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What are the worst mistakes you've made in KSP?


UbuntuLinuxKing

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Hey all,

 I got bored and decided to ask the forum what terrible, terrible mistakes you've made in playing this game. To get the ball rolling, I'll tell one of my stupid mistakes.

After about 50 hours of playing, I had just managed to successfully build an interplanetary science ship and land on Duna. After I sucked Duna dry of science, I launched and realized I had ludicrous delta-v still left, even after all the hopping around Duna I did. To be fair, I was using modded engines, but I still had the delta-v. At the time, I was still pretty clueless on how to transfer between planets, so when I decided I wanted to go to Moho, I created a  maneuver node that dropped me from Duna's orbital height down to Moho's orbital height and into an encounter. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that to complete the maneuver, I would have to reduce my orbital velocity to zero, and essentially fall towards the sun until Moho got in the way. The issue was, with my 100kn total thrust, coupled with the fact that the solar gravity would accelerate me to a few hundred km/s, I couldn't slow down and ended up dunking my team of six 5-star Scientists into the sun. Woo.

 

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Awhile back, I started a Science save.  I usually play Sandbox, not a fan of Career, but this was a nice in-between.

Had probably 20 hours in it.

It was cleverly named 'default'

I needed to test something in sandbox, didn't have a testing save made, and quickly made one... you can guess what I named it.  I'm too trigger-happy when it comes to prompt boxes.  Bye-bye 20 hour gamesave.

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31 minutes ago, Lo Var Lachland said:

Uh.... Tryin to dock at 100 m/s.

 

I know! It was 2 years ago! I'm SORRY! 

Don't feel bad. I rammed into my ~2000000 funds Jool station at 15 km/s when the drive on my torchship failed, courtesy of that mod that randomly breaks stuff. Don't remember the name.

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I was building a minmus base with KAS and KIS, as well as planetary base systems, and thought it'd be a good idea to refuel my lander using the reserves in the base. I forgot I had Smart A.S.S from mechjeb turned on in the lander, and when I connected the crafts, mechjeb freaked out and flipped the entire base upside down, shattering every solar planel and squishing a kerbal.

I'm now a quicksave spammer. 

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For me it was snagging one of the many fuel lines on my heavily asparagus-ed Eve lander (the 1st workable design I landed) on a small part (parachute I think) instead of connecting to a fuel tank, resulting in the supply of fuel to the engines being unbalanced. This ended in the expected, expensive, fiery way, forcing me to F9 to pre-launch and then sending an (almost) identical, but unmanned vehicle to give my brave explorer a chance of seeing Kerbin's blue skies again.

Thankfully all went well with the 2nd vehicle.

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I was gonna go land on the Mun, but since I wanted to rush my build I forgot RCS thrusters, solar panels and the heat shield was too small. After about five hours (not exaggerating) of sitting at my desk, redoing maneuvers, quick saving and reloading, I finally made it back okay. I had to do an aerobrake around Kerbin for awhile and I managed to stage my parachute with 0.01 electric charge left. It was hell.

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1 hour ago, Chowderpat said:

I was gonna go land on the Mun, but since I wanted to rush my build I forgot RCS thrusters, solar panels and the heat shield was too small. After about five hours (not exaggerating) of sitting at my desk, redoing maneuvers, quick saving and reloading, I finally made it back okay. I had to do an aerobrake around Kerbin for awhile and I managed to stage my parachute with 0.01 electric charge left. It was hell.

Happened to me too. XD

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On 23-10-2017 at 7:54 PM, UbuntuLinuxKing said:

Don't feel bad. I rammed into my ~2000000 funds Jool station at 15 km/s when the drive on my torchship failed, courtesy of that mod that randomly breaks stuff. Don't remember the name.

Isn't that "DangIt!"? Had similar experiences with that one. Engines failing just as you're trying to dock. I flew around with simple chemical propulsion vessels, but the impact was still sufficient to blow up the space station I was trying to dock to. 

Another big mistake I made was when going to Moho with a woefully underpowered ship. It didn't have enough dV, nor powerful enough engines to inject into a Moho orbit. To make matters worse, I was playing with TAC-LS, and the hastily assembled fuel tanker arrived barely in time at Moho to refuel the stranded ship and send the Kerbals home before they would starve. Then DangIt! came in and broke some of the engines that were powering my ship. I ended up sending a Kerbal on EVA and disassembling the broken engines with KIS just to drop some deadweight... but the remaining engines were not even powerfull enough to get out of Moho's gravity well. I think I did more than 10 half-hour burns before the ship was finally in an orbit out of Moho's SoI.

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To try to go for estetic before functionality... and ignore the Engineerreport at same time....

You build a orbital stage with mk2 atop, place parachutes on the orbiter and reposition them with the gizmo for stile....

Deorbit and look how the parachutes bring the orbiter nicely down,... with farbelow sight of the capsule on supersonic speed crashing in the next best mountain.....

Check your... rootpart....

Funny Kabooms 

Urses

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1 hour ago, DaMaster_Architect said:

Isn't that "DangIt!"? Had similar experiences with that one. Engines failing just as you're trying to dock. I flew around with simple chemical propulsion vessels, but the impact was still sufficient to blow up the space station I was trying to dock to. 

Another big mistake I made was when going to Moho with a woefully underpowered ship. It didn't have enough dV, nor powerful enough engines to inject into a Moho orbit. To make matters worse, I was playing with TAC-LS, and the hastily assembled fuel tanker arrived barely in time at Moho to refuel the stranded ship and send the Kerbals home before they would starve. Then DangIt! came in and broke some of the engines that were powering my ship. I ended up sending a Kerbal on EVA and disassembling the broken engines with KIS just to drop some deadweight... but the remaining engines were not even powerfull enough to get out of Moho's gravity well. I think I did more than 10 half-hour burns before the ship was finally in an orbit out of Moho's SoI.

Yeah, that's the mod.

5 minutes ago, NSEP said:

Doing ANYTHING wrong in Realism Overhaul.

That mod is like touch powder explosive. Just look at it wrong and things will die, break, explode or all three of those things simultaneously. The Real Solary System mod was cool... for the five seconds it took me to realize that the distances were also realistic. Your nuclear rockets cannot save you now. 

20 minutes ago, Mrcarrot said:

unprofessionally aggressive reentry technique

Please enlighten me on this.

 

Please.

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4 minutes ago, UbuntuLinuxKing said:

Yeah, that's the mod.

That mod is like touch powder explosive. Just look at it wrong and things will die, break, explode or all three of those things simultaneously. The Real Solary System mod was cool... for the five seconds it took me to realize that the distances were also realistic. Your nuclear rockets cannot save you now. 

Please enlighten me on this.

 

Please.

I burn until I have no periapsis, e.g. on a trajectory to hit the ground without aerobraking.

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Spent several days constructing a massive station in LKO with about 400 parts, kazillion struts and a wheel-like habitat with pretty lights in the middle. One of my expeditions to Duna was  leaving at the moment, so I thought that making a rendezvous and taking screenshots of the Duna mothership against the station and Kerbin is a good idea.

When those two 400 and 250 part abominations came into the physics zone of each other, the game decided that enough is enough and everything krakened, both ships wobbling and exploding in an apocalyptic spray of parts.

Naturally, I forgot to backup the save. Derp.

 

Edited by Haruspex
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43 minutes ago, Haruspex said:

Spent several days constructing a massive station in LKO with about 400 parts, kazillion struts and a wheel-like habitat with pretty lights in the middle. One of my expeditions to Duna was  leaving at the moment, so I thought that making a rendezvous and taking screenshots of the Duna mothership against the station and Kerbin is a good idea.

When those two 400 and 250 part abominations came into the physics zone of each other, the game decided that enough is enough and everything krakened, both ships wobbling and exploding in an apocalyptic spray of parts.

Naturally, I forgot to backup the save. Derp.

 

I had a ring station at about 500km, with about 250 parts. It actually worked pretty well, although without struts it always got eaten by the Gyro Kraken. However, when my 50-part shuttle entered physics range, the entire station just soundlessly came apart. Literally, nothing exploded - all the joints between parts just vanished, and my station turned into a debris cloud slowly floating apart. I wish I had a screenshot of it.

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Worst mistake that nearly killed Kerbals: On my first Eve flotilla mission, I accidentally jettisoned the Gilly lander with two people still in it halfway through the Eve escape burn. Eventually, I rescued them.

Dumbest mistake: Forgetting to turn on symmetry and only attaching one booster instead of three. I didn't notice until I pressed space.

Most annoying mistake: Forgetting to configure the RCS in RO/RP-0.

Most Kerbals killed (not reverting): returning an SSTO from a station in career mode. Landed too far down the runway and couldn't brake. I either had turned steering off or had used too big of wheels to use steering. I was going slow enough to survive if the plane went off of the runway, but then I hit a light on the end of the runway and the right wing fell off. The plane struck the ground and 6 Kerbals died. RIP.

Most kerbals killed (accidental, reverting): I didn't take the time to fill the seats, but I had a 916 Kerbal mothership that I probably crashed on Minmus (and The Mun) a few times before I got it right.

Funniest mistake: I flew a mission mostly from map mode to one of the moons of Kerbin once. Unfortunately, upon returning to normal view, I discovered I was orbiting the wrong moon.

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Built a mining lander ship to refuel an interplanetary tourist ship (using Interstellar tech Nuclear engines).

Launched both as a single unit, and was well past the point of being able to revert when I realized that the mining ship lacked some critical components. (Like, would never be able to re-dock because it had no RCS, parts-clipping issues, no fuel cell for backup power, missing radiators, no water tank, one of the drills was configured to separate Dirt instead of Water and I didn't have the parts to reconfigure it, was carrying around a bunch of dead weight, etc. tl;dr, I really shouldn't do ship redesigns after 1AM.)

So I built another one that addressed these problems, brought it to the refuelling stop on the Mun, transferred the crew (including the tourists, who were somehow able to fit through a KIS fuel line just fine) and redocked the new ship with the interplanetary drive unit. Crisis averted, now on to the next stop!

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