What's your luckiest moment?

[ptreese84]

So.. I was messing around with stock KSP getting re-familiarized for the upcoming patch. Made it to the Mun and back again.. barely!

Ran out of fuel with a PE of 48k around Kerbin and an AP of 260k. Managed to burn that down to an AP of 180k with RCS and the rest with aerobraking.

And on top of that i randomly landed 24km from my launch site on Kerbit.

So I'm curious. What's your luckiest moments?

Edited October 13, 2013 by ptreese84

[WillHop]

I once accidentally staged my 80% of my fuel and my landing legs on the way down to the Mun, only to land precisely on top of my engine and then make it back in to Munar orbit with the help of the EVA pack. Unfortunately it was retrogade orbit, fortunately my stage orbiting the Mun had plenty of fuel left and was able to change to a retrogade, pick up the stranded Melley Kerman and take him home. After this I decided this Kerbal was so amazing I would send him on every mission, so he went to Minmus and back, but is currently stranded on Duna...

[Whoozy]

Performing my first suicide burn landing on the Mun with an untested rocket design.

[Outback_Zach]

I was testing out a retrograde satellite for fun one day. However like the genius I am I forgot to put on any solar panels and it ran out of battery in the altitude I use for stations. I labelled it debris and left it alone. About an hour later I just finished docking a module to my station when suddenly! A debris marker was flying at me and my station. The forgotten satellite wasn't pleased with being forgotten and wanted revenge. I RCSed the station away from the satellites path. Just barely. The satellite grazed a girder and sent the station spinning but with no damage other then the girder being gone.

[wooaa]

wow. That is the first time I have heard of someone crashing into orbital debris.

[Dasemay]

once i was coming back from a successful moon mission about to reenter the atmosphere when i realized i had forgot to put chutes on my capsule. so i E.V.Aed out of my rocket to watch it explode on the ground from a better perspective but instead of crashing into the ground along with the ship i bounced harmlessly off the ground.

[sumghai]

A few weeks ago I was landing a rover on the Mun.

I set the coordinates to near where one of the equatorial Munar arches were located, and let MechJeb handle the rest while I went to make myself some tea. Just as I came back to my seat, I watched the skycrane fly right underneath the arch and land at the bottom of a shallow crater, narrowly missing the apex by around ten metres.

Good times.

[rpayne88]

Having a capsule (a Mk1-2 with a Mk1 on top) tumble during reentry (with FAR and DR.) DR caused the majority of the capsule (including the parachutes and almost every thing else) to either burn up or be torn off. That left me with the pods and two vanguard technologies ejection modules. I then ejected my crew, only to have them catch fire and burn. Fortunately, all four of them splashed down before burning up.

[Rockfire]

My luckiest moment was my first trip to duna and back. On the return I couldn't bleed off enough speed during aerocapture and wasted all my fuel trying to slow down with the main thrusters. My last resort was to use the last of my RCS to circularize.. it took awhile but I managed to get them into a highly eccentric orbit.. then it was just a waiting game. Im sure Bill didnt mind spending an extra few weeks with Jeb and Bob.

[magnemoe]

Second grand tour without mining. I managed to land and take off from both Eve and Tylo with an lander with an horizontal ladder for the kerbal to hang on to.

Now here is the scary part, landers was only tested unmanned except for short ballistic flights on Kerbin I was never able to get them to work after the trip who used both.

Probably did more than 20 tests of each of them, all ended in craft spinning out of control as kerbal unbalanced it.

[Zaryulenko]

Mine was during a bad interplanetary travel to Duna that was completed whitout problems (Obviously excluding the bad maneuvers), i had the double NERVA stock-alike, (not really important to say ) and i made a bad maneuver, how i managed to get to duna?.... Easy, just turned throttle up on Prograde and, BOOM! Duna encounter in a year! I hated how much i predicted that just going to prograde would save my rover mission but i also laughted after that. something like that doesnt happend really often to me.

[Farside]

I was fast approaching the moon and realised i still had an extra stage with a huge amount of fuel, school boy error. so i jettisoned it and continued descending. I then turned the craft to slow the approach only to watch the stage that i had jettisoned early whiz past (also school boy error). Very lucky.

[TheDarkStar]

I was landing on the Mun, but I started slowing down much later than usual. I throttled all the way up, expecting to crash at 50 m/s, but I did a near-perfect suicide burn (I stopped about 5 meters above the surface).

[Tex]

During the final descent of my VERY FIRST munar lander, the Armstrong Lander, I started coming in, doing my final burns and whatever. I saw that i was going sideways a bit fast so I turned and burned the opposite direction, then realized I was waaaaaaay overcompensating, so I overcompensated for THAT... then finally got down to ~20m or so above the surface. Still going really fast, so I turned again, my landing legs made contact (promptly breaking off), then bumped me so I was burning sideways towards where I was burning away from. (Confusing, I know... )

Long story short, after my legs broke off, I was constantly bumping and sliding, and I laughed so much as I was just doing little frog-leaps across the surface before finally falling over and sliding sideways to a stop... Not very successful, but I still made it

[Guest]

I am playing with the mission controller mod, after completing a LKO mission I figure I would use my remaining fuel to complete a mun orbit and back mission. It was going well but at the end I was off 60dv for the return, when I thought all was lost the mun decided to tug me closer to kerbin after a few passes. I love the mun; everybody talks about minmus but the mun is like my guiding light, it gives me reason to explore, and this time around helped me directly. I think I will switch my flag to the one with the kerbin and mun to honor it.

[nhnifong]

I recently found that my research crew on Duna was running out of food water and oxygen (TAC life support) and they only had about 120 days remaining. The planets were not aligned properly for a Duna to Kerbin transfer, and there was not enough life support time to wait for the next transfer moment and still make it home alive. I had a bit of extra fuel (around 1100 m/s of dv in the return vehicle, only about 600 is needed for a normal return) so I decided to go for an unusual return and slingshot off of Eve The burn took exactly the amount of delta-v I had, plus a little monopropellant for fine adjustments, and the transit time was about 90 days! Made it home alive!

[sickboy]

I was sending a probe to Dres, after reading what burn i was supposed to do totally wrong ( the opposite apparently) i ended up burning my orbit towards the inside of kerbin's orbit, lucky for me, it wasn't wasted as i was able to change my orbit only slightly and intercept Eve, so the probe is now orbitting Eve rather than Dres, which i guess is better than orbiting the sun for ever

[boomerdog2000]

My first manned Jool mission.

Completely untested design, only going off the delta V numbers.

Landed successfully on Laythe, started the ascent, running low on fuel, getting concerned, managed to barely get into orbit... without any fuel. Had to have the now unmanned return vehicle come dock with the lander, but he made it home.

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

After playing ping pong with jools moons (as you do) i was screaming in to Vall at 1km/s. And then my nuclear engines fell off, so I detached the base module from the bottom and landed the ascent stage. I then returned to orbit and docked with my mothership. I then left for laythe and managed to land 10m from the sea.

Now they just need to wait for the rest of the base to arrive.

(I've had luckier times, but this story was fairly lucky, and in each one of these threads I like to post a different story)

[The Destroyer]

I don't remember much "luck", but here's a kinnda lucky one.

I was doing a dragon mission, landing on all jools moons. I underestimated the fuel requirements. Needless to say, I managed to get a dragon innto a flyby of Laythe, and managed to slow down.

Only problem? low fuel. So after 5 quickloads, I did a last second burn, in an attempt. Even so, I ran out of fuel. Coming at laythe at 50 m/s ready to say goodbye... then I heard a loud splash of parts crashing... but then, the dragon was ALIVE! Remarkibally, it did not destruct. A weird thing is however, is that it actually got underwater, and stayed down, not surfacing. So I evaed all 7 kerbals, which gradually floated up.

They are still there.

[Superfluous J]

I just performed - unknowingly - a suicide burn while rendezvousing for docking. I was coming in around 50 m/s and noticed I was heading right at the craft I wanted to rendezvous with so I figured I'd just kill my momentum and have an easy dock.

I wasn't paying total attention to the screen (watching the speed on the navball) and when my speed hit 0 I killed the throttle, turned the camera to see where the other ship was, and my ship's butt end was a foot from theirs (It's a tug, so the rockets are on the sides). I swear, I couldn't have fit a Kerbal between them.

[MrPopcup]

Yesterday I launched the smallest minmus craft, only 16 parts, I decided to drop a lethane miner with me and then go to kerbin. Everything went OK! I aero-'breaked'? In kerbin, then became close to the sea, I kept slowing my self and was low on fuel, just 1.5 seconds before splashdown the rocket flamed-out and there is no fuel!

GOOD WORK YEAHH!!

[Bekiekutmoar]

Back in 0.17 I had a lander en route to Vall. The lander had one nuclear engine and three lateral LV-909's. When approaching the surface of Vall, I discovered the Kraken 'ate' the three lateral engines. Don't know exactly how this happenend, there was however an issue back then that switching from 100.000x timewarp to 1x could cause unplanned disassembly.

Anyway, TWR was dangerously low and the surface was approaching fast, but I managed to steer clear of mountains and thus gaining 2 extra km's to brake. Just enough to drop velocity to a non-leathal 12 m/s ... !

[Colmath]

The luckiest one I remember is my first Mun Landing. I did it apollo-style, which meant I had to do a docking maneuver after ascending from the surface. I was still very unexperienced however, so I used up much more fuel on the descent than needed (I still tend to do this, I still have lot to learn), which meant I was dangerously low on fuel for the ascent.

I managed to get a fair distance up when my tanks hit zero, but I still wasn't in orbit. Luckily I managed to circularize my orbit somewhat with RCS-thrust (thanks to my habit of overengineering and putting waaaay too much RCS fuel on my ships), and from there I could perform a docking with the command module, saving the mission and both brave kerbals. Still, it was lucky that I had that much RCS fuel on the lander....

[nhnifong]

After years at Moho, three of my kerbals managed to get one of the most scenic landing spots on Kerbin (accidently)