You Will Not Go To Space Today - Post your fails here!

[StrandedonEarth]

He lived, and he's home. Success!

[HeadHunter67]

Since he walked away from it, we classify that as a "good landing". Success!

[NecroBones]

Well, I actually did go to space today.

I am not sure whether to consider this a success or a failure.

Success, for sure.

[deltalambdamu]

Your Kerbals are alive and most of your ship is in tact. However, you was unable to complete your mission. So the mission is a fail. But your rescue was a success.

[Benjpalmer]

Accidentally forgot to keep an eye on a burn while trying to get into orbit.

Come back, out of fuel, and this happened:

[ExplodingRocketShips]

I have pictures of one of the structures set up, but when I landed my second of three planned hab modules for a Tylo base (There is going to be other bases on planets and moons like it in the future) I jumped one of my Kerbals from the ladder...Turns out faceplanting on Tylo is bad for health. (The game crashed.)

[Spartwo]

Although no longer appropriate I find it kinda funny.

If I were to sum up progress on the launcher.

[Bioman222]

It was meant to land. On Eve.

[Tw1]

It began as a regular launch, when one of my smoke enhancers (RT-10s set up to give that proper blast off cloud) broke of and hit one of my actual engines.

I tried to fly the rocket but it soon became apparent orbit was not to be.

So I went out in a blaze of glory.

[CatastrophicFailure]

So I schlepped a couple of ion bikes to Gilly to test out in the barely-there gravity. Jeb was thrilled for a moment:

Until it became apparent that the thing is absolutely uncontrollable. I realized too late that the probe core I used has zero torque output. Then a minor collision with the ground made KSP that Jeb was a piece of debris stuck in the seat. So I figured the solution was, of course, an even bigger collision. So after much finagling (that new ion engine might as well be a Mainsail on Gilly) I manage to slam the bike into the ground at about 60 m/s. This knocks Jeb free but the game still thinks he's a piece of debris and won't let me control him, and he's now on a sub orbital cruise to the other side of the moonlet.

It finally took a bit of save file editing to convince KSP that Jeb was, in fact, Jeb, and another twenty minutes of him bouncing and sliding around on his face before i could get him back to the ship. He didn't seem all that unhappy oddly enough:

[Bishop149]

Test of new launch system!

First stage separation . . . . Oh that's not gone well . . . .

[cantab]

A 700 part ship on a 200 part launcher means you will go to space today - just not very quickly. I was running at around 1/6-1/7 speed on launch, up to 1/4 speed at best now it's in orbit and the launcher discarded.

[User Unrelated]

Still playing 0.23

I wanted to send a big long train-rover to duna...

so I wanted to first test the parachute system.

Toss it on top of a solid stage, and wait for Kerbin re-enrty! What could go wrong?

Oh...

The actual launch didn't go too well either.

[Wooks]

I doubt this thing will ever reach orbit, but I´ll try until the game explodes.

[G4S3FR]

I'd say less of a fail, more of an abnormal launch angle.

[Tortoise]

>I send the first piece of my space station to orbit, has 4 tiny rocketboosters which are out of fuel

>I send my second piece into orbit

>Temporarily turn on infinite fuel while docking and rocket boosters on the other craft re-activate

>Entire space station de-orbits.

[cantab]

I'd say less of a fail, more of an abnormal launch angle.

What the heck? Your rocket appears to have broken the launchpad. How on Kerbin do you manage that?

[TerLoki]

Testing out a new modular lander/crew vehicle system, where the orbital module detaches to become the lander's command pod, then ejects the engines once in orbit again and docked. About right after undocking and doing my deorbit burn I noticed the lander had no attitude control, so I had to perform my first SUBorbital docking to catch it before Jeb turned into a splatter on Minmus.

[moeggz]

We've all been there. While Kerbals like to sneak onto our rockets solar panels apparently like to vanish once in space (you added them, you KNOW it!). Kerbals make due without ladders, SAS, or sometimes without fellow Kerbal contact for years while they wait for the rescue mission you swear you'll get to someday. So, as the title asks, what is your biggest blunder in KSP?

I made mine recently. I had launched a moon lander/orbiter paired ship and made it to Munar orbit after a lot of tweaking and time (I'm still relatively new to the game) and undocked the lander from the "mother ship" that had enough fuel in it for me to knock out all of the biomes on the Mun. I had placed a nose cone on a decoupler on the engine of the lander as it was upside down and on the top of the rocket at launch. In Mun orbit while controlling the lander I hit the space bar, the decoupler fires and nothing happens.... I had attached the nose cone directly to the engine some how O_o. Had to redo all my work. May not seem like much to you experts but it was a very costly error for me.

So I'm excited to hear about your greatest "oh duh" moments!! Cheers!

[CatastrophicFailure]

Y'know they have a pill for that now...

[NecroBones]

Y'know they have a pill for that now...

LOL, too funny.

[cantab]

As for "derp" moments, well it's never very critical but I've lost count of the number of times I've throttled up and sat wondering why the delta-V meter isn't going down. Because my engines aren't ignited, of course.

And on the flipside, Shift-Tabbing back through objects in map view when my navball is open and my engines are ignited, resulting in an unintended burn.

Then there's mods into the mix. Like typing decimal delta-V values into Precise Node, then only noticing some time later that I'm in a fast timewarp since . is still the control for speeding up time.

Really KSP suffers quite badly from control overloading, even not counting the mod.

[Sun]

Just 5 minutes ago, I tried landing on Jool at .000000001 m/s. Apparently, even going one QUARK or PROTON per second and landing results in a nuclear explosion.

[ArmchairGravy]

Getting ready to head to Duna, so I launch my manned core and followed up with the drive module. I get the drive module all rendezvoused and go to dock, and find that I hadn't put any RCS fuel on it. The core doesn't have any RCS capability as everything is supposed to dock to it. The drive module made a pretty splash on de-orbit at least.

Addendum: I got a drive module and lander attached and headed off. Get to Ike, my first stop, undock the lander, extend the legs before my burn down to the surface and find I didn't have symmetry turned on when I attached the legs. It seems this mission was fated to fail.

Edited April 20, 2014 by ArmchairGravy

[Benjpalmer]

Protip: Do not try to test stuff with a probe at night.