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

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BattleMetalChris

BattleMetalChris

Posted
Posted (edited)

My first ever manned landing, on Mun; everything went well, I established an orbit round Mun, then shortened this and descended, landed, perfect! Jeb got out, one small step for a Kerbal etc.

He went for a walk. Took some photos. Wonderful. After a while I decided it was time to head home, and went to put him back into the lander.

cAeZjp8.jpg

This was when I realised I'd put a battery right under the door and he couldn't climb back up. This was also before I realised Kerbals carry a portable RCS pack with them. So I spent the best part of 30 minutes desperately trying low-gravity leaps at varying speeds and from various locations (which at one point resulted in him spending 5 minutes tangled in the struts and fuel-line of one of the drop-tanks) until I timed it right and I was able to hit 'Board' in the fraction of a second it flashed up on the screen, and Jeb was able to return home to his loved ones.

Edited by BattleMetalChris
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Remkeau

Remkeau

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Posted
File this under "failure to fail:"

i tried setting up a low orbital fly over on Minmus. Watching from the ground, it was obvious the ship wouldn't quite clear the first hill, but I kept watching anyway thinking at least there'd be an amusing explosion & debris cloud sailing overhead. Saw the ship hit the ground, saw a small explosion, but no debris. But SOMEthing was still there.

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

Just sitting there on the side of the hill. Command pod & everything above it was gone, but the rest of the ship was just fine. Gregvan could approach it, jump on it, try fruitlessly to knock it down, it was perfectly fine. If there was a hatch or probe core he probably could have boarded & flown it off.

Kinda reminds me of the ship from Alien for some reason. Kinda creepy, just sitting there like that. There's no reaction wheels to hold it like that either. :0.0:

Ha, this should be a feature! Imagine all the rockets sitting with their command pods 10 meters into the ground around the launch pad!

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Franklin

Franklin

Posted
Posted
My attempts to build an ion powered craft on Kerbin have all failed. Nothing exciting, just no lift at all.

There's nothing less satisfying than not only failing with a design but having nothing happen. The number of planes I've made where it's a half hour of mockups, come the first runway test and... nothing.

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Nemecle

Nemecle

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Posted

Not a pure fail but, a long time ago, before 0.13 I guess, I started playing KSP without watched enough tutorials : I had no idea of what was "SAS" (but I put plenty of ASAS on my rockets because it was looking cool) so more of my first launches was like... running in the dark ? (I made it into orbit anyway, most epic and intense moment for me, and for my keyboard)

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cantab

cantab

Posted
Posted

Ah Kerman, I just managed to make a huge screwup of an asteroid rendezvous.

In setting up my ejection burn I chanced across a helpful Munar encounter, which I then tuned to get a sub 10,000 km intercept on the asteroid in solar orbit for an ejection burn of just 900 m/s. I then timewarped, trusting Kerbal Alarm Clock would stop me for the manouevre.

It didn't. By the time I'd manually stopped, it was 30 seconds past.

No matter, I quickly oriented the spacecraft, turned on the engines, and throttled up for the burn.

Maybe a minute or so later, I realised that something wasn't right. The delta-V requirement was hardly dropping, certainly not as fast as it should have for a five-ish minute burn. I went back into normal view, killed the engines, and wondered what was going on. Were my engines blocked? There was a fuel tank between them, though nothing behind. But I'd used them before hadn't I? I considered sending one of the crew out to EVA behind the engines and see if the thrust was blocked or not, though it'd be a bit of a problem if it was fine and the Kerbal got sent flying. Then I thought, is it some kind of bug? What happens if I use RCS? So I turned on the RCS and pushed down H.

And the RCS jets clearly pushed the ship sideways. What the?

Then it hit me. I still had the docking port on the side of the ship set as "Control from here". Meaning I'd been thrusting at right-angles to my intended direction, wasting just over a hundred units of fuel and doing Kraken knows what to my orbit.

Well, I figured I'd better get on with my burn, so I sorted things out and finally started watching my delta-V requirement drop. I didn't want to wait another orbit, I might not get the Munar assist. It wouldn't matter for a planet, but this asteroid is considerably out of the ecliptic and the Mun really helps for the inclination change.

As I burned I watched my path pass through the Mun's SOI when I'd completed nowhere near the whole thing. Trusting the navball and the node, I kept burning, but then after watching my path drop out of the Mun's SOI and stay out I stopped and took a wider look on the map view, ostensibly with about 200 m/s left on the burn. It was instantly obvious that I was way off course, my apopasis 60 degrees ahead of where it should have been.

*BLEEP*

I was already in such a high orbit that going around wasn't an option, I had to fix things now. The obvious way was a radial burn to deflect my course, and I set up a node in five minutes to put me back on for the Mun flyby and onwards for asteroid intercept. However, this intercept was a full three days later than the original.

Finally this burn at least went smoothly, but the cost? An eye-watering, for what was essentially a course correction, 600 m/s. So my cheap 900 m/s ejection burn turned into a 1300 m/s one. And this is a mission to aerocapture a D class around Kerbin. I'm probably going to WANT that fuel I just wasted.

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Blind Dead McJones

Blind Dead McJones

Posted
Posted (edited)

The mission was to get a jumbo fuel tank into orbit to attach it to a station for fueling.

First I consistently failed to get it into orbit. I eventually decided that I needed to use the fuel in the tank rather than take it up full. I attached radial engines with fuel lines into them from the orange tank, with their own smaller tanks as well (essentially reverse onion staged).

When I got the tank attached, I would move the fuel back into the large tank, and decouple the small tanks which had reverse-facing separatrons on them so they wouldn't just float near my station. They were action group 3 in addition to a stage.

Well, that button's next to the WASD keys. When I started my gravity turn, I accidentally decoupled those rockets and fired them into the first stage boosters, which exploded the entire rocket (my Kerbals survived - hooray for the abort function!).

I eventually got it into orbit, although docking a ship that big was still probably the single most frustrating experience I've ever had in KSP.

On a meta-example, about a week ago I was trying to uninstall Infernal Robotics when I learned that it isn't working now (I wanna wait until it is). I got a little overzealous with deleting stuff and accidentally deleted my sandbox game, and I had to start over.

Edited by Blind Dead McJones
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Zedwardson

Zedwardson

Posted
Posted

So I designed a Rover, and wanted to put it on the mun. after some trial and error I finally have a simple, bare bones rover that works well enough.

Design the lander for it, and look over my lifters and it turns out that one of my main lifters is ideal for a mun shot. Munrover project begins.

Launch 1 - the payload wobbles and the rocket is unable to get it working right, so launch failure. redesign payload.

Launch 2 - Staging error, launch failure.

Launch 3 - stage is unable to make turn fast enough to make final orbital burn, ends up instead at 100k it is 65k and starting to hit hair.

Launch 4 - new reaction wheel insert correct issue. After one orbit the main stage fires, and the payload strut fails and the payload hangs on by a thread.

Launch 5 - My GF Cat jumps on keyboard at launch. so much for that launch.

Launch 6 - Orbit uneventful, on burn to moon the lander stage starts its launch, and goes into uncontrolled flight.

Launch 7 - Orbit uneventful, new design with some thrusters and reaction wheels to help stabilization. Still issues at separation.

Launch 8 - test for final separation, find out that my rovers wheels are sticking on the stage separator. I watch it go free. Relize that that stage only had 60Dv, so I was a go. set up maneuver, (mind you, all these launches where at 100k and 0 degrees inclination) begin burn, which is good. Run into old stage from failed launch or my old stage from this launch. Lost of Probe.

Launch 9 - after debris clean up problem free flight till landing. Rover is released and lander falls over. This is not bad as the rover survived, but it rolls down a hill, ALMOST runs over my Kerbals on the moon, and rolls over the flag for hte first Kerbal landing.

Also, it is dark out, and I didn't put lights on the lander.

:rolleyes:

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nremies1

nremies1

Posted
Posted

I launched a space station into Kerbin orbit. It was my first one and more of a proof-of-concept/design than anything else. It's not going to serve any practical purpose in Kerbin orbit other than something to be proud of. Jeb rode it up himself in the cupola module and successfully placed it at a 100km orbit. Bill and Bob launched in an Apollo capsule with an empty seat to go get him and do a little docking practice while they were up there. Their flight goes very well and I get some good rendezvous and docking practice in. They fetch Jeb and all three head home. However, the second stage of the station is floating about 10km away and not really going away...so I reconfigure the crew bus slightly in the VAB and launch again, this time with a grappler and the intention of grabbing that big spinning tank and getting rid of it (mainly for more RV and grappling practice). By the time I get back up there, it's drifted off further than it had been, so I shrug and make some mock rendezvous runs with the station...no docking clamp fitted to this vehicle so I make a few runs but don't make contact. Eventually I scrub the rest of the mission and start my deorbit...except I'm overtired and not really paying attention, and my deorbit burn smashes me directly into the station. Two Gigantors kersplode off the station and it goes tumbling away with the autopilot burning the RCS madly to regain control. Meanwhile the crew bus has blown into tiny pieces and the command pod is tumbling away with no engines (service module is still burning and spiraling crazily away) and no parachute - I saw it break off and drift away. Crap. Orbit is decaying. Periapsis is now like 59k. Jeb and friends get out and push to stabilize the orbit slightly above 70 and we quickly fit out another crew bus with a hitchhiker mod and lift off. Jeb and friends are playing cards in the CM when the rescue ship arrives and pulls to a stop about ten meters away. They hop outside and EVA over to the rescue ship. Success! All are aboard. We begin deorbit burn. Just before we start reentry I release the last stage to trim things down for splashdown. Wait. This capsule is awfully small now. Where are Jeb, Bill and Bob sitting? Oh. Right. I didn't re-arrange the last decoupler to account for the hitchhiker and just jettisoned them. I saved them and then killed them all two minutes later. Derp.

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Lundmunchkins

Lundmunchkins

Posted
Posted
I felt the urge to kill Sidwig today...

So this was the worst fail I ever had...

Behold the newest and safest rocket ever!

http://i.imgur.com/XnoeK6t.jpg

Nothing could go wrong!

http://i.imgur.com/VtLnKn8.jpg

NO NOT THAT WAY!!

http://i.imgur.com/NxO49Nc.jpg

DAMMIT!

http://i.imgur.com/nXx30Qk.jpg

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

http://i.imgur.com/tysLOj7.jpg

RIP Sidwig Kerman...

"I just don't know what went wrong!"

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Kasuha

Kasuha

Posted
Posted (edited)

Jeb, Bill, and Bob returning to their ship after slight mishap with their rover.

uaT7Zd6.jpg

... and successfully parked next to the second, still complete rover.

Y8r36fQ.jpg

Edited by Kasuha
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cantab

cantab

Posted
Posted

I don't bloody believe it.

So after having carried out an RCS-less docking followed by a docking with off-balance RCS and hardly any torque, and wrestling the two payloads into a rendezvous with the station, I separated the payloads so I could take them into the station on their own power, switched to them and went to nudge away from the drive section, and

Nothing. No response at all.

Because the brain-dead algorithms in the game have decided to completely drain the little batteries on the payloads, and the even littler batteries in the probe cores, despite the fact that the drive section has FIVE of the giant Z-4k batteries that still had more charge than anything but its ion engines will ever need.

Well screw this. When they come into the light I'm deorbiting the payloads on their RCS and sending up remakes with reaction wheels this time.

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Grotoiler

Grotoiler

Posted
Posted

Greetings all!

I feel that this would be an appropriate place to initiate my KSP forum endeavours... I think this thread should be required reading for all prospective rocket-men the world through...

I couldn't help but realise that NASA's Stardust spacecraft (for more info, uncle google will provide the answers) returned cometary fragments embedded in aerogel that look startlingly similar to a great many Kerbal flight failures:

tsou_060124b.jpgThe moment I saw this image, I was immediately reminded of the countless failed attempts to go to space I saw here...

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zapman987

zapman987

Posted
Posted (edited)

gNK5Sde.jpg

Look to the right, right above the horizon.

About had a mid-space collision today. It got within 4km at its closest...

Note to self, start picking random orbits heights for staging.

Edited by zapman987
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