That Moment When you realize....

[BoneHacker]

That moment when you realize you forgot your passengers once you've reached Minmus.
That moment when you realize on re-entry you forgot to equip your capsule with parachutes.
That moment when you realize you have no landing gear when you are about to land on a new planet/moon.

What are things you realized once you got to your destination?

When I forgot my passengers, i decided to rescue a Kerbal around Minmus for a contract instead, and land and make it a science run.
When I forgot my landing gear I used my storage bay door 'Open' command to bounce the ship up enough to burn thrusters to escape.
When I forgot my parachutes, I left the craft in orbit and did a self rescue mission to retrieve my Kerbal.

What did you do to solve your delimas.

[Superfluous J]

That moment that Bill hitched a ride with Jeb in the ship that was going up to rescue Bob. This was way back when Science Mode was career mode and we only had our own rescue contracts to fulfill.

To solve the problem, I kicked Bill out of the capsule somewhere around 7km up. He respawned.

For some reason this was perfectly fine in my mind while killing Bob out in space was unthinkable.

[samstarman5]

Took on a rather demanding space station contract.

Started with the habitat section to fulfill the habitation need. Contract required room for 6 kerbals, but no stipulation on there actually being 6 kerbals present, so just had Jeb bring it up.

Decided to go with the fuel requirement next, so sent up a nice big fuel module with an AI pilot.  Fuel module ended up in a higher orbit and no immediate window to rendezvous with habitat module.

Decided to send up second habitat module to join up with fuel module, with AI pilot.  Rendezvous successful. Jeb still in orbit with first habitat module.

To fulfill contract, needed a power module with lots of power storage. By now had large solar panel tech, so included a pair with that module.  Valentina took that up with a successful rendezvous, completing the contract.

 

Realized that when you need a large fuel cargo for your space station, it is good to send that up first and let it choose the orbit.  Habitat modules, being much lighter, are a lot more flexible and can go wherever the fuel module wants to be.

Also realized that contracts are rather flexible, and don't pin down on anything you send up that satisfies most of the points on the first launch.  Jeb is still in the first habitat module, awaiting ground control's decision on whether to keep that module in orbit for communications relay, or to either ferry Jeb over to the assembled station or have him RTB and scuttle the first habitat module.  It is self sustaining with a pair of small deploying panels, batteries, and a tier 1 relay dish.  It is pretty much a habitable communications satellite as it is.

[MinimalMinmus]

The moment when you EVA for science... and your kerbal falls.

The moment you realize you forgot one small part of your contract, but that you won't be able to do for ages.

The moment you read the contract you've just signed better.

The moment your mun lander falls with 3 kerbals on board. (I'm actually pretty good at correcting this kind of problem)

"It's at this moment jeb knew, he effed up"

Edited January 8, 2017 by MinimalMinmus

[ottothesilent]

That moment when you ram a space station hard enough to destroy your SSTO's forward intake, essentially stranding Jeb in space, since he can't survive reentry without that intake.

That moment when your minmus lander fails, so you EVA Bill to a low orbit, and then forget him for 27 years because you never went to Minmus again

That moment when your Duna return vehicle becomes an Ike lander, crashes, and forces 3 kerbals to EVA into orbit, but now your Kerbals in the Duna station are trapped

That moment when you stage away your retro-engine and have to use RCS to deorbit from Keosynchronous orbit, and it takes fifteen minutes

[BoneHacker]

Dang ottothesilent, you seem to have had it rough beyond me. Duna is far, although i can't believe you simply left a fellow Kerbal hanging around Minmus! Now that i've mastered it my next stage is Duna. But poor Bill, but then again I only use Jeb so I don't know or care who Bill is either! Haha! Let him hang in orbit for another 27 Years!

Edit: Also seems like 5thhorseman cares as little about Bill as yourself... Bill must not get along with people well. When I meet him..... I promise to put him in orbit EVA style around the Sun. I will post a picture soon.

Edited January 8, 2017 by BoneHacker

[Flamingo]

That moment you realize that you have forgotten your ladder and are out of EVA propellant, so you have to send a new lander up that Jeb can reach from the ground so he can refuel and then go back to the old lander and then fly to Kerbin, leaving the new lander behind.

[BoneHacker]

Flamingo, how hard and how long did you try jumping and spamming the grab/climb button? It must have been so close.

[purpleivan]

That moment that you realise that with your ship in orbit, the paying passengers that you had planned to take on a combined Mun and Minmus excursion are still back at the KSC. No problem just send them up in a cheap vehicle to rendezvous with the excursion vehicle. But then there's the moment that you realise that tourists can't EVA and your cheap vehicle to lift them to orbit was built without a docking port.

I also had a moment of realisation similar to 5thHorseman's when I sent a manned rescue vehicle to Mun that only had one (obviously full) seat. The solution was to have the rescued kerbal hang on to the ladder and after liftoff from the surface repeatedly switch between controlling the vehicle and the guy on the outside to move him to the top of the ladder, to stop him sliding  off.

A slow and rather irregular ascent, but it made orbit.

Edited January 8, 2017 by purpleivan

[seaces]

The moment you realize you have wrong staging order and you stage away everything up till the heat shield on the capsule....

[Flamingo]

4 hours ago, BoneHacker said:

Flamingo, how hard and how long did you try jumping and spamming the grab/climb button? It must have been so close.

I tried everything, even tipping over the rocket by getting under it or by walking into its legs, but nothing helped me. So Jeb stood there in the mint for some days before he got back in the warm and cozy pod.

[Der Anfang]

That moment when I realized during my Ascension Programmed that I was supposed to have an engineer along with the rest of my crew to go to Eve. However, when I discovered why mining Gilly was so slow, I realized that an extra scientist snuck on board in place of the original engineer's spot... must have tied up that pesky engineer and posed as them during the boarding procedure. Sigh.

[Leopard]

Probe to Eve, first landing in the current game, only my second landing there ever, landing gear exploded but pfff who cares landed, Science! occurred, then came to beam it home...

 

Ahh yes, some how I forgot to fit an antenna... Still on the plus side the probe has space for one so can just start that mission again.

 

face - desk.

[bengee777]

 

I can't say how many times this has happened to me, especially when trying to complete a land speed record.

[Aegolius13]

I used to forget the antenna and/or docking port on a shameful number of my station contracts.  I've improved a little (thanks to CommNet maybe), but still not perfect.

But I continue to forget the ore tank on approximately 50% of mining rigs.  

[Snark]

That moment when I realized, for the Nth time, that the rescued kerbal can't get into the ship because Jeb had stowed away in the capsule, again.  Eventually this happened enough that I got sufficiently irritated that I wrote a mod so that would never happen again, ever.

That moment when I realized, for the Nth time, that I had launched a ship with a bunch of solar panels on it and had forgotten to assign them all to action group 1 to enable toggling them all on/off with a button press, so I'll have to go around clicking each one individually to get them to open or close.  Again.  Eventually I got irritated enough that I wrote a mod so that would never happen again, ever.

(Can you tell that I'm often primarily motivated by irritation?)

That moment when I realized, as my crewed Eve lander approached its destination, that I had forgotten to launch the crew return vehicle that would pick up the kerbal from orbit after ascent from the surface.  And clearly it's not okay to let poor Bob think that Kerbin has forgotten him!  It's a matter of honor that his crew return vehicle will be there waiting for him when he arrives.  So I built a ship with a ludicrous amount of dV, and made the trip from Kerbin to Eve in eight days.  That's eight Kerbin days, i.e. 48 hours.  (This was back in 0.90, before reentry heat was a thing, so I could just aerobrake at Eve by slamming into atmosphere at several dozen kilometers per second.  That was... dramatic.  On approach, I kept finding myself automatically stabbing the "," key.  "Hey, why isn't this working?  Oh.. I'm not actually on time warp.")

[VikingStormtrooper]

That moment when I realize that reaching the orbit of another planet does NOT mean necessarily that I will find that planet at my arrival. I wish there were ephemerides in game, it would be a lot easier to know when to leave Earth, and to perform REAL Hohmann transfers!

[JacobJHC]

That moment when you get a Duna encounter when you are trying to go to Jool

That moment when you get a Jool encounter when you are trying to get to Eeloo

That moment when you realize SQUAD will probably try and sell new planets and new updates to us

That moment when you realize the solar panels are still in the VAB

[Nathair]

The moment when you unpack the complete suite of Surface Experiment Pack science modules that you hauled all the way from Kerbin and realize that you forgot to pack a screwdriver.

[Squidiness]

I forgot to deploy the solar panels on a probe... It wasn't fun

[simonh]

The moment when you realize the reason you can't dock to to that Clamp-O-Tron Sr on the space station, and keep bouncing off, is because the docking port is attached the wrong way round.

Simon Hibbs

[Zoidos]

When you realize that the probe will not perform the fine tune maneuver half way to dres because you forgot to deploy the antenna and your probe is now just an expensive piece of debris.

[Superfluous J]

That moment you send up a nearly-empty-of-fuel rocket to rendezvous with that huge tank of fuel you left in orbit, only to realize that without a probe core it was marked as debris and was deleted.

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

That moment when you realize that the surface-scanning satellite that you're sending to Duna is actually going to arrive before the relay satellite that you'd sent several days earlier, and thus be out of communication range when it's time to do the capture burn.

[JacobJHC]

Just now, Whisky Tango Foxtrot said:

That moment when you realize that the surface-scanning satellite that you're sending to Duna is actually going to arrive before the relay satellite that you'd sent several days earlier, and thus be out of communication range when it's time to do the capture burn.

Wait shouldn't it be close enough for some communication if they only launched a few days before? I think you can do solid retrograde burns without contact though so you should be able to get a rough orbit without a sync to Earth.