Your Biggest Fail in KSP!

[hellion13]

Spending hours designing and building the perfectly engineered rocket only to have it collapse in a cloud of glorious explosions.....

[GreeningGalaxy]

Probably one of the first times I made a decent KSPI ship: I decided to land it on Minmus for a shakedown cruise, which went swimmingly enough. Then I figured I'd launch another one and land next to it just to show off my awesome precision landing skills to myself, at which point I discovered, about 2.5 kilometers above Minmus in a steep dive trajectory, what "Radiation Safety" on the DT-Vista engine actually meant. Rather than firing the engine back up and dooming the kerbals below to radiation poisoning, I decided to do my best (not much) to slow down with RCS and see if I could ride out the crash. I did, but the ship certainly didn't stay intact enough to make it back to Kerbin.

[tofof]

My rover took a tumble and apparently killed Bill; he went ragdoll and the craft stopped taking input. Unfortunately for me, this means it kept the previous inputs I'd given it just before that point. The tumbling slowed and slowed more, each time spending more and more of its motion doing a loop on one of the wheels, until...

Words don't really do it justice. This would've gone on for days, I suspect, until that patch of Mun was totally without sunlight.

[Sky_walker]

My biggest fail was the first mission to Duna.

Reload after reload after reload.

Game constantly bugged for me. My rocket either entered constant acceleration or it got "stuck" in place relative to the sun, and Duna just flew away. Oh, and my favorite: spontaneous deassembly when entering Duna SoI. Made a beautiful cloud of derbies... good 5 times over until I actually managed to get past the magical forcefield without loosing parts. Then there were few other bugs like spacecraft flying through Ike, graphics bugging out on atmospheric breaking, graphics bugging out on crossing the SoI, and various problems with loading/saving, then rover bugging out in dozens of weird ways (like getting stuck in it's lander platform just to be ejected on sub-orbital trajectory moment later)

Until that point I thought that KSP is a well coded, relatively bug-free game, but that one trip wiped out any good impressions I had. Since then I actually started noticing bugs, and.... oh my god....

[Xenro66]

My biggest fail... Hmm...... It's got to be messing up with the action groups. You know the glitch where you put a symmetry object into action groups, remove the symmetry, put symmetry back and replace the object removes the action group on all but the original object yeah?

Well during my SSTO to Duna (permadeath), I didn't realise that I had done that glitch. While coming in for a landing, went to activate my VTOL rockets and one of them wasn't bound to the action group because of that glitch.. I was only 1km above the ground, you can probably guess what happened to all 10 Kerbals on board.... Even since then, I've avoided Duna. It's a freaking deathtrap for me

[cantab]

My Duna rover. This was part of one of my big missions, I sent that, an Ike lander, and an asteroid to the red planet. Tons of dockings, complex orbital manouvres, the works. Just designing the rover took ages of work and testing on Kerbin.

Disintegrated on parachute opening.

I do not (usually) revert.

[SatanX]

I once had a low orbit rocket test that ended with the Kerbalnaut dying on Jool. I should never run a space program.

[Hannu]

Most of my fails have been forgotten or accidentally made things. Last was, when I delivered large supply ship (largest tank of fuel, TAC life supplies etc.) to station on 200 km Laythe orbit. I tried to dock and everything went nominally until ships touched each other. Nothing happened. I tried again, and nothing. Then I realized that I did not have docking port. I am not sure if I forgot it or deleted accidentally in VAB before launch. I had to bring supplies from nearby Jool Station and then I sent a fixing unit with claw and docking port to fix the supply ship.

[tall_guy]

Every time I attempt to build/fly a spaceplane should count as a fail. Flat spins abound and landing just doesn't happen without explosions. Now all my cockpits are detachable and have their own parachutes.

[Ultraflight]

So I tried to run a little RP-style space program, what with "unlocking tech" without that silly "manned-start" Campaign Mode.

I successfully orbited a probe around the Mun.

Two days after I landed a lander on the surface, I switched to it from the orbiter, and it had died.

I discovered that the RTG had glitchsploded upon carrier stage separation.

I blamed it on the Kommunists.

This is why I should never be trusted with engineering a lander vehicle.

Also, always bring a static solar panel. Just don't even not bring one, you WILL need it sometime.

EDIT: And I just can't not tell the story of my Luna-3 workalike, Artemis II.

After Artemis I impacted the Mun, as intended, Artemis II was sent to flyby the Mun and image it.

The booster stage did not have the deltav to get all the way to the Mun, so I used some RCS fuel in the probe, the course correction fuel.

After a round of Hullcam imaging during the flyby, it was ejected out of the Kerbin system by a chance Mun assist.

Several days later, I'm looking at my old probes when I discover Artemis II about to flyby the Jool system.

I scramble to modify the trajectory, and the probe manages to aerocapture into a Jool orbit.

Now this 4 year old Mun probe is circling Vall.

The krakens were smiling upon me, it seems.

Edited October 1, 2014 by Ultraflight

[Ph34rb0t]

Missed my Duna orbital insertion because the fuel tanks of my probe blocked all of the 10 solar panels from sunlight and I ran out of electricity.

[SofusRud]

I shipped all the components of a large modular surface base all the way to Laythe, only to find that one of the assembly rovers was for some reason missing its docking port. Must have misclicked back in the SPH, but since I couldn't complete the base with only one rover, I had to wait for an alignment to send tug back to Kerbin to get the rover, and then wait for another intercept. One tiny rover held up my entire space program for an obnoxiously long time.

[JTG]

I attempted to make an Apollo style mission for 3 Kerbals. It had 2 pods, the command, which fits 3 kerbals, and the lander, which fits 2. I got to orbit, but the command didn't have enough fuel to burn into Mun orbit. I had to ditch Bill and send him into EVA orbit. Then, the lander was landing, and it crashed down hard, killing Bob but Jeb was spared. Now Jeb is stranded on the Mun, and Bill above it. Time for a rescue mission I guess...

[kevin_nightwolf]

hmm my biggest epic fail.... hmm

i builded a core for a space station. fired it up and made it go in orbit. fair enough.

then i builded a huge part to dock onto the station to make the station bigger.

i brough it up into space and made it go in an orbit and i just realised.... i dont have enough fuel for correct the orbit for going on to do the actual docking.....

xDD

(PS: i bought the game yesterday and already have done like 100 atempts and 50 different designs xDDD)

[WARodst10175]

Unleashing the kraken. (Game crashing) By screwing around with HyperEdit... Oops..

[mrclucks]

Putting a keostationary satellite up and lithobreaking with the command module that put it up without parachutes. And not realizing who i had untill i 'recovered' my craft and saw who i KIAd. Jeb, Bob and Bill. . .

[Aser]

I needed a bit more science to unlock the next tech, so I figured I would send up a quick lander to minimus.

I launched, circularized, and did my transfer burn. I de-orbited. As I was coming in for my landing, I started realizing that I was not slowing down nearly fast enough. Turns out I was careening towards the Mun with a Minimus lander.

1 kerbal paid dearly for my mistake.

[Sampa]

Built the mercury-redstone rocket in rss using real fuels mod, forgot to set up the fuel tanks for the launch stage.

[UFO Researcher]

Mine is this!

Edited May 19, 2015 by UFO Researcher
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[EdgySpork]

Hitting a parked spaceplane with a different spaceplane. It wasn't showing as a vessel on the map because I had craft display disabled.

[CrazyJebGuy]

I came back after an update, and I swear to God it was not my fault. I took Jeb on a simple orbit and return mission. But on the way back, aftyer rentry, the parachute deployed too slowly! It barely slowed him at all! So he smashed into Kerbin at 432 mph.

[RA3236]

Aerobraking on Eve with a Pe of 50km and travelling 5000kms on Soi change.

[maceemiller]

Lots of fails here but my most recent one was during reentry to Kerbin.

I actually wanted to do an IVA but foolishly hit EVA.....

Jebs suit filled with a mystery goo which he got no science for......

[thakyZ]

I forgot to put parachutes on my capsule. But I only noticed when plummeting ~1000 m/s into earths atmosphere.

[Boots]

Sent a fleet of probes to land on duna and ike, only discovering once they'd landed and collected all the juicy science that I hadn't added antennae.

Then, a year later, designing a complicated pair of eve landesr and discovering I'd made exactly the same mistake.