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

[xub313]

I was testing my new Mun lander and Jeb got the bright idea to land on the VAB. Let's say it wasn't exactly a soft touchdown. Fortunately Jeb survived.

Jeb is lucky he's in an orange suit, I would have fired anyone else.

[Delrey]

Flew to Eve with 2 remote atmospheric probest to fly through the atmosphere. Forgot probe cores. I released debris.

Delrey

[Glockenspiel Hero]

Had a mission to put a satellite in orbit around Minimus. No problem. I had a new probe core to try so I built the usual probe + solar panels + antenna +thermometer, attach it to the stock probe booster and send it off. Get it into the correct orbit , get the points and then a mission to do a bunch of temp readings on Min pops up. Great- free points. One's on the surface, but I've got tons of DV and Min has low gravity, so I can grab it

Halfway in I wonder why nothing's working anymore. In my haste to try out the new core, I forgot batteries. I'm in shadow, my probe's out of juice and I do a very nice lithobrake 20 seconds later.

Should have known better to send a probe to do a Jeb's job.

[egnio98]

To be fair, I did make it to space, but when I docked the SSTO i was testing out to the station to drop off a little construction rig, the rig refused to get out of the bay because the RCS was clipped through the bottom of the bay.

Well, at least I know the SSTO works!

[RCgothic]

Today I will not go to space because I forgot that my first Remote Tech probe will be over the horizon before it's planned LKO circularization burn. Unplanned re-entry resulted.

Edited December 22, 2014 by RCgothic

[Grover]

Today I will not go to space because I forgot that my first Remote Tech probe will be over the horizon before it's planned LKO circularization burn. Unplanned re-entry resulted.

I dont suppose you have a node amd flight computer set up? Darn our low tech mission control

[RCgothic]

Nope. I'm a long way away from nodes.

My solution was to use a manned launcher to place 2 unmanned relays in a 100km orbit and then send them up to 710km 120deg apart on RCS as and when connection allowed. (710km gives me more leeway for angular position than 600km and keeps 700km clear in case I want it for something later). I didn't have enough dv to send a mk1 capsule to 710km and back on 30 parts inc payload.

A third relay completes the triangle by getting to 710km without Jeb's help.

They're now in almost perfect orbits, max +/- 30m and inclination down to 0.0003deg, within 0.1deg of correct orbital phase.

Slightly undercut my probes-first approach, but oh well.

[KvickFlygarn87]

So, after going on a rather long hiatus of approximately three months, I decided to update and launch the game as I saw the new update.

Anyways, I was eager to get going so I decided I was finally gonna go to Duna as a "coming-back" celebration.

I threw together a really small lander with transfer stage and launcher. After a lot of fiddling and timewarping and other funky business, I finally had my approach; it was about as perfect as possible. There was no need for a planechange or midway course correction. Anyways, everything went smoothly and I finally managed to land on Duna for the first time without using MechJeb.

Since everything had gone smoothly I decided to relaunch and rendezvous with my transfer stage (I had left a docking port on it). At first I couldn't find it in orbit because it had been labeled as Debris (DAMN YOU, KSP). But since I remembered the approximate orbit it had, I decided to launch anyways and work out the rendezvous later.

Once in orbit I had to find the transfer stage. I fiddled a bit through the Tracking Station and eventually found it. I set it as target from the lander and started to set up nodes. After a minute or so of fiddling, I discovered that it was in the opposite orbit.

Mistakes were made!

What horrible failures do you have to share?

[Awass]

The Clampotron Sr. Docking Port is a mistake waiting to happen. I once made a station core based on it, sent that into orbit, launched another station part to dock with it, and only then realized the docking port was on backwards.

[LordFerret]

Learned just yesterday that a piece of debris (engine, fuel tank, docking port) without a probe core attached doesn't want to cooperate when re-docked to. The engines wouldn't fire, and the Clamp-O-Tron Sr didn't allow undocking (again) once docked.

I should start a thread titled "Top 10 Reasons I'm Going Bald".

[Mister Kingdom]

I have a very annoying habit of forgetting to install certain things on my craft. Things like (Most often to least often) Solar panels, batteries, RCS, docking ports, any way of returning to Kerbin, and in one case an entire engine. However, my most embarrassing failures are when I put TOO MUCH in my ships. Such as:

1) Attempting to send two, very small station components together to save space. I did this by putting the docking ports together, with a separator between them. Cue magnetism!

2) Attempt "Apollo-style" Mun mission, with Scott Manley's design for taking rovers (Two beams protruding from the sides of the lander). Proceed to get large S.A.S hooked around one of them on the way down. Flail wildly, forgetting about being able to delete it in the Tracking Station. Remove most of the lander, including most of the fuel, landing on a steep crater wall. Await rescue.

[eddiew]

Basically everything I launch in 0.90 with the first winglets. Cannot steer them at all under FAR - half a dozen satellites have fallen into the pond because they wanted to fly level until they ran out of fuel

Got a solar powered probe-rover all the way to Eve after 9 real time days, only to realise that the light side is now facing away from Kerbin. Waited another week for it to rotate round enough for a daylight landing (was using Remote Tech, needed LoS to Kerbin). Then discovered that Eve's atmosphere rips extended solar panels off the moment you start moving, so had to keep stopping to charge up, then folding up to move. Exploring Eve a hundred yards at a time xD

And yesterday, only installed 1 TAC small life support cannister for my Minmus run and spent ages in a polar orbit getting crew reports for a contract. Arrived home with just 3 hours of oxygen to spare - I hadn't even looked at it until I was back in Kerbin's atmosphere. Not quite a failure, but it was darn close to killing Bill

[cicatrix]

Placed solar arrays too close to the LV-N decoupler fairing. After it came off, both solar panels were torn away... the probe is on the escape trajectory. Last F5 was pressed months back.

Now I'm facing a dilemma - either I send a manned repair mission in 2 years (when the probe comes back) or accept a 'mission failure'.

Here, a lesson to be learnt: always press F5 before anything you do!

[herbal space program]

On my first successful Tylo landing, I miscalculated the total dV required so much that I had to burn my whole unmanned return stage and dump it. Then, when I finally got the lander on the ground in one piece, I discovered that I had left a Mk1 illuminator sticking straight out of my descent ladder, completely blocking it. Damn you, 4-way symmetry! No flag planting for me. I do get to call the mission successful though, because my lander was OP enough to rendezvous with another well-fuelled ship that I had in system and get towed home.

[tyrant264]

When I was launching a probe/rover to duma one of the SRBs still had a tiny bit of fuel, but being myself I was like meh and decoupled, needless to say I shouldn't of mehd it because it gained speed and smashed through my craft like a hot knife through butter. so much FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

[carlpilot]

I was testing a Kerbin system crew shuttle, and it launches perfectly (aside from an RCS thruster being knocked off by a Procedural Fairing), and it lands on the Mun perfectly.

Once it lands, it immediately starts to topple, so I throttle up to full thrust, in an attempt to get back into a stable Munar orbit. While it is still burning to a suborbital trajectory, the fuel runs out. Completely out, and the RCS is not stable enough to push the shuttle because an RCS thruster was knocked off during Kerbin orbit boost, and it enters an unrecoverable flat spin (it can happen in a vacuum, apparently!), so Bill Kerman bails out, and rides with it along its trajectory, until about 10000 metres above the surface. Then, he turns on his EVAPack, and manages to land safely (after a little tumble) at 1.00 units of propellant left.

[KvickFlygarn87]

Well, yesterday I had a craft that just didn't want to work properly (however I will admit that the problem was most of the time approximately half a meter from the screen). Explanation follows.

So, after returning from a 3 month hiatus, I wanted to ease back into the game, refresh my memory. First I went to Duna (see previous page), then I decided to refresh my docking skills. I launched a Mk1 pod with a Docking Port Jr. on it

which barely got into a high orbit.

Because it just barely got into orbit I decided to go full KSP and slap some boosters on that puppy; more specifically, 2 medium sized SRBs.

The first 2 launches I decoupled the SRBs early and it blew my stuff up.

The third launch, I decoupled them after they burned out, however they decided to fall into my main booster and blow it up. The fourth launch I had just slapped some sepratrons on the SRBs (Are your boosters failing? Add more boosters to them!). However, when I launched I discovered that I had put the sepratrons in the first stage and my SRBs in the "decouple" stage.

The sixth launch went really well, except for the fact that I still didn't get to orbit with enough fuel for a rendezvous. To solve this, I swapped the solid boosters for liquid ones. My seventh launch failed as well because the boosters fell into my rocket.

I slap some Sepratrons on it and, after EIGHT LAUNCHES, all went well. 90% of the time here I was being incredibly dumb, but hey; it's what I do.

Ironically, my craft was named "TO SPACE".

[CatastrophicFailure]

A rookie crew on the first flight of a new revision of my workhorse launch vehicle. Something went wrong, I'm still not sure what, probably related to FAR, but the rocket suddenly started to veer off course:

Fortunately, I've learned well my lessons on launch escape systems and practicing abort procedures. The crew initiated the abort sequence with only moments to spare.

As it was now completely perpendicular to the air flow and still moving at about mach 2, aerodynamic forces began tearing the rocket apart barely a second later.

But the pod and escape system were still tumbling, the abort engine actually pulled it right back through the middle of the debris field:

It caught me so off guard I couldn't even get the really good screenshot. The escape tower assembly is usually extremely stable, especially at this lower altitude. Amazingly, it passed through the exploding booster unscathed, and the crew parachuted safely to the water.

[RCgothic]

The last few days I completed a couple of Mün flybys in preparation for a landing.

I set up a pair of long-range comms relays targeting the Mün, figuring that if they're in 180' phase, one will always be able to see the Mün. Somehow in testing I failed to notice that they only had enough battery for 75% of an umbral transit, and as they were in an equatorial orbit this meant they'd only have a 95% up-time.

So I put an identical pair of sats in Münar orbit, intended to provide a surface relay link to the majority of the surface. Because they were in a higher orbit, the umbral transit takes longer, so those only have a 90% up time. I also forgot that a Sat behind the Mün from kerbin's perspective would be completely ineffective. But as a craft on the surface would still only have to wait 20 mins or so to transmit, I let all these errors go.

Then I launched Mün-goer 3, which Jeb landed perfectly in the target zone. However, he forgot to turn the engine off and it fell over as I fumbled it. But no worries, because he was pointing up towards the lip of a crater, and I managed to get space borne again. But then I tried to by-eye the controls rather than use the nav ball. The pointy bit did not point upwards and Jeb did not go to space again.

And it wouldn't let me revert, so I quickloaded. To before I'd put up the long-range relays. Drat.

On the plus side, Jeb is alive, and I get to fix the issues with my Sat networks. (3 in inclined orbits with 2x the batteries on a triple-launcher using an inverted tri-adaptor).

Edited December 26, 2014 by RCgothic

[Theoderich]

I just designed and flew a plane for a temperature contract just beyond the northern ice caps. So I flew for an hour, real time since it is allergic to time warp, and ran out of fuel shortly after passing the pole.. so far so good, I though.. let's glide the rest.

Saved and flew on.. turns out: my target zone is on the other side of a large lake, and I could glide to the middle of the lake, but no further. So I decided to land on the ice instead, safer and closer to home...BUT I forgot to check center of lift vs center of mass when empty. Which was already a problem when I still wanted to cross the lake. I is very as soon as you go below about 170m/s, at least when empty. Landing took me a long time, but I made it loosing only one wingtip.

So with the failed glide attempt, and the landing I spend about 2h for NOT getting the contract done.. hurray for doing that again

[Rocketscience101]

Thermal Curtain Failure.

Is that a reference to a movie? Space Camp, I think its called.

[mdkendall]

Put a probe down on Duna. Landed, shall we say, awkwardly. Having done the science, really wanted to take off and get back to the orbiting ship so the science could be recovered rather than transmitted.

The probe has fallen over and is pointing downhill on possibly the steepest slope on Duna (the eastern edge of the large canyon). So I think "This can't be hard, I just need to retract the legs and roll the probe round so it's facing uphill, activate the legs at the right moment to stop it rolling and bump it upright a bit, then fire the engines to take off".

Naturally I quicksaved first.

That was a good thing, because I spent the better part of the subsequent hour rolling, bumping, firing, exploding and re-loading.

Finally I did it! The thing rolled round, the legs stopped it pointing uphill and bumped it just a little off the surface, I fired the engines and took off! Success!

Approximately thirty seven seconds later it became apparent to me that the probe had about nine hundred meters per second of delta-v on board, and you need about fourteen hundred to reach low Duna orbit.

This came as something of a disappointment.

[nohelmet]

Wow, cool story @mdkendall! I can imagine how disappointed you must have been!

[j-tk]

Send Max to Space. Max and Jinx friends

Thermal Curtain Failure.

http://i.imgur.com/TXmbFed.png

http://i.imgur.com/gwSKowI.png

http://i.imgur.com/NO8rpso.png

[CatastrophicFailure]

Send Max to Space. Max and Jinx friends

?!? I posted that a month & a half ago and people are just now getting the joke? LOL

http://i.imgur.com/RNjGIAk.gif

Approximately thirty seven seconds later it became apparent to me that the probe had about nine hundred meters per second of delta-v on board, and you need about fourteen hundred to reach low Duna orbit.

This came as something of a disappointment.

What'd you use to record that gif?