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

[Triop]

[Acolyte]

Easy jobs today.

1. Launch a ore-survey satellite with one of those big scanners for the first time EVAR, see what it can do.

2. Swap some personnel at my little munbase for peeps that have been to minmus too, so I can level up my kerbals.

Use a simple satellite mounted on a stock-for-me 5 kerbal transport module on a cheap (1.25m) booster assembly that I have already used before. A light load on a tried and tested lander because I'm not in the mood for hours of troubleshooting today. I don't have a contract to defray the costs, but its only $ K60 (ish) and I have plenty of dough. Main job is the satellite, but I can do both jobs with 1 mission, yeah !

And then the reality begins......

I do NOT release the satellite as soon a I get my Mun orbit and do some of the line-up maneuvers with the mun-base with the extra weight attached - no biggie right ? I separate the satellite and get on with the crew landing.

I land and spend rather longer than I want swapping 5 kerbals at base for new personnel, everyone plants flags to make sure the get max XP, although I suspect its only necessary to land on Mun.

The old crew take off in the 5-man shuttle, break orbit and.... don't have fuel to make kerbin periapsis 70K - oops maybe that screw up at the beginning where I didn't launch the satellite sooner was a bigger foul-up than I first thought. Oh well, I have a quicksave before the Mun-return launch (ie about 2 minutes ago) so I retry, and retry and keep failing.

I look on the forum for how to optimise the flight home - best advice ? get out and push 

So I try again and burn prograde when I should have burned retrograde - oops, quickload again.

This time I am more careful but have to watch the fuel tanks because somehow my twin side boosters have slightly different amounts of fuel in them so I need to stop the burn when either is empty or the other will spin me around.

Only this time after the burn I am now intersecting Kerbin (from 8,000,000 m ish)- I have just enough fuel left to re-raise my periapsis to 45k. Well at least I don't have to get out and push after all ! I have never been (intentionally) adventurous with re-entry so this will be a good learning experience for me, although a fully loaded 5-kerbal transport would not be my first choice of test module 

But I needn't have worried, as after about 5 re-entry loops and my ablator reduce to zero, Valentina brings it home like a boss and all 5 crew are recovered. I even got 10-ish points of science from a surface sample I picked up during the Mun handover - SUCCESS YEAH , albeit after about 4 hours....

I don't forget the satellite I left in orbit, but its has loads of fuel for its size and will be easy to position......

The satellite, where is it ?

Check debris, ship, all the different tracking station buttons, but my new satellite is not there !

Did I lose it in the debris ? did I fire it into the Mun when I separated it ?

I can't find it - I'll need to send another mission.

It will have to be unmanned, I can't take the stress 

Edited February 8, 2017 by Acolyte

[StubbornJeb]

Admit it,we have had some fails while playing KSP,and i want to ask:What was your biggest fail in KSP?

I once chose to land on Moho,turns out i picked the wrong place to land,and i fell dooooooown the Mohole and into the abyss.I never got out

R.I.P. Valentina Kerman

She didnt know how to land.

[seaces]

out of all places you had to hit Mohole.......

[StubbornJeb]

25 minutes ago, seaces said:

out of all places you had to hit Mohole.......

i mean,come on! In the map view,it looks so obvious!

[Snark]

FYI, there's already a thread for this one, folks. 

 

[Vanamonde]

Indeed. Overlapping threads have been merged. 

[StubbornJeb]

11 hours ago, Snark said:

FYI, there's already a thread for this one, folks. 

thats cool! I didnt know.Im stupid  

 

[Rath]

On 10/31/2016 at 0:23 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:

Er, this probably won't end well...

Nope. It didn't. We're going to need another Timmy! Kerman.

Obviously, you appear to have someone shooting a nuclear shaped charge based weapon at you (scroll down to "nuclear shaped charge").

[joacobanfield]

So, the Kerbollo 1 mission had been a sucess, Jeb became the first Kerbal on the Mun...and then kicked his ship, tipping it.

I had to "climb" a hill with it later to escape the Mun´s gravity.

[Archgeek]

15 hours ago, Rath said:

Obviously, you appear to have someone shooting a nuclear shaped charge based weapon at you (scroll down to "nuclear shaped charge").

No no, no one's shooting a nuclear shaped charge at them -- they're using a nuclear shaped charge to shoot a disk of tungsten plasma at them.

[cantab]

I'll cross-post this here. Jeb bailed out of the lander and proceeded to make orbit then get to the orbiter on the jetpack. This was intentional by me. I forgot one small problem with the orbiter.

And now Jeb is locked out. D'oh.

[Bluegillbronco2]

The image speaks for itself... Idid not go to space that day.

[CatastrophicFailure]

16 minutes ago, Bluegillbronco2 said:

The image speaks for itself... Idid not go to space that day.

What were you trying to send to space, a crate full of Vectors?? 

[CatastrophicFailure]

Me? I spawned a small galaxy. 

Er... wait...

Nope, that's just another failing rocket... 

[joacobanfield]

Contract build failed...

[Draalo]

A while ago, pre ver 1.2, in an early career state i flew to the Mun and land with Val.

I was pretty happy, vessel was a pod with tank + terrier and 2 radial attached tanks + 2 Terrier. Only ~50m/s dV left in the radial Tanks. I calculated my dV requirements and flew well.

(Hadnt unlocked fuelpipes)

Gone on EVA, Val tumbled and touched a landingleg - which exploded (nasty bug). Vessel tipped and layed flat - luckily the Hatch was still reachable.

Did a quicksafe (and learned to quicksave whenever a waypoint like landing has been reached).

I was able to rotate the ship but SAS wasnt strong enough to point the vessel up again.

Hmmm, what to do?

Ship was on a hill, so i orientated it to point the peak.

Did all the science, quicksaved again ( lesson learned) and throttled up... 6m/s ... 8 m/s ... 12 m/s ... Terrier expolde .. oh, too fast.

Quickload. Throttled up but less. Radial Tanks went empt, so i decoupled. Bad idea. Mainvessel touched the ground and expolded.

Took me 30 or more attempts to reach the peak without running out of fuel in the radial tanks.

After all i was starting in the wrong direction, so i needed more dV than expected to get into orbit and was only able to reach a Kerbin PE of 60km ... took many (MANY!) aerobreaks till Val finally landed.

 

Not a total fail, Val survived and i got my science but:

It took a whole sunday for a single mission. I cursed all squad members that day. Now i can laugh about it

 

 

[Core]

I crashed a Tuk-tuk at 150 M/s and the rider launched off at 2,000+ M/s.

[Leafbaron]

8 hours ago, Draalo said:

A while ago, pre ver 1.2, in an early career state i flew to the Mun and land with Val.

I was pretty happy, vessel was a pod with tank + terrier and 2 radial attached tanks + 2 Terrier. Only ~50m/s dV left in the radial Tanks. I calculated my dV requirements and flew well.

(Hadnt unlocked fuelpipes)

Gone on EVA, Val tumbled and touched a landingleg - which exploded (nasty bug). Vessel tipped and layed flat - luckily the Hatch was still reachable.

Did a quicksafe (and learned to quicksave whenever a waypoint like landing has been reached).

I was able to rotate the ship but SAS wasnt strong enough to point the vessel up again.

Hmmm, what to do?

Ship was on a hill, so i orientated it to point the peak.

Did all the science, quicksaved again ( lesson learned) and throttled up... 6m/s ... 8 m/s ... 12 m/s ... Terrier expolde .. oh, too fast.

Quickload. Throttled up but less. Radial Tanks went empt, so i decoupled. Bad idea. Mainvessel touched the ground and expolded.

Took me 30 or more attempts to reach the peak without running out of fuel in the radial tanks.

After all i was starting in the wrong direction, so i needed more dV than expected to get into orbit and was only able to reach a Kerbin PE of 60km ... took many (MANY!) aerobreaks till Val finally landed.

 

Not a total fail, Val survived and i got my science but:

It took a whole sunday for a single mission. I cursed all squad members that day. Now i can laugh about it

 

 

don' forget to get out and push! walking the spaceship home is always an option.

 

[Ryu Gemini]

These are a bit old, but you know that XKCD comic illustration of the Saturn V?  The one that says that if the engine is pointing up, you will not go to space today? 

 

I felt otherwise a couple years ago.

 

Now, technically, this was a success.  But by any standard of decency in design (not to mention environmentally) its an abysmal failure. 

 

The idea was to get to space while having a mainsail pointing upwards on at any time the rest of the rocket was. 

 

 

 

 

 

There was also a time I tried to make a row-boat with infernal robotics. 

In fact, my knee-jerk reaction to installing infernal robotics seems to be attempting to do things with them that I could do a hundred times easier with an ACTUAL part that does the same thing. 

 

 

 

The paddlewheel was arguably a success.  At least before I tried channeling Danny (at the time, he had recently done a video playing with the physics of intakes and water in his typical messing-with-the-game-until-an-entire-swarm-of-kraken-attack-him). 

 

 

 

Oh, right.  There was also that time when I accidentally built THE ACTUAL TENTACLE OF THE KRAKEN ITSELF. 

 

I'm honestly not sure WHY I built this thing.  Maybe for some "put a long/large thing in space" challenge at the time?  But I used infernal robotics to make a folded up thing, so I could get the absolute longest thing possible up in space.

 

 

It was indeed pretty long. 

 

 

The physics engine however objected, violently, with it whipping around in a frenzy and constantly magically moving around between different orbits at random.  And due to how plastic and flexible Infernal Robotics parts were, it did this without exploding violently. 

 

 

And thus, the Kraken's Tentacle was given form.  And in thanks, it decided to spare Kerbin from destruction.... for today.  Or maybe it was just enjoying the fear and terror of the vessel's poor pilot as he got flung around all over the place to look at Kerbin at the time.  Either way, the planet lived. 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 4, 2017 by Ryu Gemini

[Delay]

That seems to big to be Kerbin. What mod is it?

(Note the very thin atmosphere)

[ZeroG]

Ah, forgetting to set up staging; this never gets old.

On the plus side, the probe core survived.

[MushTroqua]

Was trying to launch a minmus probe...

guess i won't

[Ryu Gemini]

On 3/4/2017 at 6:54 AM, Delay said:

That seems to big to be Kerbin. What mod is it?

(Note the very thin atmosphere)

If you are talking to me, note that those screenshots were from an older version, and the atmospheric graphics may have been different.  It is also possible I had installed some graphic mod at that time.  Or maybe, the endless kraken event going on at the time was messing with the atmosphere's appearance somehow. 

 

 

[AccidentsHappen]

Rendezvous gone wrong. I was trying to use my surface mass relay to get a stranded John John Kerman off Minmus and into an encounter with my very-low-orbit station. After a heck ton of reloading quicksaves and experimentation, I felt I got it right. I strapped John John to his RCS-powered surfboard and loaded it into my Howitzer-style mass relay. Apparently-I'm-enjoying-using-hyphens-but-that's-not-the-point. I waited for the station to come somewhat close and shot John John Kerman into space in a way that no Kerbal had done before. I was pretty on target, and I adjusted my rendezvous with the minimal RCS on the surfboard. I'd pretty much run out by the time I got the encounter right, but, as usual, I didn't check my relative velocity. I timewarped to the closest point and oh my god I'm travelling at a bazillion miles an hour I found I was going way too quick. I adjusted my encounter so I was dead-on with my course and then ditched the surfboard, instead using John John's RCS pack to slow down. I'm guessing you can see my mistake by now. I watched in a strange trance as the high-speed surfboard proceeded to knock out all my solar panels. This was bad, as I need that to generate electricity. I called the station as a lost cause, and decided to evacuate so I could deorbit and start anew. I fired off the escape pods, they collided with the ground. I forgot to rotate the station; eight more kerbals gone. I undocked the ISRU tanker and tried to turn it around to escape the havoc; forgot to board kerbals. That ended badly, as that was the last hope for the kerbals stuck in the science lab. Meanwhile, John John was staring at the scene of explosions against mint green, explosions as the ISRU tanker rotated into the crew module and the space confetti that littered the general area.

I later remembered I had a quicksave and went to reload it. Again, I goofed and hit save instead. That catastrophe put me off KSP for a week. I then went and made another station and put into the same orbit. I'm just hoping the remains of the old station doesn't creep up behind and send my new one to get a closer-than-orginally-planned-encounter with Minmus that-would-probably-end-in-a-bang.