Fails Turning Into Success

[kfc1314]

Fails are common in KSP, with all the explosions and accidental staging, but sometimes you can succeed in a different way. Have your fails ever allow you to succeed?

For me, it would have to be when I was trying to get a satellite into orbit around Kerbin. My orbiting skills aren't exactly fine tuned, so the apoapsis ended up exceeding 1 million. At first I was afraid I would crash into the Mun, but suddenly the map showed that I had plotted an escaped of Kerbin's gravity. This put the satellite in orbit around the Sun! By failing in orbiting Kerbin, I now have a extra-planetary satellite.

So, how have you won?

[Subbota]

When my landers turn into debris fields I like to think of it as spreading kerbal technology across the kerbol system. Someday alien civilizations may find all those rocket parts and learn something from us.

[DChurchill]

Launch hairiness.

[MUSTANG]

I tend to look at all of my crashes in terms of that Thomas Edison saying, "I have learned 1000 ways how not to make a lightbulb."

[espm400]

Back near the end of .20 I was practicing my precision landings on the Mun and accidentally hit the wrong time-warp button. I overshot my landing zone by a few km, but in the ensuing panic I ended up with the best suicide burn I've ever done, literally being able to see my shadow as I killed my horizontal velocity and transfered to vertical movement at roughly 5-10m above the surface.

[The Jedi Master]

One of my most memorable moments in my KSP life: Back in 0.18, in the early days of my space program, I was coming in on the Mun when I ran out of fuel. (I still suck a fuel management, for the record ) For most, this would be a death sentence. But I had a crazy plan. I ejected the lone Kerbonaut from the capsule, and used the jetpack to slow down.

And guess what? It worked. Sure, Danke was stuck on the Mun without a ship, but he was ALIVE!

If anyone remembers the thread I made about that (it was lost in the Great April Derp), please say so, I'd like to remember old friends!

[Specialist290]

One of my more recent ones:

If you're thinking that there should be four solar arrays instead of just three, you're absolutely correct. I miscalculated how much fuel I'd need for my descent burn and ended up running out of fuel about 100m up from the surface. The first bounce tore off one set of solar panels and two of the landing legs, but I somehow managed to get it upright in time for the second one.

[Rainbow-Dashie]

When I first started my plans for my first Mun landing, I had tried to build a ship to get me there, but instead got a bunch of failed designs, the 2 best were a smaller ship that couldn't even get into orbit, but was controllable, and a bigger rocket that could have gotten far out, but flipped, and spun and always crashed...

So in typical Kerbal Fashion... I just took the 2 designs and strapped em together with a bunch of struts. And that became my first ship to crash into the Mun... Of course I forgot landing gear, power, RCS, SAS, an actual crew, a few stages were messed up, and decuplers were set up wrong... but it somehow got there!

[mobious44]

My first week of me playing KSP usually resulted in in my ships either blowing up on the launchpad, not having enough fuel to make orbit, or wasting the fuel trying to make orbit. That being said, I had just launched my latest ship in a desperate attempt to land on the Mun. While in the ascent stage, much to my horror, my rocket either had a structural failure or i miss-staged, either way there was a large explosion followed by a few smaller ones that left me with my last stage barely intact. As my friends watched on, telling me to abort and ditch the Akula rocket series that it was all together. I decided to be like Jeb and continue anyways, and to the astonishment of my friends, i managed to make a highly elliptical, yet stable, orbit before i ran out of fuel. That was a win for me, as it was my first orbit. I spent the next week trying to get a rescue craft near the stranded one to save Jeb, but it only resulted in failure. And the death of more kerbals. I still have that save somewhere though.....

[Wallace]

For, I think, my second launch, I sent a badly designed (but cool looking) deep space probe on a random escape trajectory, just to see what happened, initially in the hope of leaving the solar system, I then realised the puny ion engine would never manage that without a collosally long burn, plus it would be boring as it would have nowhere to go, so it went into sun orbit and got pointed at Duna instead, then i realised it was not going to get to intercept Duna, so now it will orbit round the sun and slingshot to Jool, which I'm fairly certain it can intercept.

So that's a double fail, followed by potential success.

[Dkmdlb]

Just the other day while launching the fuel module for an upcoming mission to Jool, the rocket bent in half when the AP was at 75km. I was aiming for a 125km orbit. After an emergency staging and emergency burn by the interplanetary nuclear engines, I was able to rescue it into a stable orbit.

The good news was that I had forgotten to attach a probe body to my final orbital insertion stage to de-orbit it. I was concerned about two giant orange tanks floating around in the vicinity of my manned fuel can and was thinking during the launch about doing a trash-collecting mission to get rid of them.

Thanks to the catastrophic failure, those tanks just fell back to Kerbin! Yay!

[annallia]

My most recent fail to success would be a munar rescue mission. My attempt at landing my rescue ship landed too far away for me to fly my kerbals over. Since the other ship was mostly intact just too low on fuel to return to kerbin I switched to it intending to do a little hop over to the rescue lander.

Problem is I forget that I lost part of the ship (was a rough landing) and it was now imbalanced on thrust. I throttled all the way up hit my hotkey to turn on the engines (I've had a few accidents from hitting shift so I toggle my engines) the 2 LTV-30's made my light little lander take off like a bat out of hell and angled luckily directly towards the rescue ship. I immediately cut the engines, now my problem was how to land this thing? I swung it back around kick in the engines again for a burst of breaking speed just in time to slow me down enough that my landing struts clipped a hill breaking them off and making my craft cartwheel across the crater (still off the ground) I checked the fuel, only 13 units left, put my engines on full (still off but throttled all the way up) managed to end the spin and just before hitting the ground turned the engines back on.

After that there were a series of explosions as the lander hit the ground, the command pod broke away and bounced across the ground for a good 200 meters. How do I know it was 200 meters? Because I was about 200 meters away from the rescue lander when I hit the ground, the pod came to a rest just a few meters short of the rescue pod.

[regex]

Yesterday I was playing around with KAS and Kethane, setting up a refinery in parts on the Mun. The plan was to use KAS to attach the parts in docked mode and then transfer around the Kethane (to see this in action, watch katateochi's incredible

, part of which was the inspiration for my refinery). I also brought along a huge refueling truck that was pretty much entirely a 3/4 orange tank from KSPX with some wheels.

Anyway, I brought down the hub last; it had four KAS winches, some solar panels, RTGs, too many batteries, and a Hitchhiker so my miners could have a place to live. I sent Jeb out to attach it to the refinery in docked mode and it physics glitched hard; it tipped over and started slowly spinning on the ground. The huge solar panels didn't even break; it just spun over them. I managed to unhook it from the rest of the refinery, got Jeb to the fuel truck, which had a winch of its own and a KAS magnetic head, and tore ass after the hub which was slowly spinning up over a hill. I managed to attach the KAS magnetic head to it, jumped back into the truck, and started reeling it in. Big mistake.

The hub got all reeled in up to the truck but it was still physics glitching, and rolled under the truck and tipped it over. Once again I managed to unhook it before anything more catastrophic took place, but the truck was on its back (thankfully no parts were harmed). I left the hub to its own devices while I looked sadly at the situation. Rather than give up hope and just start from scratch, I checked the truck and saw that I had brought along a grappling hook as well as the magnetic head. Before I launched I was wondering why I had even bothered putting that crap on the truck but now I was thanking my lucky stars. Jeb quickly got the truck righted, drove it back to the refinery, used the magnetic head to right the tipped-over refinery pieces, and sat down to wait for the new hub (which I managed to get installed without glitching through quicksaves and some trickery).

[aleis]

My first Succesful landing was a fantastic failure. After finaly figuring out how to make a space craft orbit I decided it was TO THE MUN.

So i built a a gigantic hodgepodge of random junk that hurts to look at now and sent it to the mun.

Then I learned the joys are Time Warp and completely shot past my Mun encounter window.

Luckily The gravity assist pointed me more or less right at minimus and with plenty of dV I went Kerbal. So in the end my first Landing on a celestial body was Minimus.

Who needs the Mun!.....I then launched a second craft and accomplished my first goal........All Kerbals diligently guarding the historic first landings at these locations......maybe they will get releaved at some point.

[Tiron]

I once forgot to move the launch clamp stage on a craft...it ended up not only with it after the initial engine firing, but after the SRB decouplers. So imagine my surprise as I hit the engines and go nowhere. So I decouple the SRBs (leaving them still attached to the clamps, burning at full), and proceed to land on the Mun anyway. That ship had so much Delta-V it wasn't funny.

[aNewHope]

I once played around with the mission controller plugin. The mission was to put a probe on a suborbital trajectory. When the probe was on it's way to apoapsis (over 20,000,000 km because of some SRB miscalculation) it went out of power (forgot solar panels) and I couldn't activate the parachute.

Free falling from 20 million km, it touched down @ over 150 m/s, but fortunately landed on a cubic octagonal strut (those are insanely robust) and was fully intact.

Lithobreaking FTW!

[OrbitusII]

Back in 0.20 (a very long time ago, I know) I was planning on taking my Fairing'ed Heavy to Mun with a lander, but I didn't have nearly enough fuel. So instead I just made it into a space station.

That is all.

[NASI Director]

I took a probe that was only supposed to go into LKO. Long story short, it said hi to Minmus and went to live with the Mun for a while.

[Hikaru]

One of my most gratifying moments that was initially a complete horrifying epic failure happened in early 0.18; I was trying to do a rendevous with a space station already in orbit with a spacecraft that was empty, so it could offload the crew and take it somewhere. Just as it finished its circularization burn, it staged... *right in front of the space station* - KABOOM! - Luckily I'd designed the station so that the habitation section was isolated on the far end of the station. It quickly ran out of power due to having nothing to power it *with* and was a dead duck, but I was able to evacuate the crew and learned something about space debris that day.

[rdfox]

As a side note, even NASA plans for this sort of thing. The Apollo missions had multiple launch abort modes, and the later ones on the lunar missions didn't just abort the mission completely and dump the spacecraft into the ocean... they would shutdown and jettison the failing stage, then use what was left to launch into an alternate low-earth-orbit mission to try and salvage something from the flight. Shuttle, too, had such an abort mode ("Abort to Orbit"), and it was the only abort mode ever used in actual flight (STS-51F in 1985).

So yeah, trying to salvage what you can out of a fail isn't just a Kerbal thing!

[Skorpychan]

First successful kerbin orbit ended up in a solar orbit. Officially says it's 'on escape trajectory from the sun', but it isn't. Strange bug, that.

First Minimus encounter. Failed to orbit, picked a flyby instead of an impact, and later got a Duna flyby out of it.

First Eve landing turned into a proof that I cannot, in fact, use the landing motors to move the lander out of water. Poor Bill. Also proved that kerbals swim agonisingly slowly.

[tntristan12]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/44102-To-the-Mun-and-back-again-a-tale-of-pride-fuel-lines-and-monumental-ovesight%21

This cautionary tale...

[MaGicBush]

I launched a rover to the mun and ended up crashing and blowing all the wheel legs off, yet the main body of the rover was still intact and safely on the mun. I turned on my science equipment and then had a probe on the mun instead .

[Tassyr]

Way back in the beginning I had just started to use mechjeb and such- back in the days when I did single-stage land/return craft- and a chunk of debris from a previous launch clipped my ship, tearing off the mechjeb unit, the RCS thrusters on one side, solar panels, the works- but left the command pod and one functioning engine/tank setup. Meaning... Instant Apollo 13 simulator!

Jeb made it home, even!

[Vedexent]

I had an Apollo style Munar mission: Kerbin-Mun command ship/transfer stage, and a lander. I had build in the in-line command computer module in the command stage so that I could theoretically fly it "from the ground" when the single Kerbalnaut was away on the Munar landing.

Lander ran out of fuel partway on the accent stage, and had not quite reached an orbital trajectory.

I had the pilot go EVA mid-arch, and using the suit thrusters, managed to just barely get him into a stable orbit while the lander crashed back into the Mun.

Switched over to the command ship, and rendezvoused with the pilot, got him on board, and flew home.