KSP "Facepalm" Moments

[Nalin_Airheart]

I F9'd when I should've F5'd, its like that saying that If you french fry when you're supposed to pizza you're gonna have a bad time.

[WeirdCulture]

ever had the whole RCS system on the wrong vehicle?

[kodemunkey]

So, funny story. Bill faceplanted into the Munar surface while attempting to enter a rescue vehicle. For thirty seconds the Mun disapeared entirely. Bill, the crew of the rescue ship and the ship that Bill originally landed in vanished completley.

Jebediah was piloting the rescue ship.

[SgìobairOg]

Learned the hard way yesterday that docking ports will allow your orbiter's main engine to rob fuel from your lunar lander module. On the way to Mün I made sure to transfer fuel into my lander tanks and top them off (should have been a warning sign). Got to Münar orbit, disconnected from the orbiter, activated the sky crane rockets... nothing. The orbiter had sucked the lander tanks dry.

Word to the wise, shut off fuel cross-flow on your docking port.

[magnemoe]

So, funny story. Bill faceplanted into the Munar surface while attempting to enter a rescue vehicle. For thirty seconds the Mun disapeared entirely. Bill, the crew of the rescue ship and the ship that Bill originally landed in vanished completley.

Jebediah was piloting the rescue ship.

I had this happend on Ike during my first grand tour.

I had done an burn directly from Moho to Duna, after mined and filled the mothership as much as I could, because of some miscalculations as in forgetting the plane change burn, I was very shot on fuel but managed to get into Ike orbit with a bit less than 1000 m/s dV on miner after drying all other tanks.

As Ike was mapped for kethane I only had to find an nice landing spot and start filling the tanks, however I would not be able to abort the landing. Went to map mode before deorbit burn overseeing mechjeb doing it. Looked good so as I get lower I switched back to external view to check the landing spot and move it a bit if needed, I could not see Ike, looked all around, could see Duna far down below me and I understood the planet had become invisible. Let mechjeb land anyway and it slowed down however ship exploded at ground level and I had to reload.

[Specialist290]

ever had the whole RCS system on the wrong vehicle?

On a related note, on my first (and only) trip to Duna, I put the parachute on the orbiter bit instead of the lander.

Fortunately, it ended up not mattering, since the lander ended up landing safely anyway.

Edited October 3, 2013 by Specialist290
Because "and only" is no longer true at this point.

[Annikovka]

When I went to Duna I made a Space Plane and I couldn't generate lift with the wings and crashed at 700 m/s into the ground!

[Astraph]

-> Landing on the Mun for the first time, happy and stuff.

-> Wanna see that crater over there.

-> Separately-landed rover is too far to walk; decided to use jetpack.

-> Jebediah flies happily all 3 kilometres there.

-> Forgot you don't have to press acceleration all the time

-> Realise Jebediah is going bazillion m/s and won't slow down in time.

-> Oh crap, lithobraking.

-> Jebediah [*]

[I_do_robots]

My first (Modular building) space station section, heavy lift, follow the standard launch procedures well, check and recheck custom key settings (Even wrote them down for reference) and crew, Nice launch, going good, get my 45 Deg turn and the 2nd one to 90 at around 80K meters...Feeling pretty good, alternating between CAPS LOCK and NO CAPS LOCK, making constant adjustments...Feeling froggy even at keeping everything on the mark. Start doing orbits alternately rotating halfway around to burn prograde and retrograde, trying to match up Apo and Peri, finally get that after about 8 orbits at 1X speed. Go to start decoupling things and I decouple the capsule first (With only 4 RCS thrusters at the nose and no engy behind it...Lost all the functions to further decouple anything still connected to the station. At least I turned the electronics and lights on...Every attempt to move the capsule just rolled it around....

Thumb "Esc", select button to return to VAB....EPIC FAIL...HOURS getting that alignment and circle orbit perfect just to fail on a key stroke...Owww.

[musicpenguin]

Forgot parachutes on my rescue vehicle. No survivors.

[thunderstar]

i was designig a stock escape tower from the 1 man pod, for some reason when activated the escape tower will get stuck on the capsule and make everything explode :C

[KerbMav]

While trying to align my craft for reentry in the upper atmosphere:

"I can rotate but not tilt in any direction? What kind of hellish drag ... ?? Oh ... docking mode ... "

[iBeej]

My absolute biggest noob fail was when I attempted a landing on Jool... I had no idea it was a gas giant and never read the stats on it. During descent I remember thinking... "Where the hell is the ground?"

Kraken...

[Zaryulenko]

My last Docking operation was not scheduled and had to be done because of Lazyness, It was supposed to be a deorbit mission for a unused space station,the 16 SRB deorbiter block (Separate from the New Replacing Core Station) should had to go lineal and NOT radially on the HubMax, Well Lets see what happends here......... *Engines start* *BOOM* What the heck?! oh come on now i have a debris Field around me!

F5 and F9 were very handy for giving me a chance to use the Replacer core for manual Deorbit

Moral of the story: Dont be lazy and dock PROPERLY for your safety.....

[iBeej]

Every single time I design a new lander for the Mun, just as I'm descending to land...WTH? Why am I out of fuel? *facepalm* I forgot the fuel lines. Time to fire up the ascent engine...

I found a trick when this happens. Alt right click the two tanks and fuel transfer.

[little square dot]

good gravy... too many to mention.

I once built a rather complex modular base to land on Eeloo. I spent an entire weekend designing, redesigning, testing, building modules, skycranes, and HOOJ delivery vehicles(each module[including skycrane] in the 30T range, direct from LKO to Eeloo = massive amount of fuel).

As my launch window opened I began the arduous process of launching 7 custom rockets to LKO, doing lengthy transfer burns, warping, making course corrections, more warping, encountering and making final course corrections, adjusting orbits, selecting landing zone, landing, and gathering all of the landed modules together at an ideal spot to set up camp.

Now for the caveat... given that I haven't had any luck getting standard dock ports to couple on land, I opted to use the Kosmos APAS-69 ports with guide fins, as I've had much better success with them.

Unfortunately, in all of my testing, optimizing and redesigning, it somehow never occurred to me that the ports have to be [69] in order to allow docking. All of my ports were one-fin-up/two-fins-down, so my ingenious, beautiful, meticulously designed base was totally dead in the water.

gah... engineers everywhere would be disgusted with me.

[IndigoCypher00]

It's pretty common to accidentally stage when you're not supposed too. (Note: I've done all of these things) It's catastrophic when you do it with SRBs, it's rage inducing when you let go of the stage holding all your RCS during docking, and it's freaking horrifying when you hit spacebar and suddenly have your command pod attached to your rocket with nothing but centrifugal force alone. The best part its, I've done that, and then tried to salvage it. Once, I got lucky with my design and was able to get a detached pod into space on a slim suborbital trajectory, but once space physics got a hold of my craft I was left with a manned capsule, in which situation my failure to reach orbit actually saved a life.

Once, I let my brother, who had relatively little experience with the game, fly a rocket on my save file (I know, bad idea). He flew a simple rocket that he built into LKO with MechJeb. I didn't think anything of it and left it in orbit for a while. When I finally got around to recovering it, it started out great. I was on the dark side of Kerbin, but he had packed a parachute, and I could read the NavBall. I waited till AP, got about halfway to retrograde, and then stopped dead. His reaction wheels had run out of power. No problem, just wait till morning and open the solar panels...wait. No power. Crap. I eventually ended up launching a retrieval craft that the terrified Bob floated over too and reentered with. That was my first time with a big EVA operation, and it was the scariest minute and a half of my life.

Oh, and detaching the stage your MJ case is attached to during a complex maneuver sucks pretty hard, too.

[Basilo1146]

My biggest duh moments would probably be when I was first learning how to dock. For some reason, instead of cancelling out my velocity relative to the target and then trying to approach it, I would just try to redirect the vehicle without stopping it. This never actually resulted in any crashes, but I kept flying right past whatever I would try to dock with

[leax256]

facepalm moments...90% of this video

[jebisanaggie]

Oh, and detaching the stage your MJ case is attached to during a complex maneuver sucks pretty hard, too.

Mechjeb (if used) gets attached to the command pod. Made that mistake one too many times.

[Randox]

Back in version 19, I did some work on planes, mostly modded prop ones, thinking I might make one that could fly extremely far on solar power (I probably can, but I start dying of boredom at about 15 minutes, so no go). I also had a go with a quad engine VTOL cargo lifter (using a tow cable), which was just crazy enough to be able to lift it's own weight (tested by having one pick another one up). Now, the craft itself was crazy, since I could never get the balance quite just right (it was actually pretty easy to fly. Landing could be tricky, hovering was quite hard).

But there are two kinds of winches. Electro magnet, and suction cup. The former can be turned on and off, but it also needs power, and this is what I used. This worked alright, with a bit of patience I could sometimes grab things from the air without crashing (it didn't respond well to what is essentially dropping an anchor), and having put in some batteries, and solar panels and the fact that the engines also made power), I never really gave this a lot of thought. I never worked out ariel grabs, since hovering steady enough, and in a particular location was pretty much impossible for me, and a flyby grab was like dropping an anchor, and didn't end well.

The solution was to land, run out with a kerbal for a manual attach, climb back in and pray that the engines could get the cargo off the ground before the RCS lost a fight to gravity, pendulum physics, and sanity, needless to say that the first minute after a pickup was spent desperately trying to gain height and stop the cargo from spinning around on a 20m cable. After doing this a couple of times around the base, I decided to take a rover to the island. I'm not too far out when suddenly, the rover drops off the magnet. I look at my ships status and notice it's dead out of power, the magnet drawing more than the engines and solar panels could produce. Now, the magnet was still useful since it meant I could drop things. Still, after that, I made the switch to suction cups.

This is the flying facepalm of a ship. This is either a few seconds before the rover falls into the sea, or the second run with the suction cup. I can't tell which grapple I am using.

[GK258]

Back in 0.17, I was just a total noob at KSP, trying to explore the new planets. I already landed on Mun after smashing more than 100 Kerbals into its surface ("I am not a dum****s, I can figure out how to land this thing without Youtube" - well, I didn't.), and even had Minmus (Believe it or not, I landed on it with the same mission that first successfully landed on Mun - i overdid my burn as I didn't had a clue about how that works - and saw an encounter for a second, so I saved and went for it. Complete success with return.) and Duna. So I decided to try Eve.

By that time, I coud remember hearing that Eve was somehow difficult, as it has double the gravity and >double the atmosphere< than Kerbin. So I made a ship that I thought would do fine, it should certainly have enough dV to land and get back to orbit. It performed quite well, it had huge fuel surplus when taking off from Kerbin, so I went ahead and flew some poor Kerbal to Eve. Everything went fine, he got an encounter, aerobraked, and started to descend. Still fine, but then, the parachutes began to rip off from some reason. I loaded a few times, and when enough of them survived, I proceeded. And soon after, when I found out that the ship is hardly falling down, I started to realize something may be wrong here. Poor Kerbal has landed, explored the soil and the ocean (Sealevel landing at Eve like a pro ), and went back to take off.

The ship flew some 500 meters up and fell down again. WTF?

and that was my story of my first Eve return mission colonial mission.

And the I went to check the forums, and I suddenly understood...

[DerekL1963]

Took the engine off my orbital insertion/maneuvering stage in the VAB to swap out it's fuel tank, pulled the lower decoupler up to the new tank, and hit the "launch" button. Watched, quite pleased, as the booster flew smoothly into orbit and separated from the orbital insertion/maneuvering stage...

[Hallofo]

Just this last week:

Testing out the new SAS/ASAS power use, I put up a simple orbiter and waited for the dark side of Kerbin. I put it into a VERY fast lateral spin and hit the SAS toggle to watch the electricity drain. Satisfied, I lined up for a retrograde burn and hit the throttle.... nothing. Gave it some more..... still nothing. I started looking around and noticed that the spin was fast enough to make the main engine fly off! Fortunately, I had enough RCS juice to burn it into a aerobraking orbit and the Kerbal was recovered.

Next, playing with my first (working) SSTO plane: I had finished my proof of concept flight, 100% green across the board. Made it to orbit, maneuvered into a circular orbit and retro'ed down. I undershot KSC by about.... 1/4th of a Kerbin, so I had a looong atmospheric flight to get there (lucky, I had plenty of fuel). While lining up for final approach I noticed that the plane seemed to "jerk" really bad when correcting the course. Even with SAS on, making fine adjustments was next to impossible. I chalked it up to poor aircraft balance with the fuel partially burned off. I landed, gave myself a high-five and then noticed.... I had landed with level 3 time compression! No wonder the movements seemed jerky!

In both cases, the Kerbals beat the odds (and my poor skills) to survive!

[LameLefty]

... when your long-planned crewed Moho landing mission arrives in the Moho SOI and prepares for orbital insertion ... only to discover that you're 1,500+ m/s short on ∆V. Ah, well. At least we got a fly-by. Now to figure out how to rescue the kerbalnauts.