KSP "Facepalm" Moments

[kookoo_gr]

Launched a rocket into orbit last night, after the final stage of the ascent stage was depleted i pressed space in order to decouple it from the transfer stage. :huh:the bottom rocket left but the Rockomax Brand Adapter 02 was stuck at my nuke drive. Spent about 30 minutes launching the same rocket again and again only to discover that i forgot to place a decoupler between the nuke and the adapter. :facepalm:

[lajoswinkler]

Sending a return mission to Minmus, to find the floating monolith. The lander had only one solar panel. Reaction wheels depleted it and it got stuck facing the shadow during a suborbital flight down the mountain. Lander was slowly approaching the ground, but the forward speed was around 30 m/s. I couldn't turn it retrograde. Emergency EVA. One Kerbal down the mountain, two Kerbals down the mountain. Funny, but also not.

Seconds later, the lander touches the ground and goes into a few minute long gradual reducing to electronic waste. It took a long time before Kerbals came to a halt, missing the designated spot by more than 10 km.

Jetpacking back without knowing where anything is was a total failure.

[annallia]

getting to minmus for the first time!

*snip*

and Realizing i put the landing legs on backwards.

LOL.

Ok I shouldn't laugh so hard... I did that myself a few times.

To continue on landing leg facepalms...

When I first started I didn't know that you had to deploy landing legs. I had hit the landing gear button but nothing happened so I figured they were just the way they were. Because of this I only used the light legs because I didn't have to rotate them which made for some... interesting designs. When I finally realized that they need to be deployed I started using the heavier ones... and put them on upside down thinking like the light ones they would extend straight down.

[Spyritdragon]

I made this Apollo-style Munar mission. Had a nice command module, enough fuel, nice working, stable lander. Dream ship really.

Only, i'd attached the lander to the command module with a senior port, for stability and because the lander had a big node on the top.

So as i ordered Jeb to climb out he was like 'yay yay yay yay yay!' and he rushed out the door, clunked his head on the senior port and sent it flying, along with the rest of the lander .

Also, i had a hilarious accident involving three planes and a mod called Kethane.

I wanted to test this out, and grab a few Kethane samples for testing. I built a small plane with a few jet engines, liquidfuel tanks, a single small drill, some panels for power, and a tank for some kethane. And a scanner.

After flying North for a rather long while, i passed bingo fuel. At this point, i had to either turn around to get home or fly on in the hope of finding a patch of Kethane before my fuel ran out. Luckily, right as i was about to turn my plane around, i found said patch of Kethane. I landed reasonably smoothly, managed to deploy the solar panel and drill for Kethane safely.

Facepalm 1: My converter was piped wrongly and didn't work.

Everything worked fine, but my converter would not convert any kethane into liquidfuel, most likely because it didn't have any piping coming from liquidfuel tanks. I was out there, way past bingo fuel, and i hadn't attached a kethane engine, relying on that converter.

So, next step: I built a bigger plane (the first one was meant to be a small fast way to get some Kethane) with a large Kethane converter, a gigantor pannel on top for power, two small drills and a reasonable amount of fuel. Goal was to fly over and RV with the other plane, drill for Kethane, fill both planes with KAS and fly back safely.

After a while designing this thing, i got it off the runway, flew it over, everything worked like a charm. After another reasonably long flight, i landed in the kethane patch. A few kilometres off the other plane, granted, but that was fixable. I drill for kethane successfully, convert it to liquidfuel successfully, although my single gigantor was blatantly lacking and made the drilling take ages. Then, i notice:

Facepalm numba 2: My KAS connectors were gone.

Somewhere in this building process, probably when replacing a messed up part, i'd replaced the part my KAS modules were on, not realising i'd gotten rid of the connectors. I had no detachable ports to transfer the fuel with. The tanker could come back fine, with kethane in it, but that left the other plane stranded out there. And no kerbal stays behind for me.

So, i took the fastest ship i had quickly availible i knew worked: the Ravenspear. Able to achieve very nice velocities, travelling at 1000m/s at times, i managed to fly it over, with KAS connectors rather fast. It appeared to be hard to land though: I failed multiple times. My last landing was nice, except for a missing gear, which effectively prohibited movement. At this moment i grew tired of the mission, decided to let them wait a bit and go to space again. I'd been in atmosphere for far too long.

Then .21 dropped and i switched to a new savefile .

Edited August 24, 2013 by Spyritdragon

[RogueMason]

Completed a rendezvous, pressed space to decouple. Somehow, I'd managed to get a decoupler and an adapter the wrong way round, leaving the adapter stuck to the engine of the main vehicle. Adding to that, the decoupler fired but didn't actually decouple

That is the first time I've made a proper screw-up in ages. Kids, don't be this stupid, your financial department won't be pleased...

[PwnedDuck]

Put sepratrons onto my SRBs backwards, launching them directly into the rest of the rocket during takeoff...

So, launching a fairly elaborate craft to Bop and back, only then to realise that it basically amounted to and orange tank with a NERVA in 9 parts rather than 2 (the sole reason for it being elaborate was for it not to be that, but instead lighter and more useful).

[Gojira]

Spend days making a multi part ship. Finally send it to Duna. Reach low Duna orbit. Deploy lander. Have chutes rip apart lander and kill both Kerbals inside. Decide to go to Ike. One probe crashes and burns, the other lands successfully. Leave Ike. End up in high Duna orbit. Warp till return window to Kerbin. Get captured by Ike. Unwarp a millisecond before the ship hits at 600+ m/s. Lose ten Kerbals (two in the lander, eight in the ship) that day.

[Zaryulenko]

Hello again, Well this time my cargo ship will take a little longer than expected, That was NOT a decoupler under my FTmN-280...... Now we must send it again..... AGAIN....

[Zeblote]

Don't place the mechjeb controller upside down or stuff will go crazy.

[Herbert McCheese-Wang]

What?! But I've got a full tank of fuel, wait, where are the fuel lines?

*Facepalm*

[chri]

"3,2,1, GOOOO!"

*Clank, Hiss, BOOOOOM*

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

SOOO many times hahahaha

[magnemoe]

Completed a rendezvous, pressed space to decouple. Somehow, I'd managed to get a decoupler and an adapter the wrong way round, leaving the adapter stuck to the engine of the main vehicle. Adding to that, the decoupler fired but didn't actually decouple

That is the first time I've made a proper screw-up in ages. Kids, don't be this stupid, your financial department won't be pleased...

Reminds me of my first Eve mission, I made an ship with three probes, plan was to drop one on Eve, it it did not work, drop another, continue to Gilly and drop the rest of the probes. One probe on top two below next to nuclear engine. Coming to Eve drops one of the bottom probes, decopler was mounted the wrong way so engine did not work, did the deorbit burn with main ship drop bottom probe two and circulated again.

Probe landed well in water.

Continue to Gilly, because of the deorbit followed by circulate burn from an stupid high orbit I run out of fuel, I was just able to point the ship on impact course with Gilly. Release front lander, press space again and decople engine and fuel tank while releasing parachute.

Watch all three parts impact Gilly.

[Brapness]

Once rendezvoused a lander with its transfer stage and then burned for Duna. I did the burn in map view and didn't notice that the ship seemed to be going slower than expected. After a couple of minutes I switched to the ship view and realized I hadn't disabled the lander engine, which was pointing in the opposite direction to the transfer engines. Felt like a complete berk after that.

[Buckshoot]

First trip to Duna. Unmanned probe. Pretty sure of my delta-v calculations. Everything went fine until it was time to decelerate to circularize orbit.

After almost 2 hour of real time the end result was probe went in and probe went out of orbit and into unknown space.

Sometimes i still go see it just to remind me to always add more fuel.

[AIux]

Set up fuel lines incorrectly in asparagus staging, staged wrong tanks that were nearly empty. The tanks shot up past the rocket and then ran out of fuel, stopped and then came back down, landing on my capsule and killing my kerbals. *facepalm*

[RocketPilot573]

T-10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... What was I supposed to do here??? 2... 1... And we have liftof- BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

[djnattyd]

This happened last night.

Launched a manned flight in preparation of my trip to Duna, 10k up the first set of tanks ran out so I staged. Wait, why can't I turn? Okay, throttle down slightly... Why isn't it throttling down?

I'd only staged the capsule separation /Facepalm

[Geschosskopf]

Made a lander that's essentially a big central fuel tank with 2x 1-man lander cans radially attached to the sides, doors facing down (lighter than using a single 2-man can). IOW, the lander cans were rotated 90^ in both roll and pitch from their normal orientation. At launch, the rocket did an immediate U-turn and impacted halfway between the pad and the VAB. Forgot to set "control from here" to the normally oriented probe core on top AND didn't notice the navball's wonky orientation trying to remind me to do this .

[WillHop]

I put loads of seperatrons at the bottom of of my command pod in case the parachute broke on my escape tower.

3...2...1... launch!

*explosion*

Fire the escape tower!

Success!

*parachute snaps*

Fire the seperatrons!

*kills vertical velocity, then adds more and the capsule goes even further up*

And then I ran out of abort systems. Lucky for me it was just a simulation....

[LameLefty]

So yesterday I made my first crewed landing on Duna. After landing, planting the flag and the obligatory photo op, I got the crew back in their lander, took off and then screwed up my ascent. I limped up to a highly-inclined "orbit" with an apoapsis of about 75 km and a periapsis of only 18 km, totally out of fuel and with no RCS mono prop left. Oops. My orbiting crew managed to rendezvous with the crippled lander and dock, then raised the orbit of the stack to a nice, stable circular 85 km or so.

Having done that, I sat back and took a deep breath, put my hands on the keyboard to take a screenshot ... and bumped the spacebar. Aaargh! My orbiter capsule and the docked lander ascent stage separated cleanly from their only means of propulsion home. Jeez.

(F9 returned me to a quick save with my lander limping towards apoapsis - had to do the whole "limp into orbit, rendezvous, rescue orbit" thing all over again. THIS time I did with stages locked to avoid this error again).

[spectrhz]

I decided to whip up a lander with releasable orbiter to dres when I saw a launch Window. The orbiter had more solar power than you could shake a stick at, but I forgot to add any power generators to the lander. I had enough power to not notice until long after I landed. So I decided get into a nice low solar orbit instead of staying there, but flying with no sas for interplanetary burns is almost impossible, because it was slightly unbalanced. Long story short I barely got a dres escape and had to launch a big heavy rescue craft to rendezvous in solar orbit, which takes forever. A little dres mission turned into a big rescue mission

[zekes]

...when you accidentally stage and you forgot to quick save...

[Geschosskopf]

This is the forum equivalent of forgetting to quicksave. A few hours ago I logged on and spent 1/2 hour typing up a mission report complete with illustrations. It looked good in the preview so I hit "Submit" before doing my usual thing of copying all the text to Notepad just in case (a habit born of long suffering with flaky connectivity). And instead of seeing my post, I see a message from the "IT Monkeys" that they're "doing stuff" to the forum. AARRGGHH!! Even worse, I was too busy feeling sorry for myself over this to hit the BACK button in time to save my typing. Double AAARRGGGHHH!!!!

NOTE: In case you haven't read between the lines and the title of this thread, I'm totally blaming myself, not the IT Monkeys

[Bradvh97]

I was attempting to build an interplanetary spaceship in orbit. First I sent the core up, everything was fine. I sent the lander up and docked it, fine again. I then sent up 4 of the atomic engines + fuel tanks and docked them. I had fears of the ship being unstable and as soon as I attempt a Kerbin escape everything just wobbles like a jelly spaceship. I'd spent about 2-3 hours getting them all up and it just failed, big time.

[talonmadc]

my biggest facepalm then crying moment was when i just docked all the modules together on my inter-planetary laythe mission (was supposed to be my first mission to the jollinary system) then realised when i kicked on the nuclear engine that one of the modules was so heavy compared to the others that i would fly out of control every time i tried to turn on my engines and rcs didnt help at all