What is your most facepalm-worthy moment regarding KSP?

[Klapaucius]

The dangers of multitasking...

 

I had posted to the forum with a question about a lifting body seaplane I was working on. While waiting for a response, I decided to take said plane for  a scenic flight with 28 eager tourists. However, I was still scrolling through the forum while flying  While I was looking away, the plane entered a dead-end valley and plowed into the side of a mountain. I killed 28 Kerbals because I was reading the forum.

The biggest irony:  The thread was called: "What crimes against Kerbin have you committed."  I posted this very event right then and there on that thread.

 

Edited January 6, 2019 by Klapaucius

[Epicdreamer]

That must be about one and a half year ago:

Landing a Mun biome hopper to discover I forgot to add solar panels. But I was playing with KIS! So I sent out another lander with an engineer having solar panels in his inventory. Landed about 10 meters from the ill fated Munhopper (best precision landing so far!) to discover I forgot to bring along a screwdriver...

[IncongruousGoat]

Here's one that ended well, but was nerve-wracking at the time:

I was flying a no-ISRU single-launch grand tour. I thought I had tested everything down to a tee - I tested the solar-powered ion lander on Moho as a TWR check, and on the Mun as a battery capacity check. I figured everything further out was smaller than the Mun, and that solar recharge in-flight at Kerbin was negligible, so if it worked there it would work anywhere, right?

Yeah... about that.

I was out at Eeloo, the last body I had to land on before heading home. I re-fueled the ion lander using xenon from the mothership, and then made for the surface of Eeloo. And promptly ran out of EC and crashed. So, I reloaded my quicksave in orbit, made a more careful run at it... and ran out of EC, and crashed. Not only is Eeloo slightly bigger than the Mun, but (as it turns out) the EC you get from solar power out at Kerbin isn't quite negligible. Both of which I had failed to take account of in my testing.

Thankfully, the Kraken deemed it good to smile on my endeavors that day. On the third attempt, using every piloting trick I knew to keep delta-V losses low, I managed to make it down to the surface with my batteries completely drained:

Not quite as good as most of the rest of this thread, I know, but I felt pretty stupid at the time.

Edited January 7, 2019 by IncongruousGoat

[Jeb'sFineRocket]

Mine probably has to be the time when I put my fuel ducts on the wrong tank, so instead of taking fuel and transferring fuel to the central tank, it started to take fuel from the main tank instead, I was forced to do a fly-by with Duna instead of getting into a safe parking orbit and then landing.

Edited January 21, 2019 by Jeb'sFineRocket

[purpleivan]

Mine would be the first time I sent what in theory would be a successful Eve return vehicle design to that purple ship eater.

It had everything right, sufficient power to lift from the surface, enough fuel to get into orbit, stable enough to make the landing in the first place, it even had well place ladders to allow the trip to the surface for its pilot, not to be one way.

Just one thing wrong. In the set of fuel lines for the asparagus staging, one of them had become attached at the end to a ladder, instead of to the tank itself. This resulted in one of the engines being supplied with less fuel than the others and burning out early, making the vehicle uncontrollable soon after launch.

In the end I had to send an identical vehicle (except for the fuel line snafu) land it as close as I could to the first one, then have the pilot hike over to it on foot.

BTW... this is an image of the rescue vehicle, not the first one.

[netbumbler]

My best missions would simply be my 3 successful Eve-return missions. My worst would be my first manned Duna mission where I did everything right except for falling short on delta-v for the return trip. Had to revert to save. I was super angry because I engineered the landing and ascent vehicles and did all the rendezvous perfectly, but was about 200 meters short. I could get back to Kerbin's SOI, but not capture into an orbit (not even a super-elliptical one where I might send up a rescue ship). Yeah I had the kerbals get rid of every last ounce of unnecessary weight and ran the return trip multiple times, but it just wasn't happening...

[Frank_G]

My best / worst mission failure? This here:

After assembling this thing in orbit, which took a dozen launches, all that was left was the heatshield... and then the Kraken struck... I spent seconds, if not minutes staring at the screen, before i started laughing. I never repeated the mission. Instead i got back to the drawing board and designed something new. Which resulted in the Duna Trek mission, which is still my favorite mission to date.

[septemberWaves]

My most recent significant mission failure actually happened earlier today. I have spent a couple of days designing the best Constellation-style Munar mission architecture I have ever made.

But it did not work. This is the most detailed lander I have ever constructed; it, along with the rover and my Orion analogue have over 200 parts, which is quite significant for someone who plays with more than 50 mods (including dependencies) on a laptop. A bug with Kerbalism caused a mission failure when I attempted a landing (and it took me several hours just to get the crew transport and lander launched, docked together, and sent to Munar orbit), but the lander's ascent module engine was also insufficiently powerful, which (along with another bug with parts becoming misaligned thanks to autostrut), meant that the ascent module could not reach orbit with sufficient delta-v to dock with Orion). I had to revert to a pre-landing quicksave and send the crew back to Kerbin without a landing. I will have to do some redesign work on the lander.

The good news is that I was using Kerbalism properly; my mission planning was not at fault in that regard, and I have upgraded my Kerbalism version to one which lacks the bug that caused a critical mission failure for me today.

Edited January 21, 2019 by septemberWaves

[maceemiller]

Best mission? I'd say my Cassini Huygens....

Using the RSS mod I landed the Huygen probe on Titan then proceeded to send Cassini to its famous and thanked death on Saturn...

(Link to a picture story is available on request )

Worst mission? All that fail

Edited January 21, 2019 by maceemiller

[steuben]

One of mine. A spot on docking alignment on approach between an orbital station and a new module... at 87 m/s relative velocity. 

[Jeb'sFineRocket]

@maceemiller Sure! pictures are welcome! 

[maceemiller]

1 hour ago, Jeb'sFineRocket said:

@maceemiller Sure! pictures are welcome! 

Here you are

https://m.imgur.com/a/cipTc

[Gargamel]

Similar Threads have been Merged.   Successfully I think......

[SlamduncAZ]

One time I landed on Duna for the first time (in that game), only to realize I forgot batteries. I ragequitted promptly. (I had LS mods making energy a requirement for survival)

If I ever get a job at NASA, I’ll make sure to check that we add batteries.

Edited January 22, 2019 by SlamduncAZ

[MaverickSawyer]

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

Similar Threads have been Merged.   Successfully I think......

Yep, looks good. Could hardly tell where the merge happened until I went back and re-read the last page.

[RealKerbal3x]

4 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Similar Threads have been Merged.   Successfully I think......

Since when did you become a moderator?

Whenever that happened, good luck

[putnamto]

i landed a very ackward payload on the mun, with my skycrane.......upside down

[dallascwbys9]

I think mine is when I was doing a good Mun Mission and when i was ready to come back that i forgot a heat shield

, Lets just say the crew is living with the stars now

[MaverickSawyer]

Got a heck of a facepalm for y'all today...

Built myself a gorgeous little 4-seat lander for Minmus to shuttle crew from the station I have in orbit to the surface and back. Checked the balance, CoM shifts, thruster placements, everything looked great. So, I send it on its way...

I make it all the way to the station before I find the one fatal flaw of the design... Can you guys see what it is?

 

 

I put on thruster blocks without any way to slow it down when docking. 

[sturmhauke]

2 minutes ago, MaverickSawyer said:

I put on thruster blocks without any way to slow it down when docking. 

I don't recognize a lot of those parts, but yeah that would suck. Docking might still be possible though; there was a Reddit challenge a while back where you had to use LF only for a Duna mission. So to dock my lander to the mothership, I had to stock it with a bunch of reaction wheels and set the Nerv throttle limit down to like 2%. It was a lot of turn this way, blip the throttle, turn that way, blip, etc.

[MaverickSawyer]

1 hour ago, sturmhauke said:

I don't recognize a lot of those parts, but yeah that would suck. Docking might still be possible though; there was a Reddit challenge a while back where you had to use LF only for a Duna mission. So to dock my lander to the mothership, I had to stock it with a bunch of reaction wheels and set the Nerv throttle limit down to like 2%. It was a lot of turn this way, blip the throttle, turn that way, blip, etc.

Cockpit's from Airplanes Plus, airlock, probe core, antenna and docking port are from Bluedog Design Bureau, and the RCS, engine, and fuel tanks are from Tantares.

[Eriksonn]

1 hour ago, sturmhauke said:

Docking might still be possible though; there was a Reddit challenge a while back where you had to use LF only for a Duna mission. So to dock my lander to the mothership, I had to stock it with a bunch of reaction wheels and set the Nerv throttle limit down to like 2%. It was a lot of turn this way, blip the throttle, turn that way, blip, etc.

That reminds me of that time when in space engineers i needed to save a ship that had floated away. Becauce it didnt have the correct type of thrusters i had to use a single ion thruster to dock with a space station. That was very hard as i had no thrust in any direction but forward, no thrust limiter, no nav ball and the docking port on the same side as the thruster(i had to reverse it into place). Good thing was that it was very nimble and could turn fast.

[AeroGav]

Built my highest delta V spaceplane ever,  for a trip to Tylo.    The panther decouples,  and eventually , so too do the whiplash boosters.

Booster separation goes off without a hitch,  and the aerodynamics of the upper stage are such that it is able to cruise to orbit through a combo of wing lift and the meagre thrust of 5 nervs.

Unfortunately,  what I had made,  was  Tylo Impactor Deluxe,  a vessel that augers into the body with an impressive fraction of its launch mass, should you desire a Viking funeral for one of your Kerbals.     TWR is below 1 even if you empty all the tanks, and of course Tylo has nearly as much gravity as Kerbin, without any atmosphere those wings can use.    Do'h!

[egoego]

I lost Valentina, when she returned from the worlds first orbit around Kerbin, because I made my suborbital rocket bigger, but did not add additional parachutes, so she crashed.  

When I later send the first kerbaled mission to the Mün, I lost Jeb, Bob and Bill on return, because I used the small radial prachutes, which I forgot where drag chutes, not propper chutes, so they crashed. 

I hate parachutes.

[MaverickSawyer]

Moments like those are precisely why I usually set my Kerbals to level up immediately... Once they make orbit the first time, they have access to personal parachutes. It's made me much more willing to take risks, knowing that, as long as I can get them through the worst of the reentry, I can get them to the ground safely. That said, I still firmly believe in proper mission planning.