What is the most badass thing you have done in KSP?

[mrclucks]

Eva'd Bill from a 1 maned craft barely above the atmosphere of kerbin and ran out of fuel. He was on a orbit that would hit the atmosphere so I followed him down through the atmosphere, he hits the ground, bounces a few hundred meters up and starts sliding for about 3 minutes real time.  He stops, gets up and has a huge grin on his face.  Needless to say I retired him to the island runway.  

This was also with reentry heat on..

[TheEpicSquared]

When I deorbited my old space station and then landed it safely just off the coast of the KSC with onboard engines 

[Ultimate Steve]

A few more:

1. I had an old ringstation sitting in a 250km orbit. I wanted to get rid of it. So, I send up an SSTO to return the Kerbals. I get to the station. There is one more Kerbal than there is seats. So what do I do? I stuff him into the cargo bay. I re-entered with heating on. He lived to tell the tale.

2. I don't remember the specifics of the mission, but I was piloting mostly by map view. I was sending a station to one of Kerbin's moons. I get into orbit. Then I come out of map mode. I'm orbiting the wrong moon. And I had enough fuel to get to the other moon and complete the mission.

3. In my HTT Career mode playthrough, I had a contract for a rescue mission. Before I had sent a Kerbal to orbit. In my mind, the scenario I devised is that she only had an hors worth of oxygen left. So the engineers redesigned the suborbital tourist plane into a vehicle that was orbit capable and rescued her with 3 minutes to spare. (It was a plane on top of a solid booster or two. That had failed at even suborbital at least 3 times in its 5 flight lifespan.)

[TheEpicSquared]

31 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Then I come out of map mode. I'm orbiting the wrong moon.

Lol how is that even possible??  

Edited August 28, 2016 by TheEpicSquared

[Ultimate Steve]

58 minutes ago, TheEpicSquared said:

Lol how is that even possible??  

This isn't mine, but it's somewhere in that video. I was probably focused on other things.

[TheEpicSquared]

36 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

This isn't mine, but it's somewhere in that video. I was probably focused on other things.

Actually, come to think of it, my friend once tried to go to Minmus, since I told him it was easier than the Mun. Since it was easier, he thought it was the inner moon of Kerbin (which is the Mun, not Minmus) and consequently there wasn't enough fuel to complete the mission. Needless to say, a rescue mission was launched a day later.  

Edited August 28, 2016 by TheEpicSquared

[cantab]

3 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

I'm orbiting the wrong moon.

[Red Iron Crown]

One of my favorite craft, not even a spacecraft: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/61004449/KSP/1.0.5/screenshot156.png

One of my trickiest missions (KSC-Laythe surface-KSC in a single stage with no refueling): http://imgur.com/a/nuITt#0

Another tricky one, landing on both moons of Kerbin and returning with just 5 parts: http://imgur.com/a/WK14J#0

My most extreme landing (it's stable as long as EC holds out): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/61004449/KSP/1.0/screenshot142.png

[Sharpy]

1 hour ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Another tricky one, landing on both moons of Kerbin and returning with just 5 parts: http://imgur.com/a/WK14J#0

Gawd, you used the MK2 tank as a wing surface for landing?

And of course every turn after a while of being idle required firing the engine to generate electricity?

[Red Iron Crown]

Just now, Sharpy said:

And of course every turn after a while of being idle required firing the engine to generate electricity?

The pod had enough EC capacity that I never needed to burn just for generation (though I was pretty careful about using SAS). I made this for a challenge, another participant did the whole mission without any EC generation at all, which is pretty impressive.

[The_Rocketeer]

Recreating the 'watch the birdie' scene from Top Gun in supersonic VTOL jets, sans autopilot. I spend about half a day achieving this. Worth it.

[Red Iron Crown]

12 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

Recreating the 'watch the birdie' scene from Top Gun in supersonic VTOL jets, sans autopilot. I spend about half a day achieving this. Worth it.

But...how? 

[The_Rocketeer]

51 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

But...how? 

Truthfully, a lot of practice. Using a well-balanced VTOL design was a huge blessing - even though I didn't use the vertical thrust at all for this, the fact that wet- and dry-CoM were right on top of each other meant it would just plug on in a more-or-less straight line with zero control input. Every couple of minutes I had to switch crafts to make a pitch-down adjustment (because the lead plane didn't follow the curvature of the surface), and then I'd have about 90 seconds to try to invert, catch-up, match speed, and get into position. There were many failed attempts, but the real beauty of it was the aircraft were also fitted with stock missiles, so I could vent my frustrations by shooting down one of the planes and starting over

[purpleivan]

Number 1.

I don't know if it counts as "bad ass" but when I was in the process of flying a lander from Kerbin to the Mun in the shortest time possible (I made it in 37m 24s) for the Shortest Step challenge, I found myself deliberately burning straight down at the surface of the Mun that I was rapidly approaching, in order to increase my rate of descent, after it became clear my suicide burn had been a bit on the cautious side.

Jeb smiling away in the hot seat of course.

 

Number 2.

I can't remember which challenge it was an entry for, but I had sent a lander to the Mun (seems to be a theme here) with one Kerbal in a command seat attached to a rover and another safely inside a MK1 Lander Can. When it came time to leave for Kerbin I realised my error of having two Kerbals and only one seat in the vehicle to sit in. I had a command module in orbit with two seats to get my guys home, but only the one to get the pair of them back into orbit.

My solution was to have one of them EVA and hang on to the ladder, which at first seemed a simple way to get the job done, until I realised that the guy on the outside was slipping down the ladder whenever I applied thrust. This resulted in my having to constantly switch focus between the lander can to give the vehicle some motion and the EVA'd kerbal to have him climb to the top of the ladder.

At last I got the thing up into orbit, at which point I had the kerbal on the outside let go of the ladder, so that the one in the lander can could rendezvous with the command module, then collect his fellow crewman before making their way home.

At least the guy on the outside got to do a kind of reverse Major Kong.

Edited August 29, 2016 by purpleivan

[Chiron0224]

Had a Mun lander tip over on Mun.  I then carefully throttled up and ramped it off the edge of a crater in order to get back off the ground and get back to orbit.  To this day I build my landers wide and low so this won't happen again.

[Jetski]

Caught the first launch window to Moho, and successfully completed a manned roundtrip. Day 7 I think. In a fresh career. On Hard.

Managed to be the first and only person to complete the Ultimate Challenge (one command pod landing on every body) for a few months, until @Kergarin did it much more elegantly  Val covered a lot of ground. 

Flew a long multiplanet mission assembling the ship underway with KIS from recovered debris.  Piracy in space!

Edited August 30, 2016 by Jetski