KSP "Facepalm" Moments

[JMap1]

With the success of the "A Ha" thread (lots of thanks to nhnifong for the video ), why not have some laughs?

Facepalms happen. A lot! My latest mission to dock a hitchhiker can hab module to my space station was full of fail. As I was on my final few metres of the amazingly stressful procedure, I realized I was doing this without fine controls on. I was zipping all over the place! Once everything was in place, I wanted to check how the little green guys were doing. BY THE BEARD OF ZEUS, THE CANS ARE EMPTY! Every test flight I remembered to fill the cans, but when it comes to the actual mission, no dice.

Ps... yes, I am feeling thread-cocky.

[Kerbart]

Hahaha. I can just see this happening. Rocket roars through the sky, mission control is happy about yet another successful launch. At that point, Jebediah, Bill and Bob walk through the door; “Wazzup guys?â€Â

[Whackjob]

"Great reentry. Time to deploy the drogues."

*spacebar* "?" *spacebar spacebar spacebar*

"Ok, no drogue chutes. No problem. I'll just fire out the regular chutes when I'm low enough."

*spacebar* "..." *spacebar spacebar spacebar*

I TOLD YOU TO PUT CHUTES ON THAT THING!

[Zaryulenko]

Well yesterday i was supossed to send the Propulsion part of my experimental cargo ship, but i always had problems whit the main engines because AIES tank collides collides a little whit the quadruple-coupler.... and what happend? I was changing engines, stages, and i was really mad about why it detached for no reasion, i noticed about the problem at the flight test number 6 when i noticed the tank and the quad-coupler were colliding weirdly....... i shouldnt try for first time that adapter there.

Edit: The crew part of that experimental ship also had problems..... and Bill too, DAMMIT BILL YOURE NOT SUPOSSED TO BE INSIDE OF IT!..... and now hes going back to Mun PERMANENTLY

Edited August 23, 2013 by Zaryulenko

[djnattyd]

"3,2,1, GOOOO!"

*Clank, Hiss, BOOOOOM*

OK... So the launch clamps were in their own stage

[Camelotking524]

Hitting the space bar and watching the radial fuel tanks spin violently into the center tank. Because I wasn't paying attention at the direction the separators engines are facing.

[cpthiner]

For this story to make sense, you must know that I play Kerbal through steam.

Anyways! I recently went to Eeloo, The misson there, the landing, the science, the exploring, the re-docking all went very well. Well once I had left and done my burn to get back to Kerbin, A steam friend messaged me, so I went to the in game steam window to respond, then went back to my game and time accelerated. Well I missed Kerbin by millions of Km and had no idea what had happened, well to get to the steam window you press Shift+Tab, this resulted in turning on my burners, sending me WAY off course... those Kerbals are still floating out there. poor fellas.

Edited August 25, 2013 by cpthiner

[Skorpychan]

Floating down, floating down, floating down...

Is that a beach?

No, that's a mountain ridge.

It's pretty...

Oh crap, we're tipping.

*KABOOM*

*two dead kerbals*

Lesson learned: Hitchhiker pods may have a higher mass-seat ratio, but they're basically made of glass. My mun shuttle may need a redesign to use the 3-kerb capsule, or make twice the flights with lander-cans.

I think the 3-kerb capsule, with a touch more fuel on the lifter to even things out a little.

Then again, the idea is to shuttle crews and ships back and forth from stations anyway, with kerbin re-entry being managed by specialist pods.

[Tiozao]

Once I lost a probe unpowered because of an eclipse, which blocked my panels

[Pixel of Life]

That feeling when you try to deploy your chutes but they aren't working, and then you start spamming the spacebar which results in said chutes getting jettisoned..

This happened when I was trying to land on Laythe for the first time, I didn't expect the atmosphere to be that thin - obviously, the chutes could not open at such a high altitude, but I did not know this and went full retard.. And so my precious rover fell straight to its demise.

[rottielover]

Probably my best facepalm moment...

Last night:

"Man, I really want to re-install TAC Life Support!" Did so.

Oh time to check my minmus base... *ALARM ALARM ALARM* whoops. Bill's got 20 min of oxygen left. Ummm. Hmmm.

Wait! I have an old Kethane truck over there with a B9 cockpit, lets jet pack him over!

Where he promptly discovers the body of one of his comrades. And 2 days worth of supplies.

I'm launching the rescue mission tonight...

[Superfluous J]

I sent up a 3-man pod to rescue 2 kerbals who were in orbit with no fuel. Halfway up, I realized that I forgot to remove 2 kerbals from the command pod, so there was no room for the guys in orbit to sit.

Two quick in-atmosphere and under-acceleration EVAs later, there was room. I just pretend they got out before launch.

[The Jedi Master]

"Sepratrons? Eh, those things are overrated." *BOOM*

[Amphibious Rodent]

"OK, now that I've attached the solar panel arm to the space station, I'll detach my unmanned lifter and de-orbit it. Undock. Turn to retrograde. Turn. Uh... why isn't it responding? Jeb, did you activate the RemoteTech antenna?"

"The what?"

"Aw crap."

[Cooly568]

My Joolian Grand Tour had 3 major fails in it

One, I decided to use one of my micro landers, since I hadn't been using them at all.

After landing all happy...

I realized I forgot a electricity maker...

On a suborbital orbit...

So I picked it up with my kethane miner and took it back to the main ship

Fail two was in the hardest part of the mission, the Tylo Landing.

You see that little fuel tank that the kerb is sitting on?

Well that failed, even though I had fuel and the engine was directly attached, I didn't get thrust.

So I had to EVA it up to the kethane miner I put in low orbit.

Fail three was in re-entry, that speed increased to about 9500 M/s on re-entry.

"Alright, re-entry looking fine..."

"Uh-oh"

"Really big uh-oh"

"Well, there goes the whole mission. *sniff*"

"Hang on what?"

Everyone lived to fly another day.

[Specialist290]

A long, long time ago, back when I was learning how to play the game in the 0.13.3 demo, I decided to make a rocket with 48 solid boosters and launch it as high as it could go, just for a laugh.

Launch went without any problems; it rose a few kilometers into the sky and ran out of fuel, at which point I detached the command pod. It coasted a bit, so I figured I'd fire up the 'chutes for descent. About five seconds later, the SRB stage I had just jettisoned rushed up to meet the now relatively much slower capsule...

There were tears at the Kerbal Space Center that day.

[swiftgates24]

No solar panels on probes

[King Arthur]

1. Go to launchpad, ship on launch clamps.

2. Stage for launch.

3. Realize throttle wasn't pushed up/MJ wasn't activated.

4. ???

5. KABOOMFACEPALM.jpg

[SuperWeegee4000]

My facepalm moment came when I realized that Docking Mode makes docking a lot harder.

[annallia]

I posted it in the ah-ha thread but it really belongs here....

Sent out my pod recovery crane to fetch Jebs pod out of the mountains. Somewhere in the course of the journey one of the wheels on the crane broke. I drove it the rest of the way to the pod but then realized I needed that wheel fixed before I could lift Jebs pod safely (couldn't maneuver correctly without it). Well since it was midnight or there abouts kerbal time and I had neglected to put lights on the crane and couldn't get it close enough to use the pods lights I hit time warp and waited for daylight so I could see which wheel was broken.

First thing I did when I exited the command module on the crane? Hit L to turn on my helmet lights ><

[mythbusters844]

When I forgot to add RCS to my fuel tanker to dock with a Minmus station and ended up with having to dock the entire space station with it.

[Rainbow-Dashie]

"SAS? What the heck is that? pfffft, I don't need any of that!"

[Scorpi15]

Using MJ to dock a modified Kerbal X to a station on a friends save file. I was showing him how it worked, but then I pressed spacebar to activate the engine. I forgot that I had already activated it and it detached from the service module >.<

[cesarcurado]

Is excited on new rocket design

"Yay! Done! Time to launch..."

Realizes the staging isn't set correctly

"Back to the drawing board..."

[JakeGrey]

Pre-0.21:

"The hell with RCS, it just makes the whole ship wobble like mad when ASAS is on. I'll just rely on pod gyros."

Ten minutes later:

"Come on you little bugger, turn! We're going to miss the burn window!"

Apogee ended up somewhere close to the Mun, perigee was down to about 50km. Not even MechJeb could salvage that. Remember, people, don't try and steer Duna probes with nothing but a Stayputnik probe core!