Horrible flight missions

[Bilfr3d]

Answer the poll based on your most horrible (or any horrible) space ship missions to anywhere.

NOTE: users are made public when voting. If you do not want to be made public, do not submit in the poll, simple.

Edited August 29, 2013 by ToTheMun

[AlamoVampire]

well, my most horrible mission? well, tried to dock this mess:

it kept flying apart during launch, IF it did not do that, it well, was uncontrollable during docking, had to abort and revert the whole mission. those cans on bottom of those truss's were for support in atmosphere.

[Force21]

My kethane miner just wont cooperate on launch, the assperagus thrusters keep detaching without use of spacebar...

[Whackjob]

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[TheHockeyPlayer]

My worst mission ever was when I went through all the hassle of launching a base into orbit around the Mun. Then I went through all the hassle of launching a skycrane, rendezvousing, docking, and finally landing the entire craft. The one problem: I didn't have enough delta-V to land. I spent some 3 hours on the mission, and you can imagine that I was extremely disappointed when it was all over.

[The Destroyer]

Uh

Well

I don't really have anything horrible, I say it's "fun science experiment"

[Sapphire]

An entire grand tour mission destroyed by the broken docking ports bug. Really not cool... That was 23 kerbals.

[Specialist290]

To date, I have crashed pretty much every spaceplane I have ever flown. Most of those crashes were fatal. Feels bad

As for my single most frustrating experience: Getting to Moho and finding out that the delta-v charts I was using gave no real indication of how difficult it would actually be to establish an orbit.

[katesp]

Running out of fuel during landing, because you just know that if you did some tiny little thing differently you'd be planting a flag instead of relaunching.

[Juffin]

Unplanned parachute separation. And then lithobraking into Eve.

[technicalfool]

I have too many horrific KSP end-missions to count. However one prominent failure would be completing the aerobrake around Jool, getting ready to aerobrake around Laythe and drop a rover on it, and then a bug happens during time warp. Somehow I ended up on an escape velocity out of the entire Kerbol system.

Kraken, dead? Not likely. It's just playing possum.

[Tygroux]

We all did it, but spend 1hour babysitting that one automated missions on a perfect trajectory, time-warp, make calculations, take back control for orbital burn, then... wait, no power? But where's the... OH C'MON.

[Galane]

My original Big Light Booster 4 was horribly bad. I got the Stretchy Tanks addon and decided I'd try a really tall rocket with a Mainsail in the middle and four small engines around the sides. Then I stacked up 13 levels of the 400 size tank on top of each of the small engines, with decouplers and separatons to dump each level as they emptied.

TWR was very poor. It would fly and the quickly dropping weight of the spent tanks improved it, but not enough to make it too much better. No rigidity problems with every tank level strutted to the center tank, and one long stretchy simply does not flex. I flew it a few times, don't recall if it ever made orbit. I used the same top down tank staging on BLB 3 which worked pretty well so I figured I may as well go big, really big. ;-) On a shorter rocket, with more engines around, it might work better.

[Skorpychan]

Design failure.

Ran out of fuel on orbital insertion around Duna. Tried to use the landing engines to finish the job, but they were misaligned and the rover-base freaked out when they were throttled up beyond a few percent. Couldn't slow down fast enough, missed Duna altogether. Now I have four kerbals in space, unable to get back, and moving at solar orbit speeds that make it nearly impossible to rescue them.

At least the landing failures or the tipping over and crashing on landing, or the slamming into the dark side of the Mun unexpectedly lead to a quick death.

There's also the launch failures, where the whole assembly gets up to about 5k, then a booster goes walkabout, the rocket starts exploding, and plowing through stages ends up with the crew stuck to a full jumbo tank with a few tons of engines attached to it, on chutes meant for a thicker atmosphere and a lighter craft.

In future, I'm going to set up proper abort action groups.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Skorpychan

[magnemoe]

Eve landing as part of grand tour. Terrible as it went well enough until I started circulating, at this point the lander started to spin wildly throwing the kerbal away from the lander to fall to his death.

Worse as the lander had been used with success before two times, reloading did not help either.

[Ferrit]

Simply put, first Mün landing, way too much horizontal velocity, unexpected mountain scrapes off everything under the capsule which continues in a flat arc. In to a second mountain...

This was back when the Mün had just been added so a fair bit of time invested in the mission. Rather frustrating but my own fault and these days I kill horizontal velocity almost totally at a good few km up.

[SaturnVee]

I was going to do a manned flyby of Jool, I didn't expect to have an atmosphere as I assumed the body itself would be the atmosphere. They came in too low and succumbed to the kraken.

[Javster]

Option 4 doesn't matter, no one cares about Kerbals

[alioth]

No, it wasn't the time my (3rd replacement) Mantis rover's descent stage (on account of a sloppy de-orbit and landing trajectory) smashed into the Mun after running out of fuel smearing an unfortunate kerbal over the landscape, but the 4th rover - after a perfect detach from the descent stage about 1m off the surface of the Mun, absolutely stationary, without even so much as needing to repair a wheel - within a couple of km while being driven towards the main base went over the edge of an enormous crater and got smashed to a million pieces as it rolled down the side. The kerbal driving did have enough rocket pack fuel to fly himself to the base and arrive very sheepishly without his Mantis rover.

After losing the 5th rover in different circumstances (but again involving driving over the edge of a crater), a 6th one is now on its way (and will have to pick up the driver of the 5th who didn't have enough rocket pack fuel to fly back to base).

[Sean Mirrsen]

My most horrible mission experiences, considering I mostly fly spaceplanes, usually involve trying to land in horrible places. Usually on planets not meant for landing normal spaceplanes.

So far the most horrible place to land on for me is Duna. Thin atmosphere, no oxygen, and not a single stretch of relatively flat land in sight.

[Levelord]

For me 90% of the time it's phantom forces acting on my ship, especially on landing with the medium to small lander legs. The larger one happens to be more stable because it doesn't have physics applied to it and that it's hit box is semi-transparent.

[Xetalim]

Forgot to retract the solar panels on an unmanned mission, i had no RTGs...

[SRV Ron]

Coming in too fast to land because there is no visual reference from the ground. That was a Duna landing using parachutes. 12.5m/sec landing took off the legs and three engines leaving Bob stranded on Duna.

[rvcrazy]

Lifted off from the Mün. Burned to get into Kerbin's SOI. Time warped and crashed right back into the Mün. Lost a brave Kerbal that day.

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

Ran out of Fuel while on a trajectory around the sun :/