What is the biggest mission failure you have ever had?

[Provisional Name 12]

45 minutes ago, Nikolai said:

Note the remaining propellant in his pack.  He's going to need to time a good jump, and won't be able to slow himself.

You should be able to get him to jump up there, yea your taking a bit of a risk but for a rescue of any kind your basically out the ship anyway. Honestly in a lot of my really slimmed down crafts like that I have found that even if I knocked it over the MK1 reaction wheel was actually powerful enough to upright it enough to launch. anyway. You can always loose weight by dumping a little fuel or any of the monopropellant if you included it. It is hard to say since most of my craft like that had only one tank on the main stage and smaller ones on the side that would jettison for extra delta v (like a micro level asparagus staging). Still, I reckon I have stood up slightly smaller crafts that would be experiencing more gravity on the mun than this one is likely to be experiencing on minimus.

[Higgs]

@Nikolai Even then, tis minmus, should work. And as @SpaceCommunism points out, sas should be strong enough to rotate it if it falls.  

[Sharpy]

7 hours ago, Nikolai said:

Note the remaining propellant in his pack.  He's going to need to time a good jump, and won't be able to slow himself.

Wiggle around the legs enough to make one explode, so that the ship falls over. The RW in the cockpit will be aplenty to set it upright.

[Superfluous J]

Gotta be the Grand Tour I gave up on at Jool, after doing EVERY world except Vall, Tylo, and Laythe (and Jool of course).

Technically I could send a(nother) refueller, but by the time I ran out of fuel at Tylo I just lost all will to continue.

[Laie]

On 8/10/2016 at 6:50 AM, Stratzenblitz75 said:

I once tried to build a giant rocket SSTO:

 

As explosions go, this one is a real beauty. Quoted because I'm loving it.

Edit: can you remember, what's with the tank making for the sea? I suspect it might be the guilty party.

Edited September 22, 2016 by Laie

[ag3nt108]

a bumpy landing on Duna left me with damaged solar panels, unfortunately the GFX didn't model the damage and I was not aware until I tried to launch for ascent to find my modules dead and out of power. But by far my biggest mission failure was spending 2 weeks setting up my minmus mining base only to discover that in game bugs made my designs unusable, Basically ended that career save.

[DrLicor]

I had to bring 54 kerbal toerist in a orbit around kerbin, orbit around mun and a landing on the moon. That last one was a big failure. 

Everything was going ok, untill I decoupled a fired stage which was still providing thrust, resulting in a high apoapsis above mun, you really want see those happy faces of the toerist when they where on the highest point. A few minutes later the massive lander crashed into the surface, 2 crewcapsules survived the massive impact thanks to kerbal physics. 

The plan was to land the lander on the mun, refuel 2 stages, get back to kerbin and get a excrementsload of money. Now I had to build a rescuer to rescue the remaining survivers.

[Frozen_Heart]

Set up an attempted Duna landing and colonisation attempt a while ago. Put a mothership in orbit then brought the payloads and crew up in preparation. The rockets second stage was still attached as well, due to it having a big chunk of dV still.

The transfer burn to Duna went well, and due to the high dV I arrived much faster than I would have using a standard transfer and then did an aggressive aerocapture. The whole thing went perfect. On approach the satellite was released to head into polar orbit.

Then the disasters started. Base went first, but due to staging errors its chutes burnt up, and I then discovered that the mothership had drained its fuel so propulsive landing was also not an option. With the base scattered over the southern hemisphere I decided that I could at least get some science so sent down the rover and its crew. What I didn't realise was that kerbal engineers landing calculator didn't take incoming mountains into account. The stationary crew lander met the same fate.

With everything but the satellite destroyed the backup probe control brought the now empty mothership back to Kerbin, to await its next mission...

 

[Flamingo]

14 hours ago, Nikolai said:

Note the remaining propellant in his pack.  He's going to need to time a good jump, and won't be able to slow himself.

 

13 hours ago, SpaceCommunism said:

You should be able to get him to jump up there, yea your taking a bit of a risk but for a rescue of any kind your basically out the ship anyway. Honestly in a lot of my really slimmed down crafts like that I have found that even if I knocked it over the MK1 reaction wheel was actually powerful enough to upright it enough to launch. anyway. You can always loose weight by dumping a little fuel or any of the monopropellant if you included it. It is hard to say since most of my craft like that had only one tank on the main stage and smaller ones on the side that would jettison for extra delta v (like a micro level asparagus staging). Still, I reckon I have stood up slightly smaller crafts that would be experiencing more gravity on the mun than this one is likely to be experiencing on minimus.

 

7 hours ago, Higgs said:

@Nikolai Even then, tis minmus, should work. And as @SpaceCommunism points out, sas should be strong enough to rotate it if it falls.  

Dont worry guys, i've got him down again. I just send a lander with the landercan very close to the ground so he could walk in and get refueled, then flew up and back to Kerbin.

[A35K]

I once had this Vall lander from a mission to Jool which had a rover attached underneath vertically, and then before de-orbiting the rover was meant to use RCS to re-dock itself horizontally under the lander, so that the wheels would touch the ground when it landed. Well, due to the landing gear, it did not fit in the horizontal position. So I rotated the lander so that the rover was positioned on top of it, and fired the engines to keep it there while de-orbiting and landing (the rover was not secured, the lander had no docking port on top). The craziest thing is that it actually worked, both lander and rover landed safely! Well, I guess overall this wasn't really a fail...

[Mycroft]

My favorite and funniest failure is a recent bomber I tried to make with procedural wings. It failed miserably because the procedural control surfaces that I spent lots of time on trying to make them look pretty suddenly turned out to only be attached to the wing at one solitary point, resulting in huge flapping effects I couldn't get rid of. The plane could sorta fly... barely. So I figured, "What the heck? I'll just drop the bombs so at least I can get some cool explosions out of it." But I ended up dropping a ton of bombs while going too fast... so they collided with the other bombs in the bay. Now that was a big explosion, but it kept going... and going... and going! I finally realized that I had triggered the glitch I had always wanted to trigger: KSP got confused as to how many explosions there actually were, so it glitched and gave me a constant explosion. I could fly it, but the entire plane was literally a fireball that was not destroyed but still exploding. I haven't enjoyed glitches that much in the past, but on this one I found myself laughing extremely hard! Oh my word. That was the best failure in a long time. 

It gave me some awesome screenshots too!

[Nikolai]

9 hours ago, Higgs said:

Even then, tis minmus, should work.

Yeah, sure.  I just mentioned what I did because of the "Slow your drop with EVA" advice.  He had no propellant left in his pack to slow his drop with.  He'd have to jump it.

Or send a rescue, like he ended up doing.  Either way.

[JadeOfMaar]

I think my biggest mission failure was with a craft I named Flying Miner. It was a 2.5-3.75m Mun-hopper with plenty Ore storage, an ISRU and a Kerbodyne Rhino. Its purpose was to keep a low-orbit Mun station fueled for visiting ships and while landed, be a fuel cache and secondary utility vessel. I believe it ran out of fuel during descent and/or landed on an incredible slope and may have prior lost one or more landing legs. It got so rekt and painted the walls of a small crater behind a larger one, some 80km away from the Mun base. Fortunately the lander can and its 2 crew survived. The rescue craft was a tank-style rover built with Kerbal Foundries parts (so KSP 1.0.5) and the rescue party was 6 large, all in command chairs (8 chairs total). They drove that distance and back with the help of a Rapier in Closed Cycle. The monster of a lag on close approach due to the debris field took some fun out of the encounter.