What's the craziest mission you've ever pulled off?

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

On 10/13/2017 at 5:57 AM, MedwedianPresident said:

I vaguely remember a botched munar takeoff several years ago. The lander ran out of fuel, so Jeb got out and tried to achieve orbit using his EVA pack. As this failed, I decided to use the orbital module for a suicidal maneuver in which it deorbited and tried to catch up with Jeb. Turns out that there was not enough time for a clean rendezvous and/or the thrust of the lander was too small, resulting in Munar regolith-assisted, surface contact rapid self-disassembly.

Happened to me like 5 times...

[Superfluous J]

My two obvious ones are the Astro-glider (obviously) and my Jool-5 mission. I had it in my head that I'd - in a single mission - return to Kerbin a command pod for every "recoverd a vessel from ...." around Jool. That is:

• Orbiting Jool, and each of the 5 moons (6 modules)
• Jool's and Laythe's atmospheres (2 modules)
• Landed on each of the 5 moons (5 modules)

That's 13 command modules, each with a Kerbal. Plus a couple extras for utility work. Each had docking ports so I could mix-and-match reusable spacecraft for the bulk of the mission.

I technically completed it, but "orbit around Tylo" superceded many of the other things, so I didn't actually get the credit for my Pol lander having landed on Pol (for instance).

[KerikBalm]

I don't know... I don't think my missions are crazy in general... but maybe my designs get a bit extreme...

This duna-dropship's landing profile is pretty extreme, some might say crazy:

Spoiler

and this particular SSTO flight came out looking pretty weird/extreme/ possbily crazy after a bit of rearrangement of the payload in orbit:

*all pics done at 3x rescale. Duna's gravity was additionally increased by 10%

 

[NSEP]

None of my missions are seriously WHACK. But here is a 2,4kt boostah

[Goddess Bhavani]

Nothing really fantastic, but I wanted to build a low tech SSTO with the most basic jet and rocket engines, but dress it up to look sci-fi. The "Switchblade" space plane won't win any awards for efficiency or payload, but was one of the prettiest Beta craft I ever flew. 

 

[NateisKerbal]

My first Moho mission. My rocket overheated on landing and exploded. 

[OhioBob]

My craziest "I can't believe that actually worked" moment was a couple years ago as part of a tiny rocket challenge.  My goal was to build a rocket out of 0.625-m parts and land it on Minmus using nothing but the bare essentials.  It didn't have landing gear so my plan was to do a quick touch and go, i.e. touch the ground just enough to satisfy the challenge, and then liftoff before the thing toppled over.  To my surprise the rocket was quite stable and stood upright on its engine after landing.  That's when I noticed that I still had a considerable amount of delta-v remaining.  I thought, what the heck, let's see if I can fly it back to Kerbin.  Since I hadn't planned for that, it had neither a heat shield nor a parachute.  If I could just get the probe core back in one piece, I'd consider it a success.

Getting it back to Minmus orbit was a snap.  Immediately after performing the ejection burn to put me on a trajectory back to Kerbin, I noticed that I messed up big time.  The landing on Kerbin was going to occur in the middle of the night.  I didn't think that through very well, but this entire extended mission was being performed off the cuff so there were bound to be hiccups.  I was determined not to revert, so I was just going to have to live with the consequences of my blunder.

The next big hurdle was reentry.  There wasn't anything I could do but sweat it out and hope my vessel didn't overheat and explode.  Without a heat shield I knew it was going to be a close call.  As I watched the temperature rise I thought for sure I was a goner, but somehow my luck held.  The vessel got to within just a few degrees of critical temperature, but thankfully it started to cool just in the nick of time.  That was really close!  I lost my solar panels but everything else survived.

I was now plummeting toward the ground in total darkness.  I couldn't see a thing!  All I had to go by were instruments.  As if this weren't already a white knuckle situation, I looked at KER and it told me I was landing in a mountain biome.  I frantically started scribbling some calculations.  I needed to figure out when to fire the engines in order to null my velocity by the time I reached the ground.  I knew gravity and TWR, and I guesstimated velocity, so I was able to ballpark engine start time as a function of height above terrain.  The estimate was crude and correct timing would be difficult.  Couple that with the fact that I had no idea what the terrain looked like, and this was going to be a miracle if it worked.  I just kept my eye on KER's height above terrain readout.  When I reached the right altitude, I hit the throttle and prayed.

I don't know how fast I was going when I hit the ground, but there was an explosion.  I had no idea what just happened, but miraculously part of my vessel was still intact and under control.  It eventually settled onto the ground and came to a stop.  I would have to wait until sunrise to assess the situation because I was still in total darkness.  When sunlight finally arrived I could see that I blew off the bottom half of the rocket (engine and 3/4ths of the fuel tanks).  But the uppermost fuel tank, battery pack, probe core, and nose cone survived.  Survival of the probe core was enough to declare this a successful recovery.

So many things could have gone disastrously wrong with this mission, but somehow they didn't.  I don't know if it was more skill or luck, but at least on this one occasion it worked. 

[CSE]

Like many others, a moon-return story.

With 6.4x scale mastered and the conquest of Mt Framerate a distant memory (thank you, Procedural Parts),  Eillis Kerman sets out on a routine transfer to join Bob on the moon. A well-executed direct ascent lines up the Mün nicely - in fact, very nicely indeed. The capture burn is perfectly placed to proceed directly to landing - direct ascent and descent, how's that! - and the biome under the burn node looks a lot more interesting than the original, equatorial, landing site. Thanks to the expert piloting through all these manoeuvres, the lander has enough spare fuel for a suborbital hop to join Bob with an unexpected bonus haul of science; imagine the look on his face. My stars have aligned and everything's come good! Capture burn, undock, landing burn ...

Bob is, of course, on the other moon. Mission planning not so aligned then.

Even less aligned is Eillis' orbiter inclination. Clever kerbonauts will understand that a launch from high latitude to an inclined orbit requires either enough supplies to wait for the transfer window to come around again or enough fuel to make a dog-leg ascent. Wise kerbonauts will understand this before beginning the landing burn. Ah, well. Things are not looking so good on the snacks front - we were supposed to be dining chez Bob - so dog-leg it is. A couple of burns for the orbiter get its track and timing tolerably aligned, and the lander re-launches.

There's a mountain.

Simultaneous launching, dog-legging, and mountain-dodging, with fuel she doesn't have, proves a bit too much for Eillis' piloting skills and she survives the resulting crash only by the grace of Saint Effnine. Time to plan again.

With two dog-legs for the lander and one for the orbiter, the ascending Eillis can pass in front of the mountain but behind a smaller hill. The lander's trajectory can stay below the summits of both and thus get further around the Mün on its limited dV budget. Awkwardly, the orbiter's dog-leg manoeuvre needs to occur between the two burns for the lander. It's quite nerve-wracking to leave the lander looking up at the terrain and switch away to the orbiter, but the plane changes and rendezvous timings go well enough in the circumstances. The intercept is nice and close, well within jetpack reach even in the minute and a half that the suborbital vessels - both of them, at this point - will have before the Mün surface arrives, and the velocities match pretty well. At least, their magnitudes do; the directions differ by thirty degrees or so. The lander has no fuel remaining and the "orbiter" needs every drop to get back into an actual orbit once Eillis makes it aboard; her jetpack doesn't have the TWR to complete the transfer in time.

So, pointing the blunt crew capsule nose of the lander at the blunt crew-capsule nose of the orbiter as the two craft close in, Eillis climbs out of the hatch and into the handily kerbal-sized, handily tough, handily rear-placed and rear-facing engine bell, and waits. The crunch is a vintage one, as impacts go, scattering the front third of the orbiter and pretty much all of the lander to the four corners of the Mün, but the nozzle survives and Eillis with it. She scrambles into the orbiter's surviving hab module and makes good use of the suddenly-improved TWR to escape the Mün on a rapid trip home.

...

I was pretty pleased to make it with only two reverts - the mountain, and ending up inside the Mün after the first attempt at robust rendezvous. These days, in career mode, I usually carry more in the way of spare supplies and try to spare my poor kerbals quite this level of drama.

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

On 10/18/2017 at 6:23 PM, CSE said:

Like many others, a moon-return story.

With 6.4x scale mastered and the conquest of Mt Framerate a distant memory (thank you, Procedural Parts),  Eillis Kerman sets out on a routine transfer to join Bob on the moon. A well-executed direct ascent lines up the Mün nicely - in fact, very nicely indeed. The capture burn is perfectly placed to proceed directly to landing - direct ascent and descent, how's that! - and the biome under the burn node looks a lot more interesting than the original, equatorial, landing site. Thanks to the expert piloting through all these manoeuvres, the lander has enough spare fuel for a suborbital hop to join Bob with an unexpected bonus haul of science; imagine the look on his face. My stars have aligned and everything's come good! Capture burn, undock, landing burn ...

Bob is, of course, on the other moon. Mission planning not so aligned then.

Even less aligned is Eillis' orbiter inclination. Clever kerbonauts will understand that a launch from high latitude to an inclined orbit requires either enough supplies to wait for the transfer window to come around again or enough fuel to make a dog-leg ascent. Wise kerbonauts will understand this before beginning the landing burn. Ah, well. Things are not looking so good on the snacks front - we were supposed to be dining chez Bob - so dog-leg it is. A couple of burns for the orbiter get its track and timing tolerably aligned, and the lander re-launches.

There's a mountain.

Simultaneous launching, dog-legging, and mountain-dodging, with fuel she doesn't have, proves a bit too much for Eillis' piloting skills and she survives the resulting crash only by the grace of Saint Effnine. Time to plan again.

With two dog-legs for the lander and one for the orbiter, the ascending Eillis can pass in front of the mountain but behind a smaller hill. The lander's trajectory can stay below the summits of both and thus get further around the Mün on its limited dV budget. Awkwardly, the orbiter's dog-leg manoeuvre needs to occur between the two burns for the lander. It's quite nerve-wracking to leave the lander looking up at the terrain and switch away to the orbiter, but the plane changes and rendezvous timings go well enough in the circumstances. The intercept is nice and close, well within jetpack reach even in the minute and a half that the suborbital vessels - both of them, at this point - will have before the Mün surface arrives, and the velocities match pretty well. At least, their magnitudes do; the directions differ by thirty degrees or so. The lander has no fuel remaining and the "orbiter" needs every drop to get back into an actual orbit once Eillis makes it aboard; her jetpack doesn't have the TWR to complete the transfer in time.

So, pointing the blunt crew capsule nose of the lander at the blunt crew-capsule nose of the orbiter as the two craft close in, Eillis climbs out of the hatch and into the handily kerbal-sized, handily tough, handily rear-placed and rear-facing engine bell, and waits. The crunch is a vintage one, as impacts go, scattering the front third of the orbiter and pretty much all of the lander to the four corners of the Mün, but the nozzle survives and Eillis with it. She scrambles into the orbiter's surviving hab module and makes good use of the suddenly-improved TWR to escape the Mün on a rapid trip home.

...

I was pretty pleased to make it with only two reverts - the mountain, and ending up inside the Mün after the first attempt at robust rendezvous. These days, in career mode, I usually carry more in the way of spare supplies and try to spare my poor kerbals quite this level of drama.

damn

[Tyko]

I did have to have a kerbal "get out and push" once to get a return trajectory into Kerbin's atmosphere...I'd read about it, had run out of options and was like "might as well give it a try". Val made it safely home..

[bigcalm]

What if you wanted a runway on Laythe?  Well.  I have a solution for you.

[322997am]

I pulled a pod from orbit with a cross section larger than my rocket and it didn’t burn up and yeh kerbal was rescued

[Superfluous J]

Oh I thought of another one. Not really "crazy" per se but I didn't think it would work. I was doing an all-probes hit-every-jool-moon mission, and I had a probe on Bop that had to also go to Pol (or vice versa I never remember which is which or which one I'm on at any given time). My relay ran out of fuel and crashed into Tylo (oops) so I had no direct comms and no way to create maneuver nodes or throttle my engine. I did have a good enough probe core to aim in every direction (radial, normal, -grade, target) so I figured I'd try to fly the probe seat-of-the-pant style from one moon to the other.

It turned out to be pretty simple. I had a pretty limited fuel budget but getting between those two moons is pretty light on fuel usage, and the landing was a bit bumpy due to no throttle but I managed to land the probe intact.

[RedPandaz]

I was flying a base module up to Minmus when for some reason the rockets died early, plunging me back toward Kerbin in a glorified rover- small engine only made for Minmus, no heat shield, no parachute. 

 

Somehow, through a combination or retrograde-burning, aerobraking, and lithobraking, I managed to keep my crew alive. A flag now marks the wreckage