What is the craziest mission you have EVER done?

[ZL647]

My craziest mission all started quite mundane. A normal trip to Minmus was all it was supposed to be. Unfortunately, something happened along the way down. My descent staging wasn't done right, I had forgotten a decoupler, so the lander was unable to produce any thrust due the part below blocking it. I tried burning the part off but the small lander engine just couldn't generate enough heat. My choices were to crash, or abandon ship, so naturally I did both. Right as the lander was about to impact, I Eva'd. The resulting explosion tossed the Kerbal out away from Minmus  and with the eva propulsion I was able to get an escape from Minmus.

Unfortunately, this was also a Kerbin Rendevouz trajectory. In order to save this poor Kerbal, KSC command only had one shot. So out rolled the only tested ship, with seating for multiple kerbals, in inventory, a spaceplane just capable of reaching orbit to deliver kerbals to a space station. With no time to waste it roared off the runway at full burn, climbing toward orbit with everything Valentina could get from the engines. Once in orbit she made rendevouz with one of orbiting fuel depots to fuel up, then off again she gunned it full throttle in a race against time to intercept the falling Kerbonaut before he intercepted Kerbin. 

She caught up to our falling friend at a distance about half that from the Mun to Kerbin, and managed to stabilize a flight path to match him. Slowly she inched the craft toward him until he was able to grab hold and climb in the passenger bay. Then they simply rode the path back to Kerbin where they landed safe, and mostly sound of mind(spending so long floating in the void of space in just your space suit takes a toll afterall) on the KSC runway. 

That rescue mission was really my first big test of getting a rendevouz on the first pass. Most of my rendevouz had been done in multiple pass getting closer each orbit but there simply wasn't time for it on this one. I was pumped that I managed to save the Kerbal.

 

Edited October 22, 2018 by ZL647

[The Minmus Derp]

Hilarious and cool!

[Cavscout74]

My craziest mission is probably a Minmus rescue for a load of tourists after the pilot of their tourist ship was asleep at the controls & smashed the engine due to a hard landing.  I was using life support at the time, so time was an issue. 

Minmus crash landing, after losing the engine & half the landing gear.  Happily the solar panels survived.  Of course, there are no docking ports and the lander was full.

I had no existing ground rescue craft for situations like this.  I also have been imposing launch time restrictions on my career games, based on ship mass (1 day between launches for <18t craft, 10 days for 18 - 140t, 20 days for >140t), so launching multiple craft wasn't a good option - I guess I could have launched a rover with lots of snacks & waited for the next launch window, but where's the fun in that?   So I made this ridiculous beast:

Getting it to orbit was the EASY part.  The top tank drains first & gets jettisoned - which then created a massive imbalance, requiring the Wolfhound to be throttled down to like 20% thrust.  The two bottom tanks had rover wheels mounted in between them which my engineer had to rearrange to being mounted on the outboard for stability. 

Landing was actually much easier than the transfer to Minmus - killed most of my velocity with the Wolfhound, then switched to the Twitch engines for a VTOL landing.

After a short drive, I was able to dock with the crippled lander with the claw.  Once the tourists & pilot were transferred and the rescue craft's main fuel tank topped off, the stranded lander was released & destroyed with demolition charges

Finally, the rescue craft departed for home, jettisoning the wheels & side tanks as it gained altitude:

 

 

[KerballingSmasher]

wow... that's nuts!

[magnemoe]

The Jool "lander"
https://magnemoe3.imgur.com/all


Insane in lots of ways: scale, risk, stupidity, awesomeness. 
No you can not do this anymore, no engine give enough trust at this pressure. 

Yes you could use mods and balloons. 
Don that. 



Was able to send Jeb down to the surface with an wire with extensions, but was not able to plant a flag, sent an bug report  

[proteasome]

SSTO Space Helicopter to Laythe and back. Electric propeller meant unlimited atmospheric flight. Used a Karbonite fusion engine for everything else.

 

Edited May 27, 2019 by proteasome

[The Minmus Derp]

WOW that is so COOL! what mod is that?

[Raptor42]

Once I was messing around in Beyond Home planet pack, testing my new satellite launcher, and then I thought: "WHAT IF... I launched a satellite and then sent it on little stardive. The best thing about this was the fact that the star system has actually TWO stars (not counting Kerbol that is orbiting them) so you can set up gravity assist from one star that will send you on very close pass with the system barycentre (since KSP uses single body gravity calcultions it is actual body). What I didn't expect was that pass around the first star will be so easy, no unlimited heat resistance cheat needed, but after that things started to go werid. My ship started to slow down for no reason, only a few hundreds of Gs. And radiators working on 500% glowing white, and when I turned off the heat resistance cheat, you know what happened.

[proteasome]

7 hours ago, The Minmus Derp said:

WOW that is so COOL! what mod is that?

If you're talking about the space helicopter, the helicopter parts (electric rotor, cockpit, etc) are from firesplitter. The fusion engine is from karbonite. There's also a small nuclear reactor part-clipped into the body that's probably from near-future electrical.

[RocketSquid]

My craziest was when my mun mission ran out of monoprop so I launched a space station to resupply it. My dumbest was when I launched a fuel tanker to duna but left a fuel cell on so it ran out of fuel on the way there.