[Showcase] Post your "Genius" designs and actions.

[ronny]

Post pictures/videos of your "genius" designs in KSP. Not things that were designed to not work, but stuff that accidentally didn't work at all. Not really any other rules, just post failed builds you think are amusing.

My first "excellent" design is this crane for use on the Mun. I tested it on Kerbin and found no flaws with it. But note that this is the 2.0 version which had RCS in order to get unstuck, the first one didn't have RCS and just stood on the platform like this, unable to get away.

The RCS doubles in function, to get unstuck, and to get stuck again when you want to pick up something else from the platform. It spent its entire tank of RCS in two trips, meaning I would have to pick up one tank of fuel between every crane-job, and that is IF it had the ability to transfer RCS fuel, which I am pretty sure it doesn't. So it could do TWO jobs, then it was useless. But the "beautiful" thing about the design is that it had the handling of a wild horse in low gravity, so with patience, and skill, and luck, you could do ONE trip without ending up in little tiny pieces scattered across the Mun.

And here I managed to tip over the one crew module I had managed to place. My roving skills are unmatched.

And here my genius placement of the weight shows itself. The first was only a near-roll, the second picture was from later on (3 minutes later). I used RCS to try to correct it in the second one, which only resulted in flying about a bit, before landing upside down (I'm an ace RCS pilot as you can tell, even forgot to put on docking mode).

Here I finally dropped the flawed design I previously tried to fix twice. In favor of a NEW flawed design.

This thing is better at reversing than going forward, because the counter-weight at the back makes accelerating forwards a wheelie-competition. And in order to get the magnet over the middle of the thing on the platform, you must approach the platform from the taller side, and you must have the platform in an odd-angle, not at a perfectly water-level area. The rocket at the back which doubles as a counter-weight is my solution to get the crane off the platform, because the wheels are placed too wide. I would lie if I said the wide stance makes it stable, I have already rolled one of these (having lifted and placed one thing).

Note that I only put ONE thermoelectric generator on it, so while I lift stuff with the electromagnet I have a tendency to run out of electricity, which I have done twice thus far. A genius design indeed...

PS: Note that I didn't add any electric generators to the platform, so that runs out of power also, so I have to use hyperedit to just top it up once in a while (I really can't be bothered fixing that, and the hassle serves as punishment for my bad design).

PPS: The only good thing I can say about my cranes is that they are quite sturdy, the weakness in the first is that the RCS tank don't have struts so its the first thing to fall off, and the second crane falls over well before it lifts anything heavy enough to destroy it.

Edited June 27, 2013 by ronny

[FITorion]

Worked fine on Kerbin... landed with only one broken wheel on Duna. maybe 1m or driving and bam! flipped on back.

I've stopped using those wheels for anything but the lightest of rovers on the lightest of gravity moons.

This plan for a circular station was never going to work. I abandoned it rather quickly...

Without rotating docking ports there was no way I'd ever get everything lined up...

Edited June 28, 2013 by FITorion

[FlamedSteak]

My first rover design proved ugly, unwieldy and prone to becoming airborne when changing directions.

I had trouble with those rover wheels too. Though I didn't realise just how thin Duna's atmosphere was until I got there. One parachute was never going to cut it.

I can still get this around, I just have to be careful speeding up and slowing down.

Edited June 28, 2013 by FlamedSteak

[Giggleplex777]

I love this one.

Both "meanings" of genius in one picture.

Edited June 28, 2013 by Giggleplex777

[Hovis]

Would love to post a picture of this, but it happened too quick. Basically I thought it'd be fun to fly one of the stock aircraft with the basic engine removed, two radial jet engines from the B9 pack on the top, and a solid fuel booster where the engine used to go. The theory was this might be able to create a plane that could get into orbit easier, maybe getting some sort of gravity boost off the sun or something I dunno. First couple of times the aircraft would flip out of control like a mad beast, looping around and spinning end over end until the fuel ran out and it crashed. Then I hit upon the idea of instead of wrestling to stop the made somersaults, just try something new, so what I did instead was just spin the aircraft, like a bullet from a rifle, and sure enough it was stable (albeit spinning like a drill). When the fuel in the booster ran out I managed to land the plane again using the engines.

I didn't want to use the aircraft again, my guess is that it's carrying about a ton of Kerbal puke in the cockpit now. Going to want to have it hosed out.

[AustralianFries]

Does "Genius" mean practical and extremely well performing or more or less insane and...well...Kerbal?

[SkyRender]

I remember my first rover ever on 0.18... It was a disaster, to say the least. It had three wheels, none of which were where it would make sense to have wheels. Any time I got it upright, it would fall right back over. Eventually I got it right, though.

Beautiful, those Crab rovers. Too bad they were better suited to higher-gravity bodies...

[KAO]

honestly, I didn't know what I was expecting, it's the freakin' N-1 and I thought it would work.

on the other hand, just like the real thing, it provided a helluva fireworks show

[ronny]

Lots of good contributions ^^,

This qualifies I think. I designed this base of single parts that mean I could have something like 400 of these crew cans and not lag, but at this rate, 400 parts spread out with my "genius" crane, is 6 and a half hours of none-stop work.

I'm trying to think of a faster way to distribute 400 parts, all with the necessary flight status so they don't get removed as debris.

Btw, Genius means:

Edited June 28, 2013 by ronny

[The Destroyer]

I once had a epic crash landing in Dres crater, but IDK where the photo is.

Let me go look.

[bsalis]

Built a ramp to get a fuel tanker onto the runway. This was before it had tapered edges. There were a couple of issues. After this incident, Kerbal engineers decided to invest in a measuring tape.

[Felsmak]

It seemed like a great idea in the VAB.

[Rappit]

My brother's best "Genius" herpdy derp moment was when I first introduced him to KSP. He was going to the Mun by my instructions. So he built a spacecraft by himself and put a parachute, but not one landing leg. I knew what was gonna happen but I thought he is going to realize it that 'chutes don't work w/o atmosphere *facepalm* I was wrong... Poor Jeb....

[NeoMorph]

I thought of an Orion/Altair based mining op on the moon... and it worked!

The taller landers are the fuel to orbit tugs... Two different versions that I was trying out. There were slight problems with both which eventually let to V3 which is my current workhorse. The one with the solar panels is the mining lander and uses Quantum Fuel Transfers to take the place of using hoses they would use in real life. The final lander is a stock Bobcat Altair lander. I've just landed the LER lander but discovered it is a [snip] to get the darn landers undocked because the separator gets in the way so I need to figure that one out.

Edited February 21, 2019 by Snark
Redacted by moderator

[Whatshtisthis]

[korda]

Well, I had that plan of sending my rover (for kerbals waiting at Mun base) in fairing that will land on it's belly. Obviously that was rather hard thing to balance, but I've spend lot of time at it and was pretty sure that my 'lander tug' will be able to land it right. Problems started when I saved at 5000 meters. Soon after it turned out that I didn't make it perfectly balanced and I had to load save. I've had disabled 2 RCS's tanks on my rover but after loading they were active again and this destabilized it even more. I made a lot of tries and when I was ready to give up I crashed in way that keep rover intact and able to drive out. Lander tug fell apart and was ripped of from top of lander. You can see it's RCS tank on top of lander.

[ronny]

Neomorph, that just worked, this thread is about stuff that turns out don't work as planned.

Whatshtisthis, could you explain a bit? Did it work or did it fly as poorly as it looks like it does? What happened?

Korda, Nice save of a flawed design! Often KSP is about flying something that shouldn't really work, and getting away with it.

Edited June 28, 2013 by ronny

[Rappit]

As long as KSP doesn't feautre aerodynamics fully it's an OK design.

[korda]

Korda, Nice save of a flawed design! Often KSP is about flying something that shouldn't really work, and getting away with it.

I was quite sure that this design will cause problems, but on the other hand strapping rover on top of rocket just feels wrong :<

[Whatshtisthis]

could you explain a bit? Did it work or did it fly as poorly as it looks like it does? What happened?

It has a tendency to pitch downwards, and can't land.

When some of the engines ran out of fuel, it gets harder to control.

It was built based on one of the ideas I had, and boy, was it horrible.

[stanonwheels]

Bill Kerman, after subduing Jeb with gaffer tape in the MUN-1 lander becomes the first Kerbal on the Mun.

Unfortunately, an enraged Jeb, thrashing about in the capsule elbows the space-space-bar, jettisoning the ascent engines and all of the fuel. Bill is the definition of "insanely happy in the face of disaster".

A rescue mission is launched from Kerbin and reaches orbit successfully. Only 70m from the Munar surface does intrepid pilot Derwin Kerbal realise the transport lander legs had been fiitted upside-down. In his confusion, he lands directly on top of MUN-1, narrowly missing a now frozen in terror Bill.

With newly fitted MK.2 legs, MUN-RESQ2 enters Munar orbit and touches down a safe distance from the space-pile up.

Days later, all 8 crew members land back safely on Kerbin, Jeb still entombed in gaffer tape for his and the ships own safety.

[General Rarity]

Parachutes and underpowered skycranes.... many, many quicksaves were loaded

[Bannon]

So I wanted to let a friend of mine who wasn't really into KSP try to build a ship and then I'll see if I can fly it anywhere. Suffice to say, my friend would make a very Kerbal Engineer given that things ended in a very Kerbal way.

The ship in question

It's special feature, The Lord of Light!

Launch!

Launch!?

Launch?

Launch???

Welp.

Amazingly in this run the crew survived since normally they would just be crushed by the upper portion colliding into the lower section of the ship based on a bunch of previous launches.

[Turd]

I built this craft inspired by the "Lotus" lander in the spacecraft exchange as part of a Duna mission. I've only built spaceplanes before so I took a lot of design hints from other folks builds. I had to rebuild the booster TWICE due to stupid mistakes of not placing the command module properly, and it couldn't let me move it once placed to the other end of the rocket. So six hours and two launches later I finally get it into orbit. This probably took another hour as my laptop is very slow and the rocket was 350 parts. From orbit I escape towards Mun, line up a good capture, begin to circularize... And run out of fuel because I forgot to link all the tanks in the main part of the craft! Now I have literally 12 tanks to transfer back and forth. Once before I can finish circularizing the munar orbit, a second time before landing, again after landing, and possibly a fourth time in order to make it back to Kerbin!

I HATE this game...

Edited July 6, 2013 by Turd

[Oddbin]

@Bannon I genuinely laughed out loud.