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

[macdjord]

Also, add more fins to your tail. That will help keep you from flipping out.

[Varsi]

I can't even get past 10k meters. I follow Mr. Manley's tutorials, every time I start to turn at about 10,000 meters my (very) basic rocket spins out of control.

Sounds like you're trying with outdated instructions. Check his latest tutorial playlist.

Like this one:

[RCgothic]

Jeb will not come back from space today. And the battery powering his life support has a shelf life of two hours.

At least that's how I thought it would go! I'm on an early career mode game (FAR - TAC LS) with no respawns or reverts, and within the 30 part limit I thought 3,900m/s DV should have been enough to get into LKO and back. Turns out my ascent profile on this occasion was... a little less than optimal. I got Jeb into a 150km/71km orbit. It was at this point that I realised that I had zero left in the tank and the game had just auto-saved on achieving orbit. And I hadn't attached any additional batteries because I wasn't expecting to stay up for even one complete orbit. I couldn't even EVA and hope to survive the re-entry and freefall as I haven't yet upgraded the astronaut complex!

After thinking things through for a few moments I realised Jeb DID have one remaining source of propulsion! By orientating retrograde and jettisoning his second stage engines at apoapsis I managed to get his periapsis down to 67km! It was now a race against time between aerobraking and hypothermic death!

Three orbits later, apoapsis dropped below 70km. Simultaneously the battery expired and I lost manoeuvring control (no RCS). Unsure whether the parachutes would deploy without power,or even whether I'd survive re-entry without having the ability to orient my heat-shield, I armed two of three parachutes in the upper atmosphere just before the battery expired. They were promptly ripped off by Mach 6 winds. Luckily the capsule did manage to orient itself correctly without them. Jeb survived re-entry, even if by now he was twenty minutes without power and getting a little frosty. In any case the manual main chute release must have been working today, and after a fiery re-entry it deployed correctly. Onto a 30' mountainside.

After rolling down the mountainside for what felt like 5km and having both radial parachutes detonate under him, Jeb finally climbed from the pod and used his mobile phone to let the recovery crews know he was okay.

I don't think I've ever had such a touch and go situation resolve itself positively!

Edited June 11, 2015 by RCgothic

[kStrout]

You know you can get out and push. Right?

[Plume & Akakak]

You know you can get out and push. Right?

Right, but not with an astronaut complex still at level 1 : )

[RCgothic]

Right, but not with an astronaut complex still at level 1 : )

Exactly!

[richfiles]

True, it was only an test of the orbital transfer stage or something like that... But still... I didn't even get to go properly UP, much less to space!

Everything failed to stage once I was off the pad, including chutes!

MechJeb failed me TWICE!!! Once on ascent (It tried to make it a descent).

It failed me again, when my engines didn't stage either. Ugh!!!

Resilient little bugger though, that little tin can I called "Mun Luna"! Jump to 3:49 or so for the fun bits.

It was one of my earliest uses of MechJeb, and it was still setup from the pervious days Mun lander maneuverability tests.

Note the Mun lander's orientation...

Edited June 11, 2015 by richfiles

[CatastrophicFailure]

Jeb will not come back from space today. And the battery powering his life support has a shelf life of two hours.

At least that's how I thought it would go! I'm on an early career mode game (FAR - TAC LS) with no respawns or reverts, and within the 30 part limit I thought 3,900m/s DV should have been enough to get into LKO and back. Turns out my ascent profile on this occasion was... a little less than optimal. I got Jeb into a 150km/71km orbit. It was at this point that I realised that I had zero left in the tank and the game had just auto-saved on achieving orbit. And I hadn't attached any additional batteries because I wasn't expecting to stay up for even one complete orbit. I couldn't even EVA and hope to survive the re-entry and freefall as I haven't yet upgraded the astronaut complex!

After thinking things through for a few moments I realised Jeb DID have one remaining source of propulsion! By orientating retrograde and jettisoning his second stage engines at apoapsis I managed to get his periapsis down to 67km! It was now a race against time between aerobraking and hypothermic death!

Three orbits later, apoapsis dropped below 70km. Simultaneously the battery expired and I lost manoeuvring control (no RCS). Unsure whether the parachutes would deploy without power,or even whether I'd survive re-entry without having the ability to orient my heat-shield, I armed two of three parachutes in the upper atmosphere just before the battery expired. They were promptly ripped off by Mach 6 winds. Luckily the capsule did manage to orient itself correctly without them. Jeb survived re-entry, even if by now he was twenty minutes without power and getting a little frosty. In any case the manual main chute release must have been working today, and after a fiery re-entry it deployed correctly. Onto a 30' mountainside.

After rolling down the mountainside for what felt like 5km and having both radial parachutes detonate under him, Jeb finally climbed from the pod and used his mobile phone to let the recovery crews know he was okay.

I don't think I've ever had such a touch and go situation resolve itself positively!

fun fact: despite the whole "space is cold" myth, without power to run the cooling systems he'd be far more likely to expire from heat stroke rather than hypothermia. Been reading lossa Gemini stuff lately, keeping cool was actually their big temperature problem. They were some shtinky shweaty guys when they came back.

[KerBlammo]

My least successful rocket design ever.

[macdjord]

True, it was only an test of the orbital transfer stage or something like that... But still... I didn't even get to go properly UP, much less to space!

Everything failed to stage once I was off the pad, including chutes!

MechJeb failed me TWICE!!! Once on ascent (It tried to make it a descent).

It failed me again, when my engines didn't stage either. Ugh!!!

Resilient little bugger though, that little tin can I called "Mun Luna"! Jump to 3:49 or so for the fun bits.

It was one of my earliest uses of MechJeb, and it was still setup from the pervious days Mun lander maneuverability tests.

Note the Mun lander's orientation...

The ascent failure is because your rocket is being controlled from some part in the lander, which is upside down. The landing failure is because your engine wasn't turned on, and auto-stage only works during ascent unless you arm it manually.

[Flyinpenguin117]

I've spent the last couple of days trying to get my first SSTO to function and build a basic space station. Generally, its gotten to orbit, but I've never made it all the way back to space center. Catalogue of failures:

1) Generally flawed design. Spun out, tore apart, and burned up on reentry

2) Used wrong tail fin, which burned up on reentry, spun out, tore apart, crashed into surface.

3-5) Mostly succesful, but game crashed during reentry.

4) Almost made it back to space center without the game crashing, was several miles out and lined up with the runway, turned up time acceleration to close the gap, spun out, tore apart, crashed into surface (notice a theme here?). Cockpit somehow survived, so I chalked it up as a success anyways.

5) This is the most spectacular, and peculiar. The last flight deployed the first module of my space station (Cupola attached to a Hitchhiker with some panels and such), this one added a science lab. All went well, and I began my reentry burn while looking at the map. Suddenly, the spacecraft spun out. I went back and found out that, somehow, the shuttle had collided with the upper half of the space station, even though they were kilometers apart. It then tore apart and burned up on reentry. The game crashed again afterwords, so I loaded to a previous autosave and tried to recreate the incident, but I couldn't.

6) Going off the previous save, I managed to miss the space station, reenter, and overshot the space center. I turned around over the ocean, and fell just short of the runway and landed in the ocean. Somehow, the shuttle survived, so I call it a success.

[Mighty1]

I see KSP crashes a lot during reentry for you. Did you hit F10 to disable temperature gaudges? They cause a large memory leak which result in a game crash.

[TrooperCooper]

My large space station spontaneously disintegrating after a physics engines load error while I was slowing down way above with a tanker...

Those are the moments that I still use the safegame option for in my career.

[CrazyJebGuy]

SSTO

I'm not good at these. So I had a go. Started well with 4 turbojets making it climb at mach 1.7.

Two nukes where too weak to get it to orbit tho. Tried to turn back to KSC but turning at 27000 meters and mach 2 is not a good idea...

I got into a ridiculous spin. Pulled out at 1k altitude tho. Not wanting to spin or break wings, I was cautius about pitch up tho. at 300m I went holy cow this is too slow and pulled up madly. No spin.

But it was literally 50m short of clearing the sea. If only I had packed chutes and the plane packed his swimsuit

[Flyinpenguin117]

I see KSP crashes a lot during reentry for you. Did you hit F10 to disable temperature gaudges? They cause a large memory leak which result in a game crash.

I only had the problem those 3 consecutive times. I gave up and tried again the next day, and it worked fine for another 3 reentries, so I don't know what went wrong. I'll try that in the future, though. Thanks.

[BurningLegion]

I attempted to launch a 128T lander specifically designed to land and return from any of Jool's moons in a single stage for my interpretation of the Jool-5 challenge within a procedural fairing sitting on top of a 3.75M Kerbodyne stack surrounded by six 5M booster stacks.

The reaction wheel under the fairing snapped under the strain, and a whole bunch of rockets went everywhere while the launchpad exploded. Lesson learned: Either drain the lander's fuel, or use its rockets to help launch itself into orbit.

[Gnullbegg]

So something rather interesting happened to me yesterday...

This was of course totally intentional. Luckily the probe is still 100% intact so I should be able to take off, right?

Well, kind of.

So at this point I notice my apoaps marker does all kinds of strange things, like jiggling wildly across space somewhere far off the mun (no screenshot though, unfortunately). I decide I'll try switching to the space center to maybe reset things.

Ok.

[Bioman222]

My least successful rocket design ever.

http://i.imgur.com/N5rmPnV.png

This picture describes KSP perfectly.

*downloads*

[mrklaw]

I have quite a few of these, and thought it'd be interesting to hear others.

I just sent a small mun lander up to dock with my mun station in orbit. I got in a nice rendezvous orbit before realising I was going in the wrong direction. doh. So I did a quickload (rather than a revert, not sure why), which took me back ages, to the middle of the previous rescue mission which I then had to do again. Doh 2.

Determined to get it right this time, I launched again, got the correct orbital direction and rendezvoused. Brought it in to about 40m, switched over to RCS and prepared for docking. Selected my docking jnr port and did 'control from here', then looked over the target station to pick somewhere to dock...at which point I realised I only had standard sized docking ports on there. Damn.

I've been using standard sizes because the game said you can't transfer crew through a junior. But then watched a Scott Manley video where he did - so I was trying it out and it bit me on the backside. Third time lucky I hope.

So lets hear your less auspicious moments

[wossname]

Spent over 2 hours playing with RemoteTech (I'm new to that particular mod), and managed to get my Comms satellite into a perfect 6 hour keosync orbit over the KSC.

I was satisfied and very pleased with myself so I decided to decouple the satellite from the manned tugboat that pushed it up there in the first place, so I could bring the tug back to Kerbin to fetch satellite number 2... Awesome!

Decouple successful... hit F5... realise that Jeb is actually chilling by the pool back at KSC and not in fact in the capsule of the tugboat which now drifts gracefully but emptily dangerously close to my carefully situated and rather expensive commsat.

Panic hit F9... ohhhhh.

Dang.

[Bobnova]

So something rather interesting happened to me yesterday...

This was of course totally intentional. Luckily the probe is still 100% intact so I should be able to take off, right?

Well, kind of.

So at this point I notice my apoaps marker does all kinds of strange things, like jiggling wildly across space somewhere far off the mun (no screenshot though, unfortunately). I decide I'll try switching to the space center to maybe reset things.

Ok.

I've had the jiggle when I accidentally clipped goo canisters into things. Especially when they are in a service bay and the doors have closed to clip into the goo.

That makes for interesting issues.

[federicoaa]

was short 50m/s for completing moho orbital insertion.

[Feradose]

I have a habit of reentering pod only with 1 man pods, so my deorbiting stage hits my pod while last 500 meters of parachuting.. Bill died in a most unlucky way.

[SubzeroSpartan7]

Built a Mun lander because I hadn't landed on the Mun in a long time. I got there, and then I accidentally decoupled the re-entry capsule instead of the injection stage.

[Venusgate]

slrpnls

/10char