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

[Tw1]

-snip-

I stayed up till two in the morning, burning out and in and out trying to close the gap.

-snip-.

I had no idea I would get so involved with not leaving a kerbalnaut stranded.

Welcome to KSP!

One word of advice, if you're getting stuck with something, and start taking forever, stop, and come back.

I've found I'll often come up with solutions to my problems in a few minutes once I take a break, after spending an hour or two getting nowhere in the game.

Basically, game responsibly.

...

Now, I just need to learn to follow my own advice. That will be my next big KSP challenge...

[Monkeh]

I made a craft with a rover on for running around on the Mun...

I got there in the end though:

[Tripzter]

My first attempt to get my rover to the moon. Didnt exactly make it out of orbit since the keys got screwed up (decoupled from the main sail to the moon). So here is my rover upon reentry.

[Sesni]

God dangit... Needs struts.

*NEW AND IMPROVED VERSION*

...

I abandoned the project one addition of struts later.

[AlamoVampire]

My stupidity: I built a Mun Lander, 3 man cabin. Boy does it fly great! Problem: No solar panels, no extra batteries, remote guidance module. See my problem? Drains batteries in that command module way too fast. Until I fix it, I cannot safely enter into Mun orbit, let alone MAKE Munar Orbit and be able to change beyond a oh look its Mun, oh gee, there GOES Mun. XD

[panarchist]

Putting a decoupler atop a bigger decoupler in the same stage is not a recommended configuration. You *will* void your warranty.

Fortunately for the brave Kerbal crew, the lander survived the incident intact, and they actually *did* go into space today. But it was a very near thing. Unfortunately, the 6 nuclear engines fell back to Kerbin, and the crew did *not* go to Duna as planned.

[CheftonUTD]

So here's what I just found out while making my first space station...

Took off from Kerbin, got into a near perfect orbit (20m difference at 1,000,000km), and decided to let go of the engines so I could use the docking port for the next addition to the station.

I guess I put the dock on upside down, or should of separated the engine with a decoupler or something? I really kind of need that part to stay on my ship...

Oh well, off to change the ship, try again, and rescue those two while I'm up there haha.

[Bioman222]

Oops, I put this in the wrong thread.

Edited August 8, 2013 by Bioman222

[Mercury1964]

Back in early .20, I tried to orbit a station around Mun for future visitors. Got near it, ready to go, and started burning to get into Munar orbit. I was set to escape Kerbin to a 15 million km Kerbol orbit before I realized the engines were mounted backwards.

[Commander Zoom]

Well, just now my "Test Sim" save proved its worth once again. Not only was there a small problem with the staging of my new probe bus - the transfer stage's engine activated early, while it was still attached - both the decoupler (oops) and the ion engine (OOPS) of one of the probes were mounted backwards.

[Chaobaozi]

(Yes, that is Bob being stuck in my Large ASAS Module)

If you put these two together, you can see why my ship had to go back to kerbin and bob had some disciplinary consequences (Mainly falling back to kerbin with his new loot)

[L3GO]

Before i got the game and a PC i used to play games on my mac laptop. This is my First recorded fails.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39sb_8a0m30

[NASI Director]

Some say to put fails behind us. I would agree, but let's not for the sake of this thread. Share your worst fails and mishaps that made you rage quit, yell, or realize that you didn't put enough boosters on your 1000+ part launcher. This thread isn't meant to get support or share bugs, because there's already a thread for that

but instead, to look back and be amazed by how far the game has come.

First, two of mine:

Back in .17, whenever I came in for re-entry with the small one man capsule, the small parachute would always rip off in 4x physical time accelerate. Many times have put 8x strut symmetry on the parachute or raged back to the VAB. Anyway, I've started to undo time accelerate at 1000m and then continue time accelerate after the chutes deployed. I still do it out of paranoia.

I forgot when the Cupola module came out, but when it did it was one of the buggiest things in the game. Some of you may have had giant interplanetary cruisers with the Cupola module only to switch to it and find out that the entire thing performed a spontaneous disassembly. Same thing happened to me except it was my first attempt at a station/lander combo around anything other than Kerbin. So as I was docking my lander to the crew module orbiting around Duna, I ran out of RCS and switched to the crew module and found that there was nothing there and only a ton of debris. Mind you I didn't update that save to the newer fix for it because, I quote, "it's never happened to me, so why should I get it?" Long story short, I know update my KSP whenever there is a new update.

Now yours!

[Whackjob]

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Missing many, but I'll update that album when I get around to it.

[NASI Director]

-snip

Missing many, but I'll update that album when I get around to it.

Seems like you've been cursed by the Kraken... Jebediah save your soul.

[astropapi1]

There's a thread called "You won't go to space today" or something. It's exactly about this.

[LameLefty]

Missing many, but I'll update that album when I get around to it.

Oh. Em. Gee. Those are priceless (and very ambitious!). They made me laugh out loud. Well done, sir!

[annallia]

Not my worst fail, just the only one I have a memento of...

Left to right: First lander, cone shaped thing in middle is the command pod from first lander, remains of the lander designed to be able to land on a slope sent to pick up my stranded kerbals.

For what it is worth the second lander did exactly what it was meant to do, however the kraken decided it didn't like my lander design so flipped it on its head.

[ZeeWulf]

So far, I've been working on my Superheavy Rover project (I call it Beagle, but it looks like an Armadillo from Armageddon, through sheer chance.) for about five days. The design was quick, the proofing runs on Kerbal were satisfactory. Building a good rocket for it took some help and a couple of days, but I finally hammered the last of the rocket bugs out last night....but through all the work the past week, I've lost count of the number of rovers that I've plowed into the surface due to running out of fuel, coming in at a bad angle, separating the landing stage from the decelleration stage too early/late/wrong angle or looked at it funny.

The fuel situation's so bad, I've resorted to putting first a fuel station in orbit (And then trying to get the establishment crew home, we ran out of gas mid burn, and were projected to enter solar orbit. I then had to slap together a rescue ship and send that out to save them and tow them home) only to destroy it because a finger slipped mid-attempt, sending the Armadillo/Beagle into it and wrecking the station, leaving the lander adrift. I then sent up a Space Oiler (think fleet oiler for wet-navy) with a redesigned docking section and eventually got it to dock with the Rover, refuel it, and then send the Rover on the way. Of course, once I got a klick away I realized I needed to refuel the RCS system as well, since I was running low. Ah well, I had enough to land the thing.

I then started my decel, and promptly proceeded to screw up the stage separation, leaving the landing-engine facing the wrong way and the lander coming in too hot.

So far, two Kerbals have died in the process.

[Skorpychan]

Rocket trails are really pretty.

On launch:

With my current lifter, one of the boosters likes to detach sometimes. Back when I had engines on the outside of the booster ring, one of the outer ones flew off and into an inner stage, then one of the big inner ones popped free of it's decoupler. It was still held together with struts, but everything yawed violently. In a panic, I just pounded through the stages until the lander fired up and shot free of everything, before popping the chutes in the right order. Everyone was pretty much terrified as the capsule was shooting up upside-down, with the drogue chute slowing it down vertically from underneath, and rockets zooming about all over.

Everyone was alright, but the mission was a failure.

On ascent:

The booster that likes to pop off does it from time to time. Entire mission has to be scrubbed when it does, but the struts tend to hold well enough.

Design fails:

LV-N straight onto a jumbo tank. Throttled up, went to map view, and then BOOM. Engine had overheated and exploded. Mission scrubbed, stage the lander off, and get it back onto Kerbin. Then throttled up under physics warp while parachuting down, destroyed the chutes, and killed everyone on board.

Forgot fuel lines for the LV-Ns mounted outboard on small fuel tanks.

Many many failed attempts to skycrane a roving base onto the mun. Many many many debris fields.

Duna transfer stage with a Skipper engine and not enough fuel.

Ion probes without enough panels to power the engine above 10% thrust for more than a few seconds.

Orbital shenanigans:

First Minimus encounter was a choice between an impactor, and a flyby taking me out to a solar orbit. Later turned it into a win after picking the latter option, and got a Duna flyby as well before running out of fuel on the encounter.

Duna satellite dispenser mission nearly slingshotted out of the Duna system by an Ike encounter I accidentally timeskipped through. Burned a whackload of fuel to get it back in Duna orbit.

Bad decisions:

'Oh, I'll just haul the lander out of this sea and get it onto land'

It got out, I throttled back too far, and it dropped back in, hit the debris of the rover, and exploded, killing Bill. Oops.

My ENTIRE space program has, until recently, been taking off into retrograde orbits. Fighting against gravity and rotation, instead of using it.

Edited August 9, 2013 by Skorpychan

[gmpd2000]

There are at least 2 other threads about this.

[Whackjob]

There are at least 2 other threads about this.

Maybe so, but there's enough rocketry fail around to fill a hundred threads. Three is nothing.

[Subbota]

A couple of weeks ago I stranded 3 kerbals in the middle of really inhospitable mun terrain. After several failed attempts at landing a rescue nearby I finally crash-landed a rover near enough to get it to them so they could scout a better landing site. That took forever but finally I found some ground that if not flat was at least flatter than the massive crater peaks all around the crash site. After many quickloads I finally managed to get a lander in there without tipping it over.

So after finally managing to get my crew off the mun and back to kerbin I had a lot of extra fuel and decided to burn it on my way into the atmosphere, and the 4 nukes were slowing me down a lot more than I expected. It looked like I might actually be able to land the whole thing on kerbin without separating the crew module for a parachute landing. I though I was going to make it until I got to about 1000 meters so I decided to abort the vertical landing and pop the crew out, but for some reason the parachutes never activated and after all that work all 3 kerbals were killed at the moment they finally returned to kerbal soil.

On the bright side, I got a really cool photo of the descent to kerbin (for science!).

[NASI Director]

-snip

Why would you EVA the crew? D: All they wanted was to kiss the ground! Or the water, depending on where you lande- crashed.

[hugix]

Today I tried a interpretation of the Soviet Lunar return sample missions. Mission was to return a cube probe core back to Kerbin after it has landed on the Mun. Made a brilliant little lifter build from sepatrons to send the probe on a return trajectory. Had 4 small engines around it to perform the landing.

got on the mun, Drilled into the ground with a antenna, Watched at the top of the return probe, sample collected. Lifted the probe of the Mun. Got into the Kerbin atmosphere....

WHO

FORGOT

THE

****ING

PARACHUTEEEEEEEE!!!