Your Craziest Mishap During a Mission

[Felsmak]

I was doing a routine Mun landing with Jeb, but as usual, poor planning led me to a dark landing site. Against all odds, Jeb landed successfully, but he was disappointed that Kerbin disappeared behind a hill as he descended. He wanted that view, so he took off again to land in a better location. Unfortunately though, the next landing wasn't as successful. The lander fell over, and the engines got detached. So did the parachute, so he had no way to ever return home.

However, Jeb is entirely unfamiliar with the concept of failure (and futility), so he decoupled the ascent stage to set the land speed record on the Mun instead. He died.

[grynspan]

I spent real-world days on a tour of the system. The crew was in space for a total of about 500 in-game days. On atmospheric re-entry, when the parachute fully deployed at 500m, it ripped off the (eight-strut secured!) ASAS it was attached to and the crew impacted and died. I was about ready to chuck the computer out the nearest window.

[TheMonster]

["spoiler=name the spoiler tag] text [/spoiler"] Just get rid of " and '.

So after a failed Minmus mission, one of my three Kerbals dies (I had to eject them from the command module after the entire landing stage kinda sorta bounced off a hill...), I had to launch a rescue mission. However, due to a mix up at KSC, Jedediah Kerman is sent to the Min, and not an actual astronaut (we all know that Jeb is a stunt man, not an actual trained space-man). So in hind sight, this accident was inevitable.

As you can see on the far bottom right of the screen, the only thing to detach is a parachute... Well, when I tried to right the thing back up... just wait and see.

Shot at 2012-09-08 Still fully intact, just kinda a little bit side ways.

Shot at 2012-09-08 Than, after a failed attempt to right the ship, Jeb tore the thing apart in frustration (my excuse anyhow).[/

Shot at 2012-09-08 Proof that Jeb was indeed the pilot.

Shot at 2012-09-08 And, Jeb talking to the guys he was supposed to rescue about what the weather is like back on Kerbin.

Shot at 2012-09-08

Edited September 9, 2012 by TheMonster

[cowo8]

'twas a perfect mission to the south pole. The brave Shepble Kerman was single handedly attempting to fly to there.

But 10,000 metres above the South pole, it dawned upon the space plane engineers that they had forgotten to add a parachute.

RIP

[Spartan117]

I just had an early NASA moment when the rocket I was attempting to launch fell in on itself in a huge fireball. Amazingly enough, the 3 crew pod survived!

[malcheus]

Bob was very excited getting to the mun, and being able to land on the orbital meneuvring stage.

He subsequently had his fun with his jetpack, but when he came back he realised that he could not jump high enough to get back in the command pod, and his jetpack was now empty.

Jebediah was found willing to fly an exact copy of Bobs craft, with a few added ladders, to poor stranded bob.

Once there, Jeb jetpacked into bob's craft, and bob walked to jebs craft and they both returned .

[Spartan117]

Dang it!!! I can explain it no other way than that the Kraken got me. I had a pretty decent sized launch vehicle in orbit. I tried to turn it around to stabilize my orbit but it turned every which way on its' own regardless of RCS usage. I finally got fed up and fired up the engines when the craft just happened to turn near the direction I wanted to fire. A few oscillation later I was looking at a brand new ring system around Kerbin and minus three Kerbonauts.

[Randox]

Yesterday I was working on getting a rocket that could get to Minimus with only its bottom engines and fuel tanks (and all the various engines and fuel tanks strapped onto them). I finally got a rocket that managed to plot a munar intercept, and still be as long as it was when it left the launch pad, and I figured it would be neat to hop out and take a look at it, maybe pretend to do an inspection having never had the opourtunity to do so with something so large before. So I jump out, and cruise down to the bottom, but I got a little far away, and when I flew back to it, my guy (Jeb no less) hit his head on one of the bottom engines, causing him to I guess black out and go ragdolling off into space. It took at least like 20 seconds to recover and regain control (he hit the engine pretty hard). I was starting to worry that he might never recover, or at least not until he got sucked back into the gravity well of Kerbin and couldn't get back to the only rocket with a hope of getting to him in time (which at this point was dangerously close to becoming an unmanned missile, destined to cruise the system alone. Forever.

And today I decided to fly to KSC 2, but its a long ways off and I only have one useable plane (and its slightly harder to fly advanced versions), which unfortunately does not have the kind of range I needed for such a trip. So I made a slightly stripped down version (here stripped down means minus a third of its fuel and an engine) that I could stick on top of a rocket. The plan was to fly up really high, fly over to where the KSC 2 is, and then drop the plane back down into the atmosphere. Easy peasy. Unfortunately, even a stripped down version of the plane was a bit heavy (probably could have skipped the RCS fuel seeing as I didn't give it an RCS thruster system), and the rocket I stuck it on was the basic model with what I called the star drive strapped on to the tail of the plane (a conventional rocket engine with rocket fuel tanks, where the 3rd jet engine would be attached). In other words, it was sadly lacking in the 'can get into orbit' department, and only managed to get the plane a little over halfway to its destination (but it did it much faster than conventional flying). I figured that was enough and put up a movie, turned on the ASAS, and off I go, making minor adjustments every few minutes to stay in a good altitude band. About 10 minutes out I realize I am going to run out of fuel, and decided to resort to some fuel bug exploitation. In the process I leaned that even without the fuel bug, since the plane can't go very high anyway (because the engines loose power, and without the RCS thrusters its one tiny move from spiraling out of control without much air for the control surfaces to use), I actually could have saved fuel by flying slower, since I was able to go at about 1/3 speed at about 10% throttle (which is about right, since air resistance increases with the square of your speed). I ended up coming down in a glide, to discover that the runway was gone, so I aimed for the tracks leading to the launch platform. Nailed it, only to discover that the second KSC is a floating hologram. When I got out of my plane, I tried to put the parking brake on by retracting the landing gear, but my plane still slid away. To get Jeb home, I will now have to build a 2m rocket capable of reaching orbit twice, which means building a whole new, supper efficient rocket small enough to strap onto something far more ridiculous. I'll also have to figure out precision landing in an atmosphere (this is why I strapped a plane onto a rocket rather than just landing a rocket there. Don't have this skill yet, so I thought something that could fly would be better) if I ever want to get Jeb back.

Of course, if the small rocket is small enough, I might be able to give it some basic wings and a parachute so that it can land in the right position, but still guide itself down. This should hold me over until 0.17.

[SNapple]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJVXAs97LSg&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayQHEKUjUyo&feature=plcp

[aceassasin]

Just about a minute ago i was on my back to kerbin from Duna everything was going well and I started my rentry however soon after deploying the parachute failed

and i thought the worst was about to happen. As a last ditch effort to save the kerbal i went on EVA right before and impact, and guess what HE SURVIVED!!!!!

[happynoobing]

Might not be the craziest, but definitely the one deserving the most facepalm...

[Ziff]

I just found some screenshots taken during my first test of the NERVA engine. I had slapped together a quick lander to see how far it could travel with the new engine.

All was going according to my flight plan until the last radial stage was jettisoned. At the last moment it turned slightly and I heard a horrible sound. You know the one. The one that says, yeah, that just happened.

Jeb did some quick math and came to the conclusion that he his T:W ratio was still high enough to complete orbital insertion, even though he was minus a Mainsail engine. He jettisoned the fuel tanks when they emptied and boosted to a higher orbit before igniting the NERVA engine and going off into deep space. One of the handful of times I have had a mishap that did not impact the mission in any way.

[that1guy]

I was playing with the mini SRBs that are used to move things away from your craft on my Duna lander system (Bloaghanoth III). I thought that I would be smart, and rather than test the separators out on Duna, I would do a pad test. I only forgot two things. Firstly, the tower was at the right height to have a fuel tank smash into it (on Duna it would be empty, here, not so much). Second, I had a fully fueled rocket sitting below the fuel pods. When I hit the button to release the pods, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, my beautiful lifter and ship were engulfed in flames. The command pod was hurled into the air, team rocket style. The chute on top saved the life of one Kerbal that day. The lesson here is, pad testing cant replace real world testing.

[SteevyT]

I tired to make an interplanetary rocket. This happened.

[The Destroyer]

I tired to make an interplanetary rocket. This happened.

Holy crap! thats COOL! Who cares about duna or any of dat! this is better!

[Ghery88]

I tired to make an interplanetary rocket. This happened.

This was hilarious!

[Rickenbacker]

I was playing with the mini SRBs that are used to move things away from your craft on my Duna lander system (Bloaghanoth III). I thought that I would be smart, and rather than test the separators out on Duna, I would do a pad test. I only forgot two things. Firstly, the tower was at the right height to have a fuel tank smash into it (on Duna it would be empty, here, not so much). Second, I had a fully fueled rocket sitting below the fuel pods. When I hit the button to release the pods, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, my beautiful lifter and ship were engulfed in flames. The command pod was hurled into the air, team rocket style. The chute on top saved the life of one Kerbal that day. The lesson here is, pad testing cant replace real world testing.

Since 0.17 came out, the first thing I do is add two mini-solids (for the small capsule, six for the three-man) to the top sides of the capsule, and put them in the same stage as the decoupler below the capsule. Then if something goes wrong, I panic-pound the space bar until the capsule decouples, and the rockets automatically carry it up to 5-600m (more like 200 with the heavier capsule) where I can deploy the parachute in safety. It's like a real-life escape tower, and took quite a few Kerbal's lives before I figured out that the simple method is the best. I tried spin-stabilization (capsule wouldn't go!), tilted rockets (capsule flew off into the tower and blew up) and straight rockets attached to the chute (rockets overheated the capsule below and blew it up).

I also figured out that if you attach kicker boosters to your solids, to separate them from your rocket on staging, don't just put one at the top. The resulting spin almost always results in a perfect shearing off of your main engine...

Edited September 25, 2012 by Rickenbacker

[RedDwarfIV]

This was during my Eve Excusion using a Kittyhawk spaceplane for a lander. A 3-stage interplanetary vehicle just fell to pieces.

[Space_Coyote]

Perhaps my most humorous moment was went I built a rocket and attached a Mech jeb nit.. Now everything worked well, Rocket went up and got the bird flawlessly into orbit.. and I did soemthing like 12 orbits before i decided to do a deorbit burn to bring my capsule carrying the three brave curbalks down to earth..

Now what I hadn't realized is that I hadn't given my capsule enough separation from the stage it was attached to, and I dismissed the spent stage as it was going to pass harmlessly uncer the capsule as the Capsule descended from orbit..

Little did I forget my orbital mechanics lesson.. as the capsule began to fall towards the space center. I forgot the now spent stage was trailing behind the capsule and not ahead of it.. Had I decided to go retrograde instead of prograde, the spent stage mached the capsule laterally in perfect flying formation maybe 10 seconds actual time behind it..

As the Capsule slowed down I waited until 10,000 meters to deploy the drag chute, and began to slow the capsule down... not realizing the now spent stage was catching up with me and in a hurry..

But considering I was looking down rather than up, I figured I would make a safe landing while the spent stage flew overhead and smashed into the ocean just a few km beyond the landing zone..

Instead as the capsule reached less than 30 meters, the spent stage came up on the now nearly landed capsule and impaced the ground as the entire stage ricchocheted off the ground.. and straight into the landing capsule.. the chute separated, and the now hapless Kerbals too a slight upward trajectory as the stage slammed into the ground right wher the capsule had intended to land.

The end result was that the Kerbals didn't die.. In fact what had saved them from total oblivion was the fact that I had done one thing.. I had pitched the stage upwards so that then the spent until hit the ground the richochet has slowed them practically to almost zero, and the small bit of velocity they had cause the capsule to land hard, but with less than enough force to keep the Kerbals inside from dying.

Talk about a harsh lesson in phsycis.

Space_Coyote

[baked_by_oven]

I'm using mechjeb to make a mun base, and I forgot to change the coordinates between landings and mechjeb being as perfect as ever managed to land on top of the last lander and destroy both of them...

[Moach]

well, once i ran a nuke-power mission to Jool -- and the craziest part of it was.... IT WORKED!

when the assumed-dead crew got there, they tangled along with Jool's moons in such a way that after many a random course correction -- Laythe provided a slingshot that took the escape path further than any kerbal had ever gone - and most surprisingly of all - at the periapsis, it not only intersected Kerbin's orbit - it actually made an encounter!!

imagine the surprise, after over a year of drifting precisely navigating through deep-space - they got back down onto kerbin orbit and actually found a planet there!!

landing was a different affair, for which i thankfully remembered to use that quicksave feature before attempting....

but then, i had a highly experimental reentry heatshield aboard, and it bugged out on aerobrake and what followed was that fateful sound (and brief display of flashy colors) that lets you know that yes - that just happened

but they got to die at the same planet they took of from! that's "victory" in Kerbal culture!

[thesandbar]

Jeb did some quick math and came to the conclusion that he his T:W ratio was still high enough to complete orbital insertion, even though he was minus a Mainsail engine. He jettisoned the fuel tanks when they emptied and boosted to a higher orbit before igniting the NERVA engine and going off into deep space. One of the handful of times I have had a mishap that did not impact the mission in any way.

That's normally part of the plan for me. A couple of radial aerospikes carries me into orbit efficiently.