Your Biggest Failures

[RedDwarfIV]

I was working on testing a spaceplane for the Mod Community Base - it has a cart for a forward landing gear, allowing it to traverse Mun without engines.

I landed it near Werewolf Station, and drove it towards it.

The vessel impacted, knocking over the base, and breaking the spaceplane in half.

[flaillomanz]

Where to start?

First, there was the time that I accidentally time-warped while operating the Advanced Robotics in my first folding satellite.

A mistake which was compounded by my stupid reaction of immediately shift+tabbing to tell my competitor on steam (we were having a space race ).

Fun fact: Shift+tabbing into the steam overlay will cause your throttle to open wide. I barely managed to correct my mistake, and the periapsis of my hopelessly mangled satellite is just shy of 80KM.

And then there was the time I beat the somewhat stacked odds to - completely by accident - collide with some of the debris floating around Kerbin, mid Munar-transfer burn. I\'m still not sure what it was - it looked to be an RCS tank with attached decoupler and RCS boosters - but it packed quite a punch. It impacted right in the middle of the final two stages, destroying my landing engine, and the still-burning liquid engine clipped off my parachute on the way up. This all took place in the space of about 5 seconds. I did not notice the debris until too late as the camera was facing retrograde - it\'s sheer dumb luck I even spotted it at all.

[Khrissetti]

Well, the other day, while sitting on the moon, ready to head for home, I hit stage, and nothing happened. That happens, occasionally, so I just casually hit space again. The capsule popped off and smashed on the ground.

Only then did I realize I had the throttle at zero.

Ohh I know that one. In my earlier landers I started adding two decouplers on the last stage just to make sure I didn\'t seperate everything.

[Bekiekutmoar]

Recently a capsule was stranded on the Mun. I sended a rescue-vessel in an attempt to pick up the stranded capsule off the Munar surface and return home. During orbit around the Mun however, I somehow hit the spacebar and the capsule of the rescue-vessel was seperated from the rest. Now I\'ve got a rescue-ship on the way with the intention to rescue the capsule of the previous rescue-vessel that was supposed to rescue the stranded capsule on the Mun ... !

[Vanamonde]

Yeah. I don\'t know how it happened either. ^#$*@! springy landing legs!

[SiliconPyro]

So much fail! I just landed near the Mun Arch and set out with a rover to get a closer look. Well, in excitement I turned to sharply and rolled, igniting my RCS tank. Good thing it was unmanned!

[GOOMH]

My two most recent fails:

1. forgetting to adjust my staging pre-flight which caused me to jettison my Munar orbital and TMI stage prematurely leaving me with just my lander on a slingshot trajectory.

2. Recently I built rocket similars to Robert Goddard\'s first liquid fuel rocket (Engine above with fuel tank below). After many attempts all ending in no success due to it not taking off I realized physics were against me since my engine was pushing the fuel into the ground preventing liftoff. I should have done a bit more research into Goddard\'s design first.

[Commander Zoom]

Ohh I know that one. In my earlier landers I started adding two decouplers on the last stage just to make sure I didn\'t seperate everything.

A scrap-paper note with 'NO' in big letters also works.

(I think I posted this earlier in this thread, but I did something \'better\' - made it all the way back to Kerbin, then jettisoned the service module instead of making my re-entry burn.)

[Anachronda]

So much fail! I just landed near the Mun Arch and set out with a rover to get a closer look. Well, in excitement I turned to sharply and rolled, igniting my RCS tank. Good thing it was unmanned!

That\'s why you need to put wheels everywhere!

[flaillomanz]

This just in.

I was going for a low-as-kerbally-possible Munar orbit, and forgot to avoid a certain famous landmark. Too bad I wasn\'t a couple of degrees down and to the left, or I might\'ve managed to pass right through it. Instant kablooie. Coincidentally, that was the first time I\'ve managed to get closer than ~20KM to the Arch, in my entire career.

[TerLoki]

So, so many fails...

First was when I decided to be really fancy and have Munar lander on my Rama heavy lifter be mounted to the side. No matter what I tried to even it out that always led to a rather spectacular fireworks display.

Then there were the spaceplanes, all of them. I think the only ones I ever got off the ground were little Kliper-type things the size of a lander and strapped to the nose of a rocket, and most of those wound up in deep space because I hadn\'t learn how to use the map or how much thrust was TOO much just yet.

(I think I posted this earlier in this thread, but I did something \'better\' - made it all the way back to Kerbin, then jettisoned the service module instead of making my re-entry burn.)

This has also happened to me more times than I care to admit.

The most recent, and probably most soul-crushing in that 'so close, yet so far' way, were my latest batch of Munar landers. The first one blew up on impact. The second one blew up on impact, but the crew module survived. The third one was my closest to a perfect manual landing, it lost a landing strut (Soyuz mod), fell over, then fell apart when I tried to turn the ascent stage upright (it\'s currently trying to push the Mun out of orbit). Then came my first MechJeb design, I get to orbit and separate the lander with no trouble, but when I tell the autopilot to land it flashes 'insufficient thrust to land'; so I ditch the descent stage and land with just the ascent thrusters... Into a hill which rolls it over causing all but one engine to detonate. FINALLY I get everything perfect: MechJeb capsule, more powerful descent engine, smooth landing site, it\'s all coming together. The lander touches down and promptly falls over, and in my flailing with the RCS and the solar panels I added for decoration to right this thing the ascent thrusters, once again, blow up.