the relative velocity and flew Jeb onto the Kraken, with Val, Bill, and Bob onboard. 

 

[Bill Phil]

Once my munar lander ran out of fuel, and I got Jeb out and just deirbuted from high Kerbin orbit. He lived.

[cubinator]

I had a rocket a while back that flipped out and lost all it's velocity three times and still got to orbit.

[Randox]

Back before docking was added, I used to practice orbital rendezvous, because we knew the feature was coming eventually, and without other planets to explore, it was something to do. After EVA's were added, I decided to do a crew transfer in orbit. First, I sent up my standard 3 man lander, and then I sent up a one man orbital interceptor, which notably featured RCS thrusters to aid in establishing an orbital rendezvous. It also featured a nose mounted parachute, and a stack decoupler to separate it from everything else so it could land safely, once on a landing trajectory.

You can see where this is going.

 

I very promptly accidentally jettisoned the command pod from the interceptor. No engines, no RCS, no way to establish a re-entry trajectory.

 

It was time to stage a daring rescue!

Getting that lander, with no RCS, into a close rendezvous is some of the best flying I have ever done. Once I parked about 300m away, I flew the stranded Kerbal to the impromptu rescue ship. One of the crucial features of the lander was a ladder running the entire length that was installed so that Kerbals could safely disembark on Kerbin. My lander was also mercifully blessed with stable re-entry aerodynamics. It naturally flew backwards in atmosphere. See, while there was no re entry heat to kill the guy riding on the outside of my lander, Kerbals don't have enough grip to stay in place during usual reentry deceleration, so I had to constantly take control of the joyrider and move him back up the ladder before he fell off the bottom. That the ship also had drogue chutes was a blessing. I burned the engines at full power the entire way down, because I knew that if I opened the chutes at too high a speed, the kerbal would be flung off the ship. Drogue chutes were gentle enough to avoid this, and helped the LV-N engines slow me down enough to safely open the main chutes.

After that, there was nothing more I could do. I turned SAS off, and took control of the outside Kerbal. It's the only time I've ever landed a ship I wasn't controlling at the time. The ship landed in the water (which handily destroyed the engines before they could kill anyone), and everyone survived.

[AbacusWizard]

Outrunning the explosion!

 

I was sending some mess of claw-contraptions out to an asteroid and was done with the next-to-last stage, so I pushed spacebar to decouple... but then realized to my horror that I hadn't set throttle to zero first, and that there was still some fuel left in the disconnected tanks. I hit X to shut down the atomic engines, but it was too late; the flame jet had already ignited the tanks and an explosion was in progress. In a blind panic I opened up the throttle to full hoping to at least pull clear of the explosion, and without even thinking about it my fingers pressed F2 and F1 at the same time, giving me this great screenshot.

[oversoul]

I think mine just happened. If not, definitely top three. I wanted to test my new OPT install in sandbox, but instead I just used the OPT hypersonic cockpit to built an experimental RTOS (runway to orbit shuttle... not SSTO... it uses jet fuel drop tanks that get staged when I transition to rocket power).

Well, I didn't have the juice to circularize after a perfect, well-balanced runway takeoff and atmospheric flight with a 80KM apogee. So instead of reverting or abandoning the flight, I coasted down into atmo, performed a braking left hand 180 turn and coasted in to the "Korea" land mass... first "Abort to Korea" maneuver me, I think!

 

[Mitchz95]

I was bringing home two Kerbals from Minmus but had greatly underestimated the delta-v requirements: I had enough to escape Minmus, but nowhere near enough to get inside Kerbin's atmosphere, and I only had about six days of life support left. After forty minutes of manipulating maneuver nodes I finally came up with a trajectory that used a very close (as in, I could see my shadow) Mun gravity assist to fling me into the atmosphere. They made it home with twelve seconds to spare.

[Evanitis]

Definitely the time when I designed a rescue craft but forgot to include parachutes.. or a door. Kerbal Krash System made it extra-fun.

 

Edited February 16, 2016 by Evanitis

[Mitchz95]

Can't believe I forgot this one...

My ship (the U.K.S. Stargazer, pictured above) entered Eeloo orbit, going retrograde to take advantage of the Oberth effect. Once I had circularized at 110km, I deployed my lander (the Solstice) and its three-Kerbal crew to make a landing. The touchdown was a success, a flag was planted, and the team collected enough science to keep the scientists busy for months.

Then I looked at the fuel readout.

Solstice had less than 20% of its fuel left. Enough to lift off, but nowhere near enough to circularize even if I tapped into the monopropellant supply (most of which I'd still need to return to the Stargazer). Fortunately, thanks to the magic of quicksaving and quickloading, I was able to determine that if I launched straight up, I'd be able to get the lander to an apoapsis of 40km before burning out, followed by an eight-minute fall back to Eeloo. I then had the (unmanned) Stargazer lower its orbit to 40km, and waited until a fly-over was four minutes away.

Then I quicksaved. And then I launched.

Solstice blasted into space with all the power its Poodle engine could provide. It burned out at 40km, exactly as planned, and then I switched to Stargazer and fine-tuned the encounter (by now about three minutes left) to get within 100m. I managed to do it, killed relative velocity, and immediately quicksaved. In hindsight that was a terrible mistake: there was no going back, one way or another.

So now both ships are tumbling toward Eeloo with less than four minutes to rendezvous, dock, and burn back into orbit. The Stargazer has no command pod, and therefore no way to store science if two Kerbals decided to make heroic sacrifices while the third escaped. And on top of all that, Solstice has a very limited supply of monopropellant remaining. So using tons of it to close those 100m nice and fast is not an option.

It actually turned out to be easier than I thought; I pulled it off on my second try. But the fact that I got within ten kilometers of the surface (again, falling straight down) combined with the fact that this is what happened to play on my iPod throughout made it way more epic than I could have imagined.

After that, things went more or less as planned. I departed Eeloo's SOI (the landing had happened to coincide with my target's transfer window) and made a quick stop at Space Station Odyssey (orbiting Dres) to refuel before coming home. Finally, a good five years after the initial launch, my weary crew made landfall at the South pole.

By far my most dramatic mission in the game so far.

[kotomikun]

Just had a pretty good one yesterday: tried to return a couple of kerbals from Minmus, which would have been quick and easy, except they flew back in an ancient, glitchy, and poorly-constructed vessel.

SAS wouldn't lock to anything, and on reentry I remembered that this ship was abandoned because I forgot the pod's decoupler. The pod was also a mod-pod that drains power like crazy and has very little crash tolerance (it's not intended for reentry), and I didn't want to risk decoupling-via-atmospheric-heating, so I tried to do a powered landing. Plenty of fuel, but the engines weren't designed for use in atmosphere and became ineffective about 10 seconds before impact... I was still falling at nearly 200 m/s. Pulled the parachutes as a last resort, expecting them to snap under the weight, but they held, and slowed the craft enough that only most of it exploded. The pod miraculously survived, and the kerbals presumably went home and sued KSC for negligence.

 

[Entropiated]

I didn't take any pictures of this, but mine happened during SSTO testing. Bill and Jeb were in the cockpit of a plane made up mostly of Mk 2 parts. It flew really well going up and got to an 85km orbit with plenty of fuel to spare. While I was up in orbit, I decided to go back to the space center for something, then came back. This would be vital later on. So, I started the descent back through. I kept the nose up a fair bit to bleed of speed, but avoided making any drastic maneuvers at all. I made it down to about 25 km and was down to a temperature of less than 1500 degrees when, out of nowhere, it starts to pitch, and roll and yaw randomly. I'm in a total uncontrollable spin. I'm sure that the craft will disintegrate, but somehow it keeps together long enough to get me down below 20 km and 1000 m/s second, so re-entry is past the deadly stage, but still the plane will NOT stop tumbling. I hit escape to revert the flight... but it's greyed out. Darn it, I went back to the Space Center! So now I figure Bill and Jeb are both dead, and I start wondering what I'm going to write in the letters to their families. Except... well, I still have some fuel in the engines. Might as well see if that'll help. I spool up the Whiplash engines at about 15 km and while the tumbling doesn't stop, it does seem to slow down a bit. I try to get it straightened out, but it seems that the closer I get to level flight, the wobblier it gets. The most stable configuration is tail down. I fight it all the way down to 5 km and realize I might have enough fuel in the engines to stop me. I continue to struggle and struggle, watching Bill and Jeb's faces contort from fear. At under 100 m of altitude over the ocean, I'm travelling at under 10 m/s and still slowing. The tail touches the water at 1 m/s and the rest of the back end follows. It bobs up and down for a few moments, then crashes on it's side. That's when I get up with both arms over my head and do a victory lap around the house. BEST. LANDING. EVER. LOL

[Randox]

23 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

I was bringing home two Kerbals from Minmus but had greatly underestimated the delta-v requirements: I had enough to escape Minmus, but nowhere near enough to get inside Kerbin's atmosphere, and I only had about six days of life support left. After forty minutes of manipulating maneuver nodes I finally came up with a trajectory that used a very close (as in, I could see my shadow) Mun gravity assist to fling me into the atmosphere. They made it home with twelve seconds to spare.

You have reminded me of another couple of stories

Gravity Re-Acclimation

I don't land on the Mun that often. Most of my missions in the Kerbin system these days are mining expeditions, and Minmus is a much better target. However, I like the scenery on Mun more, and sometimes I like to go back, for old times sake. So one day, back in .90 I think, I decided to take a trip to the Mun. I don't really have a dedicated lander for that anymore, so I decided to take my Kethane miner, a ship which is fairly heavy (that ship was probably around 35-40 tonnes), and was equipped with 3 LV-N engines.

The problem is that I hadn't landed on anything but Minmus in a while that didn't have an atmosphere, and I kind of forgot just how much stronger gravity is on the Mun. By the time I started burning retrograde, it was too late, though I didn't realize it at first. I started getting uneasy about the numbers I was seeing 30 seconds into the retrograde burn. By a minute, I was pretty sure everyone on that ship was about to die. I tried burning the RCS thrusters for a few seconds, but that didn't do much, and there was no way I could vent all the fuel (and lighten the ship) any meaningful amount before impact.

Probably 60 seconds into the burn, I switched from burning retrograde to normal. Missing the landing site wasn't going to matter if my lander impacted the surface at 100m/s. It was enough, and the lander started to pull up with a pant's soiling 300m to spare. To give you an idea of how bad it would have been if I hand't made the switch, it took another 3 kilometers to kill off all my lateral velocity. Now, that was about a 60 degree burn angle from normal, but still. I figure if I had waited another 3-5 seconds before switching to a normal burn, no one on that flight would have survived (I might have been able to save at least one by going EVA I suppose).

 

We need more lift Captain!

This one is the most recent of my near misses, from this very patch, in my latest Ore Miner. The Ore miner is a very similar design to the old Kethane miners, though a bit heavier. 4 LV-N engines now, but she weighs 60 tonnes on the launch pad, and in theory, 70 tonnes fully loaded with ore (minus ~2-3 tonnes in spent fuel from landing). My point being, even on Minmus, she doesn't exactly have an excess of thrust when taking off to bring ore up to the orbiting refinery.

So this leads into the first time I ever used this design on Minmus. I landed on an ore deposit in one of the Methane lakes, because tall top heavy ships on narrow landing gear don't like slopes. What I did not do was take a good look at the surrounding topography when it came to take off. When it was time to lift off and meet up with the refinery, I failed to take into account the 5km tall mountain that was not that far away, and directly in my flight path.

I did spot the problem with plenty of time to avoid it, but the world map projected that I would miss, so I stayed on course. That did not however do anything to prevent white knuckles while I went IVA and watched the radar altimeter quite closely. The lowest reading I saw was around 600m, so I guess I managed to select the perfect launch angle by chance in the end on that one.

This is the very ore miner that almost hit a mountain on Minmus. The landing gear was repaired once it was back in orbit (wasn't going to chance that on the ground):

[AbacusWizard]

1 hour ago, Mitchz95 said:

I was bringing home two Kerbals from Minmus but had greatly underestimated the delta-v requirements: I had enough to escape Minmus, but nowhere near enough to get inside Kerbin's atmosphere, and I only had about six days of life support left. After forty minutes of manipulating maneuver nodes I finally came up with a trajectory that used a very close (as in, I could see my shadow) Mun gravity assist to fling me into the atmosphere. They made it home with twelve seconds to spare.

Some of my favorite moments in KSP are when I'm low on fuel and far from home, I calculate my available ∆v, and I mess around with maneuvers until I come up with a plan to get home (or at least to a safe place to rendezvous with a rescue craft) that just barely fits into the budget. So exciting!

[AbacusWizard]

43 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

Solstice had less than 20% of its fuel left. Enough to lift off, but nowhere near enough to circularize even if I tapped into the monopropellant supply (most of which I'd still need to return to the Stargazer). Fortunately, thanks to the magic of quicksaving and quickloading, I was able to determine that if I launched straight up, I'd be able to get the lander to an apoapsis of 40km before burning out, followed by an eight-minute fall back to Eeloo. I then had the (unmanned) Stargazer lower its orbit to 40km, and waited until a fly-over was four minutes away.

 

Oh wow--I've often thought about this sort of rescue, in which the orbiter briefly goes suborbital to pick up crew from a compromised lander and then returns to orbit, but it's never actually happened in my game. Well done.

 

Have you seen Nassault's short film "Jeb"? Similar idea, but with a rover instead of a lander. Very moving story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Mtv_HN184

[Randox]

9 minutes ago, AbacusWizard said:

 

Oh wow--I've often thought about this sort of rescue, in which the orbiter briefly goes suborbital to pick up crew from a compromised lander and then returns to orbit, but it's never actually happened in my game. Well done.

 

Have you seen Nassault's short film "Jeb"? Similar idea, but with a rover instead of a lander. Very moving story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Mtv_HN184

Yeah, that's really well done. I would rate rescues where the craft in peril is not in stable orbit to be just about the most difficult mission you can run. Mercifully, I've never had to pull it off. I can also sympathise with the tumbles. I've never run an SSTO, but I've put more than one plane into KSP's equivalent of a flat spin, and boy, in the cases where I have actually salvaged the situation, it's been too close every time. The solution for me was to play DCS world, which forced me to learn about Angle of Attack, and how to not die.

[LordKael]

I had a RCS enhanced Minmus rover with 2 crew and a couple hour's LS left on one of the ice plains on Minmus. Unfortunately, my lander's solar panels had broken on descent, to the point where I had zero EC left. So, I found a nice little hill with the right inclination relative to the orbiting return stage, and quicksaved so that I could have multiple attempts. In a James Bond worthy jump, my little RCS boosted rover made a 4min suborbital hop within 300m of my orbiting craft, which was able to dock and retrieve the crew. Only took half a dozen or so tries to make the jump at the right time, too. 

[Triop]

I did a roll while flying under the bridge high speed... and got away with it !

Want proof ?

...You try pressing F1 taking a screenshot while doing that !

[AbacusWizard]

Clearly we need a mod that detects impending moments of extreme awesomeness and automatically starts recording video.

[Randox]

1 hour ago, AbacusWizard said:

Clearly we need a mod that detects impending moments of extreme awesomeness and automatically starts recording video.

I don't know if Shadow Play has it or not, but AMD's screen recorder does have an option to constantly record the last 30 seconds (or whatever) of gameplay that if you do something awesome, you can save the highlight. Perhaps we all need to start using it 

[Bev7787]

I was just over 70km for an orbit once

[RA3236]

Uhh.. Right now. Gravity assist from the Mun to Minmus ended up getting me to Jool. Minmus apparently can do good slingshots.

[AbacusWizard]

1 hour ago, RA3236 said:

Uhh.. Right now. Gravity assist from the Mun to Minmus ended up getting me to Jool. Minmus apparently can do good slingshots.

Yeesh, that's quite a gravity assist. Were you close enough during the flyby that you could taste the mint?

[Skorpychan]

A demonstration of a mun landing went kinda horizontal. I tried to flip it back over, but it didn't quite manage it. Over and over, it just wouldn't tip back upright. After a while, I tried to use the engine to tip it upright, using a little thrust. Didn't work, started burning fuel, but I'd passed the 'frak it' threshold by then. So, I cranked the throttle all the way open and took off then and there. Nearly horizontal at first, but tipping vertical as soon as I made it off the ground. Then back to Kerbin, only to not have any fuel left once I'd got an aerobraking intercept. Chutes and airbrakes all the way down, then a nice neat landing on the ground.

[RA3236]

30 minutes ago, AbacusWizard said:

Yeesh, that's quite a gravity assist. Were you close enough during the flyby that you could taste the mint?

Yep, barely got 100m to spare  

[luizopiloto]

The wing strike bug... It didn't killed a kerbal of mine yet... but got close to it more times than I can remember...
Now, if the craft have one of the affected parts, it must have an escape system and only land on island runway if returning from orbits above 100Km or in high inclination...

Edited February 17, 2016 by luizopiloto