Nooooo the sweet sweet science!

[annallia]

So I restarted my career... again. I had created my own engines and got them all happy and working in career mode, then I noticed I made a small mistake. I had meant to give them an ISP of 320 in vacuum but I had fat fingered the 3 and hit 6 somehow.. Long story short I noticed the problem a short bit later and felt bad about my great career being made too easy so I fixed the problem and restarted.

170 science short of unlocking solar panels I was desperate for a good mission. I was getting tired of flying around kerbin and collecting science. No solar panels meant limited ability to transmit data. I designed a new ship, I used capacitors from future propulsion to store charges. My intention was to basically just send it straight up, burn all that I needed to get a kerbin escape then manage my burns to refill the batteries before discharging the capacitors all the while doing science and sending it home.

Launch had a small hiccup from the start, the launch clamps hit one of my booster stage engines knocking it off (Only a 1.10 TWR at launch) this made me drift a little to the west, I was going to revert but I noticed with the help of the sas I was able to keep it almost upright. So I burned off the boosters and dropped them, burned off the core stage and dropped it then I started a burn on the final stage. I took a look at the orbital map and saw I had a mun encounter, I hadn't been to the mun yet on this play through so I decided to cut the engines. This is when I noticed my orbital path. I was going to get my mun en counter, sling shot around the mun and right back to kerbin. I swear this is a flight I couldn't have done if I tried.

As I approached the Mun I opened up the goo canisters and the science module and transmitted the data back, I then waited until I was at my lowest point (12km) where I repeated the experiments, this time saving the data which I intended to return to kerbin. It was a great plan. Until I got to kerbin.. I completely forgot that this ship was not meant to return, was instead meant to drift out into nothingness until it ran out of power. But as I said, I forgot all of this so I did my usual return procedure, I staged down to just the science capsules/command capsule (probe core) at which point my chutes should have deployed.

About 100m from the ground I finally realized why my chutes weren't deploying....

[Starwhip]

Eyup. That'll happen sometimes. My Joolian probe had a ton of science equipment on it, and I sent it out there, but forgot to put an antenna on it. 10 1/2 minutes, real time, wasted.

[MightyLampshade]

I've done something similar. I built a nice system explorer ship (capable of going from planet to planet). I had built simple small landers and attached them to the ship. Went and got into orbit around Laythe, detached the lander, put Macey Kerman (I think it was him) into it and went and landed. Plopped the flag, got some samples and science, and went to get into orbit.

Then I realised that the weight of the decoupler (the "attached" part of it) kept flipping the pod over, as well as the fact I didn't put an antenna on, nor a docking port to redock back to the explorer, if I could get that far. Suffice to say, Macey was a casualty of the mission after impacting into the surface of Laythe :|

[Umlüx]

offset mass killed more kerbals than i dare to think

built a cool little science lander once and balanced it perfectly out with some fueltanks. the descent worked flawless but i forgot that the tanks would be empty on ascend... needless to say the lander flipped at some point and crashed into the surface...

[annallia]

And being just a few points shy of my goal I decided on a short manned mission because there is one thing I hadn't done yet, taken an EVA report while flying.

Built a small rocket and put Bill in it (I like putting them on rotations) and punted him out into the desert (the one biosphere I think I missed). Got under 2k meters to the ground so went eva, got my report and went back in. I had installed the eva parachute mod so the plan was to go back out on eva to get another report and skydive down. This worked perfectly with two minor hitches.

#1 My tendency to go way overboard on parachutes made Bill fall faster than the command pod despite his chute being fully deployed.

#2 Both were in a vertical drop and I didn't bother making Bill walk away when he landed instead focusing on chugging my coffee.

Bill is now a stain in the desert....

[djnattyd]

Sent Bartbus Kerman on a flypast of Duna, stuck some life support (TAC) on the craft & plenty of science equipment but no antennas, planning on bringing it all back.. Failed to take into account the journey time back and Bartbus joined Kurt and Jeb at the giant astronaut centre in the sky. Meanwhile, all that lovely science is stuck orbiting Kerbol.

[techonce]

I had a ship in a decent elliptical orbit around the planet with a fAir amount of science.

Only had a bit of fuel left, but one end was just brushing the atmosphere and the other was pretty far out.

I did my retro burn at the wrong end (playing KSP and watching TV at the same time).

Managed to get an almost perfectly circular orbit under 69,500m with no fuel.

So I cranked up time compression to 4x and watched the orbit decay a couple of hundred m each time around. I need up falling asleep waiting for aero taking to really take hold. Woke up to bits of debris scattered over the surface.

[RadHazard]

I had just started my career mode, and I had finally conquered LKO. My next goal was to send a probe to the Mun to do a flyby in preparation for a following manned flyby. This was back before I had unlocked solar panels, so I was still relying on battery power for my probes. Unfortunately for me, I had forgotten that little fact as I gleefully transmitted science home right up until I ran out of power.

The probe ended up slingshotting around the Mun and into a Kerbol orbit. 5 years and 79 days later, it's still there, in fact. I thought about sending a mission to rendezvous with it at some point, but I have yet to get to that.

Of course, I've neglected to rescue Jeb from the Mun's surface for the past 5 years as well, so that's probably not surprising.

[Maxwell Comp]

On my first manned Mun-and-back mission, some of the landing gear broke. Fortunately I had enough inline stabilizers to partially lift the ship and get into a orbit with the bit of fuel I had left. Unfortunately, that orbit was completely wrong.

Plan B: burn almost all of my remaining the fuel to get into a Kerbal orbit - but I didn't have enough to enter the atmosphere, so I burned retrograde at periapsis to ensure I continued orbiting only Kerbal. Then, I launched my rescue craft, full of fuel and space for the crew. The Mun lander didn't have docking ports, so I just planned to EVA the intrepid crew into the rescue craft. After 20 minutes of fiddling with orbits and alignments (I don't use MechJeb - I would use it, but it doesn't seem operable on my system), I got an orbital rendezvous within 200 meters. I cannot describe the incredible satisfaction of manually reaching orbital rendezvous as I saw the two ships hover in space. I transferred the crew to the rescue craft and burned retrograde into LKO to prepare for re-entry.

It was at that moment that I discovered a problem. Where are my parachutes? .... I forgot to put parachutes on the rescue ship.

Plan C: Rescue Ship 2.0 (Parachute Edition) was sent up, did another orbital rendezvous in LKO, EVA transfer, and finally I landed the crew on the ground safely.