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

[Spartwo]

So I was coming in for a landing and thought 'Looks a bit close to the SPH'

And then it hit me,or more accurately I clipped a wing off the SPH.

Somehow had a good landing though.

[zeppelinmage]

Following some catastrophic user error undesirable vehicle performance, an abort sequence was fired on my newest large lift rocket. (Read: all stages were fired at once.) The effect was rather... aesthetically pleasing. Especially with the Mun in the background.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

ABORT!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22015656/abort.gif

So beautiful

[Tw1]

http://i.imgur.com/GVgf2zD.png

It's the cloud kracken!

It's after the Mun!

[palioxis1248]

It's the cloud kracken!

It's after the Mun!

I dunno, that looks more like a hydra to me.

[ainamogel]

Struts? Who needs 'em?!?

[Adam Novagen]

I had a pretty decent fail during my ongoing mission to sustainably colonize Laythe. It didn't look like a fail, at first; Jeb was piloting a science-laden craft past Jool, and while he passed, he popped a little rover that would ultimately make its way to Laythe to test the gravity, atmosphere, and scope out a landing site. Everything went reasonably well, discounting multiple tries to find the right periapsis to aerobrake the rover into a parking orbit before landing.

That is, until I finished the rover landing, went back to Jeb, and realized that his 400km Jool periapsis had slung him into a gargantuan Kerbol orbit with a periapsis over 42 years distant. I never thought I'd need more than 100,000x time acceleration, but there you go. (If anyone wants to see that ludicrous orbit, both it and the rover landing are in the last five or so minutes of this video:

)

Nothing I have ever done, however, compares to my horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE lack of talent at making SSTO spaceplanes.

[TimePeriod]

Uhhh...

[flyin_ruski]

oops

[kiwiak]

Following some catastrophic user error undesirable vehicle performance, an abort sequence was fired on my newest large lift rocket. (Read: all stages were fired at once.) The effect was rather... aesthetically pleasing. Especially with the Mun in the background.

http://imgur.com/a/DCSph

This so awesome... why do i find crashes like that cooler than succesfull liftoffs?

[Hyomoto]

Sums up all my failures, ever.

[Wooks]

http://global3.memecdn.com/the-most-interesting-kerbal-in-the-world_o_2117907.jpg

Sums up all my failures, ever.

You win Sir, everybody go home now.

[Bobnova]

Space: I did not go there today.

If you look closely you can see why. There's an engine missing. It sort of stayed on the launch pad, attached to the gantry.

[Dirty Bob]

Space: I did not go there today.

http://i.imgur.com/kdiKI5S.jpg

If you look closely you can see why. There's an engine missing. It sort of stayed on the launch pad, attached to the gantry.

I love the timing of the shot.

[User Unrelated]

I angered the Mun.

what the heck are those "panel06"s?

The first picture where it says "structural failure of linkage between XXXX and container type A"... those were light pylons that were in no way attatched to the ship.

Everything just disintegrated all at once.

And in picture #3... "Fish Taco Crater"....... that was a flag.

The result: a corrupted save file. Fun!

This all started when I landed Fish Sticks I in a PERFECT vicinity to Fish Taco III... FTIII started to **** out, and I was curious... I could pull seemingly infinite kerbals out on EVA

and then the game just gave up.

here's the before...

After is just a black screen.

Edited January 28, 2014 by User Unrelated

[astropapi1]

Poor Geodorf.

[MajorThomas]

So I landed my Rover a little hard but no biggy just broke the wheels didnt actually make them explode. So Kerbal gets out repairs them all and when the last one is done and Kerbal is giving himself a well deserved contemplative breath the Rover starts running away.......Faster than said Kerbal can run then it go over a cliff and explodes entirely.

My first two rovers went kind of like that. Nobody told me to set the parking brake first!

Rover 1: Dropped to the surface of the Mun, from the lander. It started to roll away, surprisingly fast. Jeb popped out of the lander to catch the damn thing. He quickly fired up his jetpack and took off in hot pursuit. The rover, meanwhile, kept finding even steeper hills to head down. After about a minute of furious flying, never quite catching up, Jeb watched in disbelief as the rover just blew up and spread debris all over the dark downward slope.

Rover 2: Similar deal, this time after the rover had "thrown" the Kerbal who had been riding it, then somehow righted itself. Of course, you don't remember to set the parking brakes just before you are thrown. "Hey, come back here!" The rover started its predictable roll down toward oblivion. When it was 500 m away from the pursuing Kerbal, it exploded. Or so I thought. After I flew the Kerbal home, a routine check at the tracking station revealed...hey, the rover is fine, wheels intact, hardly moving at all, at the basin of a crater. But no Kerbal to control it. How can that be? Apparently the distant explosion I had witnessed was just a headlight going off, not the entire rover.

EDIT (tongue-in-cheek) China's moon rover has experienced technical difficulties recently...wonder if it has to do with setting the parking brakes.

Edited January 28, 2014 by MajorThomas

[AletzN1]

Damn kw rocketry interstage fairings.... They keep unintensionally(?) clipping and not decoupling when they do so!

Realized 6 km above the mun! D:<

[zeppelinmage]

So close, yet so far.

There was logic here, I assure you. I was afraid that, because my lander is asparagus-staged, the legs might clip fuel lines when they deploy, so I was planning to dock it to the mothership with legs extended. It worked perfectly in the VAB, because of course it did. Of course, in practice, the legs caught on other hardware and refused to let the docking ports connect.

Ah well, just means another slight adjustment.

[Tiakatt]

This is the story of a n00b, of a cascade of failure, and of Bob.

I had barely figured out the basics of how to get ships into space, and to get them into orbit and home again. At this time I was still quite hazy on this whole Navball thing, beyond how to turn East from KSC. I hadn't even heard of maneuver nodes. Naturally, I decided it was time for Kerbalkind to shoot for the Mun - for science.

For this mission, I chose Bob.

The trip out was exciting, it was my first Mun attempt at all, and I was pleased that I had designed a ship that could make it, and Bob and I successfully piloted there.

Sort of. Bob and I didn't set up a very circular or low, or even equatorial orbit, and we'd never landed at all without a parachute before.

Landing was...a frustration. So many attempts where I ran out of fuel only to slam poor Bob into the ground anyway. At one point, I quicksaved, uh, a lot lower than I probably should have, and due to my aforementioned confusion over the Navball I wasn't exactly oriented quite right when I did this, either. So each quickload, I would (somewhat slowly and tbh sometimes not at all) manage to reorient myself and try to immediately burn to slow down and slam into the ground. But eventually I got faster at orienting myself and could do it very quickly. Because I was still failing, I did not dare to quicksave so I got a lot of practice at that little maneuver. I was convinced at one point that I had irretrievably murdered Bob, but kept on out of stubbornness.

Finally, after a lot of practice and to my surprise, humiliation gave way to success!

Mostly.

Oh well, Bob seems happy He even has a little fuel!

We righted the ship, and Bob got out for his historic moonwalk. Took samples, and reboarded his ship to return home.

Ohhhh, wow, that is not nearly enough fuel. I tried everything I could think of, flying in every direction and at every thrust level including bursts to get an escape trajectory and it just was not happening.

Then I remembered Bob's EVA pack. He'd die, but he'd die on his home world.

Getting as high an apoapsis as I could manage with the ship, I ejected Bob and had him burn straight up away from Mun.

He didn't like it, though.

He had just barely enough fuel to escape Mun. I tried several times to get him out with any fuel left at all, and could not. Any variation ended with him failing to escape. And he couldn't return to Kerbin. Quickloading back to the surface and the safety of his lander seemed the best option for now.

In response to the fuel issues I modified the launch stage and came up with a design that I've now used for many successful missions to both Mun and Minmus. I also widened the design of the Lander.

Jeb was the first beneficiary of these redesigns, successfully landing on and returning from Mun.

But he could not rescue Bob.

Two missions to Minmus later, I finally remembered probe cores are a thing and researched Stayputnik. Took my usual lander, replaced the parachute with a Radial one, added solar panels, slapped Stayputnik on top of the command pod and EVAed its Kerbal.

It was time for Bob to come home.

In hindsight, I should have waited for Bob's landing site to move back to dayside.

The rescue probe landed on the opposite side of Mun from Bob.

No problem, Bob's ship has fuel.

Seriously?? I know it can't escape Mun but it can't go even half way to the other ship on any trajectory either?

Fine. Bob will EVA and then walk to the ship.

He's much happier about this trip than he was during those earlier escape attempts.

He has plenty of fuel, it's all too easy to put him into orbit. Instead, I set him a landing point a little beyond the rescue probe. The EVA camera doesn't always like to be where I want it to be but I quickly figure out where his retrograde is without the Navball and which key to fire to burn it since it refuses at some altitudes to let me turn him that way.

I also learned about the limitations of EVA packs.

This was yet another instance of trying over and over to avoid the inevitable. Finally I gave up, quickloaded, and just put him into Orbit.

Then I remembered the rescue probe. I knew if I used the fuel for an intercept I would not be able to get him home to Kerbin, but I could at least get him back into a command pod.

He was on a Polar orbit, so I waited until his orbit was aligned almost perfectly with the rescue probe, and launched. At pretty much exactly the wrong time.

Set him as target and circularized my orbit. Matched it perfectly to his to have a place to make adjustments from. Then changed the orbit (by far, far too much) and waited a very long time for a decent intercept window. Never really quite got one. Tried a few futile and foolish intercept attempts with that awful, awful orbit.

I could have kept trying with a less excessively elliptical orbit. I could have launched a second rescue attempt.

But I didn't.

I finally knew. None of this was really happening. Bob died weeks ago, on that very first failed landing attempt. This, all that had happened, was some fragment of Bob; searching repeatedly, desperately, futilely for some way home which was never meant to come. This was torture, and it was time for it to end.

With one final, retrograde burst of his rocket pack, I ended Bob's orbit and bid him sleep well.

-------------

He didn't bring home any science to KSC, but I learned more from Bob's disaster of a mission than from anything else I've done.

[Randox]

The most common one for me are mishandling heavy lifter rockets. It's usually a problem when the net TWR reaches north of 2.5 (I've had launches where the payload was much lighter and the rockets go north of 4). At that point, the difference in TWR on the boosters and main rocket become so great that the boosters decide this is all very unfair and split, often with explosive results when I forget to throttle down to keep everything together.

[Kilmeister]

BOB ruined MY perfect safety record last night. It was all pretty standard procedure. Bob had just installed a new module onto my space station and was coming back home. I was kind of lazy so I didn't really plan a reentry. I figured anywhere will do. So I did a deorbit burn and he was coming home safely...

Well unfortunately the end of the descent path was right on the side of a tall mountain. So I quickly reconfigured my parachutes to open early and he descended onto the slope touching down softly on its legs. But, due to the incline, his vessel started to tumble down the side of the mountain. Slowly at first, but then it began to pick up some speed and soon components were starting to explode. It was at this point BOB decided to bail out of the perfectly good capsule I had designed for him. He was instantly killed.

The capsule, however, continued bouncing down the mountain breaking off every single component and ended up rolling down the hill like a tire (It was a mk1 lander can). Eventually coming to a rest intact at the base of the mountain. If only Bob would've stuck with it, we'd both be happier now!

[Redrobin]

Space rejected me:

[Whovian]

Just from a 10 m or so fall to Kerbin.

[Jarik C-Bol]

See, I tend to do more of a "You will not come back from space today." My most recent misadventure being a very nice clean landing on the Mun, and then thinking "I have enough fuel to hop over into that crater, land, get MORE science, then go home!" As it turns out, I had enough fuel to hop over into that crater, land, get more science, and then boost up and get stranded in Munar orbit.