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

[zarakon]

These guys didn't quite make it to space...

[RocketPilot573]

This is what happens when you rely on the brakes of rover wheels to stop a plane:

[nickersonm]

When your giant launch vehicle doesn't have quite enough struts:

[Flixxbeatz]

[Giggleplex777]

Well then...

[Eric S]

Sadly, I was laughing WAY too hard to get screenshots, and you'd really need a video to really get it anyway, so you'll just have to turn on your imagination for this one. Some of you may have read this before the great forum oops.

I was working on a space station. I wanted to have life pods, but I wanted them to the minimum to do the job, no wasted part count or expensive parts. Basically, a probe core, battery, two solar panels (the flat non-deploying kind), a hitchhiker pod, a few parachutes, minimal RCS jets/fuel, and a few sepratrons. Most of the single items where on the bottom so that I didn't have to mount pairs of them symmetrically.

So, time for the first test.

Undock from the space station, use RCS to back away from the space station so that I don't smash the station just for a test. Aim retrograde and pop the sepratrons. Check periapsis, it's far enough into the atmosphere that I don't think I'll be making it back out of the atmosphere. So far so good. Time warp to hitting the atmosphere, and watch reentry. Pop the chutes. Chutes deploy, and then fully deploy without tearing themselves off the pod. I think I'm just about done. It floats down, and my confidence builds. It hits the water... and blows up. I check the stats. Yup, the hitchhiker pod is weaker than capsules, so it will have to land more gently.

Go to the VAB, add another parachute. Throw it on a rocket, don't bother docking it to the station, just put it in a matching orbit and pop the sepratrons. Everything goes fine, it hits the water, and is fine, it just floats. GREAT! Hmmm... but what if it hits land instead of water? I don't think it will be that much worse, but we should check just to be sure.

Relaunch, and repeat. Manage to time the sepratrons so that I'm coming in over land. Excellent, the test will be a success, even if the life pod isn't. Parachutes deploy. Pod comes down gently. Touches down, no explosions, YAY! Oops, it fell over because all the small stuff on the bottom of the pod. No biggie... wait, it's starting to roll downhill. It'll stop when it hits a radially mounted sepratron, right? Crunch... nope. Ooh, we're rolling faster. We've basically developed the orbitally deployed wheel and forgot the breaks. OK, so they may get sick, but they're alive, right? Rolling even faster, bottom of the hill is coming up, I'm thinking it will roll half way up the next hill. And again, I'm wrong, it's going so fast that the slight bump at the bottom of the hill causes the pod to explode.

And this, my friends, is why Kerbals should follow NASA's lead and have high speed cameras filming everything. Not to figure out what went wrong or why, but so that they have something to throw up on Youtube when ground control can't take screenshots because they're too busy laughing so hard it hurts.

[Tw1]

Was working on a lifter to take regular-shaped payloads slightly greater than 80 tons into orbit.

It would work fine, except for that one dam mainsail that keeps falling of.

I've replaced it, and the grey tank above it. I've turned the rocket different ways. I've tried different ascent profiles. I traded it for an atlas (KSPX) one time. Still fell of.

The other one is always fine, which is strange, they should be identically connected.

I've now strutted it up with the novapunch superstrut, and am making an anti-vibration frame with them as well.

I really want to use this one, the tanks burn with even timing, and it looks neat.

Just that one mainsail...

But it made some interesting fails, when launching test payloads.

Edited May 9, 2013 by Tw1

[Dunbaratu]

No screenshot, but: I attached a ring of solid fuel boosters, and radial decouplers for them. I didn't carefully watch the staging list it automatically generated for it. On the launch pad I hit the spacebar for "go" and the solid fuel boosters turned on... and decoupled the moment they did so. I sat there on the launch pad not moving and watching the boosters fly up up and way.

[LeonG17]

These guys didn't quite make it to space...

What on Kerbin happened?

[Flixxbeatz]

What on Kerbin happened?

Kerbian Meteor Shower.

[LeonG17]

Looks like it, either that or it was a muti-missile launcher test.

[POTKC]

Sorry, no screenshots.

While testing my Apollo-style one man lander, I went into a 5 kilometer orbit. Undocked the lander, burned retrograde. Everything is OK. Descending. I throttle up to slow my descent...and the engine explodes. I think: WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED??? Well, the lander hits the ground at 200m/s, and everything blows up. I am left in control of a Dockatron Junior with a KSPX mini ASAS under it. There is no probe core, but I am controlling it. It was also acting as if it had RCS on it. I managed to rendezvous and dock with the orbiting CSM using a spacecraft with no means of control or propulsion. Weird bug.

[LeonG17]

Maybe there was a structural failure between the engine and the fuel tank, its happened to me on many occasions. Its completely random

[GatsbyK]

I launched a series of Mun rockets, 23 to be exact, back when the demo was all I had to work with.

Only 7 made it to the Mun, and only one made it back to Kerbin.

Good times.

[SecondGuessing]

Had my first Mun landing in this save and neglected to fill the tanks of the landing vehicle once it had been ferried to the Mun, and so it doesn't have enough to rendesvous again. So, I build a robotic rescue craft and launch in up, tug it to the moon and then... realised that I haven't give it a stack separator, or parachutes... So once back to Kerbin (if we get there) I'll need to launch up an orbital taxi to take the brave moonwalkers back to the planet safely.

It's the little things that screw you.

[Ogre]

Installed the Kethane mod. Built a few landers and started mining Minmus. Miner #3 seems like a winner except one of my 4 engines went all wonky. It looks fine when shut off, but when I light it up, it shoots up INTO the tank it's attached to and kind of wobbles around. My whole ship spins as a result. Luckily since it's 4 engines, I can shut it and the opposite engine down and still land safely on Minmus with plenty of power to spare.

But... after filling up all my Kethane and fuel tanks, my TWR on Minmus is 0.97. D'oh! It was 1.9 when I landed even on just two engines.

So anyway... I throttled her up, and hit the RCS to just barely nudge it up, and held the RCS on until I hit 1.0. I am currently inching my way into space and letting the SAS burn MonoProp as much as it wants. I'm at 3km about 10+ minutes of this, but it's speeding up now.

[kahlzun]

I'll just let these speak for themselves. (look at the vertical speed guage for an idea of how badly these are not going to space)

Note that Jeb still looks fully stoked in this shot.

[joppiesaus]

Just seperated from my synchornous-oribt(may spelled wrong) probe

Beautiful!

Wait... What the hell happend to my orbit?! I had the perfect orbit, and I don't even have mechjeb!

I was stupid. I seperated my debris-probe, and that has ejection-force. So that means I have just messed-up my orbit by seperating it.

[DerekL1963]

Throttle up *before* releasing the launch clamps... Oh well, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

[Tw1]

I got that lifter working!

Time to try an actual payload, not dummy weights.

Up we go! Woosh!

No! No! No!

"Structural failure between rockomax brand decoupler and rockomax jumbo 64 fuel tank"

Dammit. I think you know what's coming next.

No space today for those guys. Perhaps not ever.

Edited July 15, 2013 by Tw1

[ShachonianX]

Um, where did the engine and bottom fuel tank go?

Jeb and Bill aren't surviving this.

[ShachonianX]

Once again, another fail.

[Tw1]

Thanks to a botched install of the EVA parachutes mod.

Edited May 12, 2013 by Tw1

[Twistedpear]

A weekend of Mun 'landings'

Any landing you can walk away from...

Oh dear...

Rescue Vehicle #1... (or not)

Rescue Mission #3 - GREAT SUCCESS! (except for the distance the other Kerbals have to walk!)

Rescue Mission #3 (renamed Return TEST Mission (none of the other Kerbals could be bothered walking the 25 - 30Km to join them))

Rescue missions continuing!

Edited May 14, 2013 by Twistedpear
Fix Image URLs

[Katve]

Okay I have tried 5 times to dock my new solar panel module to space station. Today I tried again and flight went nicely and I got close after 30 minutes of flying and rendezvousing. Then I was 500m away when I noticed that monopropellant is very close to end. I decided that I will move whole space station to my new module because it got fairly big engine because there was supply trips going. Everything went fine and 40 meters before docking music stopped. I looked at altimeter and saw that I hit atmosphere and noticed that I somehow ended to very low orbit. I did emergency boost to my space station and got it back to orbit around 100 km, but I have to start launching new module again. Without music I would probably noticed later and would have ditched my whole space station to kerbin. I also use quicksafe, but I safed often because I think it was safe and quickload didn't help in this case. I am also beginner so docking attempt will always take something like hour.

Long story short: My own mistakes failed docking, but music of KSP saved entire space station.