Your Most Recent Moment of "D'oh!"

[Javster]

So, I built my first ship not meant to land, named "Voyager." A cupola, a hitchhiker, a bunch of fuel and two LV-Ns. I launched it under probe control and then sent Jeb up to dock:

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/504700546805770926/367653F5F2D203D91B3C1F3A6CCEDA97BCD96E5A/

I docked and EVAed Jeb to the cupola to take command. I then docked a lander with Eldred in it and sent the whole thing to Minmus. Arrived okay, sent Eldred down and went to EVA Jeb. And that's when I discovered that the RCS cluster I'd accidentally placed over the cupola door would permit Jeb to get in, but not to get out. Um...

I brought the Voyager home, landed Eldred and dumped Jeb's lifeboat. If I could land the Voyager I could just recover the vessel and let KSC engineers cut him loose. But, of course, Voyager was never intended to land.

I tried docking two probes, each carrying six radial chutes, but simulations indicate the docking ports can't handle the g-forces when the chutes open. And I don't think Voyager's twin LV-Ns can slow her enough to lithobrake successfully.

And so, Jeb remains in orbit, entombed like one of the Emperor's venerable Dreadnoughts until I figure something out or an update saves him. My current best idea is to smash a probe into the cupola door just hard enough to smash the RCS cluster loose, but not hard enough to kill Jeb.

D'oh, indeed.

Made the same mistake on my station. The cupola had no parachutes either. EVA parachutes not an option either, cos he was stuck.

[Lunaran]

the most weight-efficient way to transport a kerbal, other than a lawn chair, is the single lander can

it follows that the most weight-efficient way to transport two kerbals, other than two lawn chairs, is two single lander cans

this has unexpected consequences

(not pictured: another screenshot with the engine firing)

[MaverickSawyer]

Forgetting to retweak the fuel tanks on my tanker probe back to full before launch. (I dropped them down to help with RCS placement...) As it turned out, I didn't need that fuel, but that was luck.

[Immashift]

Got all the way to the mun on a lander, and then attempted to land, only to find out at touchdown that I had landing legs on one side of the craft, but not the other, and there was absolutely no way to land it without breaking something I needed.

[User Unrelated]

Recently restarted career for .23, and was sending Jeb to the Mun to collect some much-needed samples so I could unlock solar panels.

well... this is nothing new, is it?

But wait... Where's the huge debris field?

Everything went swimmingly, had PLENTY of fuel (more on that later), and the landing was as smooth as butter.

I collected much science, and then decided to take off for home.

I decided it would be worthwhile to collect an EVA report whilst hanging off the side of the ship while at low altitude.

I hit the EVA button, and Jeb fell off the ladder, and the ship kept on sailing off towards the horizon, at about a 45 degree incline.

I had forgotten to throttle down. D'OH

After I landed Jeb using his RCS pack, I watched the runaway ship, hoping that MAYBE it would have just enough go juice to escape munar orbit, and I could simply collect it with a girder contraption and de-orbit it for science... But it just kept going.

Out of munar orbit... out of KERBIN orbit... The ship is now in an eccentric solar orbit with it's periapsis somewhere down around Duna's orbit. PLENTY of fuel to get home

So I did a bit of orbital science, unlocked solar panels, and a probe core, and sent a rescue ship to get Jeb...

The rescue was a success, but I FORGOT TO COLLECT A SURFACE SAMPLE before I left.

Double D'OH.

I need to go collect that errant ship somehow. I've done girder cages before, but not in solar orbit.

I like challenges like this, I almost always just roll with it, and have fun solving the stupid problems I get myself into

Edited January 12, 2014 by User Unrelated

[SkyRender]

These sorts of things have become increasingly rare, fortunately, though when they happen they tend to be correspondingly absurd. To wit: I decided, while climbing back into the main pod of my inverted Mun mission rocket, to see if Jeb would enjoy the experience of having the ladder he was holding onto suddenly disappear beneath his hands. So I retracted it while Jeb was on it. This, as you may have surmised, was something of a mistake. For though indeed Jeb was now liberated from the ladder, he was also liberated from the ship by quite a considerable (and growing) distance. The mere act of retracting the ladder upon which Jeb had been climbing had somehow eliminated all of his lateral velocity. As I was recording at the time, and as it would make for a rather amusing end to an already comedic video, I went ahead and let him impact the surface of the Mun going at an alarmingly fast speed. And much amusement was had by all. The end.

[AwesumnisRawr188]

Not that great, but when I had my own playthrough on my brother's computer, I had a sweet rocket that could actually fly pretty far, which by far, I mean I could sling the less intelligent Kerbals out of Kerbin's orbit, and out of sight, while they were smiling the entire time. To get back on track, I was going to make my first successful trip to the Mun. I had it planned out and everything and launched. Almost there and second to last stage burns out, end up double tapping the space bar, and with my command module still hanging on the front with no throttle control, I watched as my rocket flung past the Mun and missed completely. Was pretty close.

[Duke23]

In my last d'oh moment (or series of them to be more accurate), Kurt died, one skycrane crash landed, another had to ditch its payload and then itself was ditched, and several future parts to my Mun base were lost. How, you ask? Because I'm an idiot, apparently.

I had made a "living quarters" for my Mun base which I knew was a little off balance but I didn't think it was a big deal. After all, the deorbit burn and approach went fine. But when it was time to touch down, my skycrane derped out and all the throttle in the world wouldn't counteract the Mun's gravity (and the module was about .5 tons lighter than the last one I had dropped with it). Kurt was in the living quarters and died on impact but Kirbus the pilot survived with "minor" damage to the skycrane.

So of course I blamed the skycrane and Kirbus demanded another one be sent to him with a new living quarters, which it was. This one:

Instead of being unable to defeat gravity at the last second, this one deorbited fine but spazzed out a little on the decel burn and when it came time to really throttle up, it started to cartwheel so the payload was ditched. That's when I knew it was the module, not the skycrane. So I went and redesigned it and sent out another one (it had 3 struts hanging off it with docking ports at the end -- one at each side and one on the other side from the front door) so I took off the unbalanced one and that one was landed perfectly fine. THEN I got the bright idea to build a new rover and a solar array to send out there which sounded great, but because of the way it was built I had to do the stupidest orbital payload transfer ever, which looked like this:

You can probably already see the problem. Because of the size of the rover and the engine arrangement on the skycrane, it was impossible to dock with it. So I took the solar array down and left the rover in orbit while I designed ANOTHER skycrane, which was really just the same one but with two fewer engines and some parachutes for a possible future Duna mission.

I wasted way too much time with that mission.

Edited January 12, 2014 by Duke23

[Vahal]

Recently I found out that stacking nuclear engines can be... problematic (least I can say) Cause I didn't understand what happened but had some doubt I made a test

Before activating stage

After activating stage

D'oh! All my IP ship had to be rebuilt

When my I tested my first interplanetar ship combining an orbital science facility and a lander, I had this kind of doh! moments I send it to the Mün and start the landing, everything was ok until the lander touched the ground and break its engine, spread some parts around... WTF is going on?... And saw I forgot to extend gears Doh! number one.

Reload

Landing was fine this time, gears help to prevent landers exploding, and did science and flag stuffs, then here we go! The lander went back to the orbital lab... One minute... Where is Munnand?... No... Did I forget him? Dooooh! Munnand was quietly watching the Mun surface with his little smile. Apparently he didn't realize I forgot him. Ok! time to rescue him! Send back the lander, Munnand jumped in the can and time to go back!... Nope. Not enough fuel... I forgot to refill the lander tiny fuel tank. dooooooooooh /facedesk.

Reload

Ok then Munnand was safe, lander too, ship traveled back to Kerbin and I sent a ferry pod to transfer crew from lab and lander from the IP Ship to the ferry. Ok time to dock... dock... Well, it's usually easier to dock when you have a docking port instead a parachute. nnnniiiiiiiiiiiii! Nevertheless I didn't give up! Time to EVA, folks. So lander crew EVAed to the ferry then I transfered with crewmanifest lab crew to lander capsule, then I EVAed them to the ferry.

the only SS I took

Was a terribad karma mission

[palker]

I sent a science mission to the Mun since I wanted as much of it as possible i put 4 goo canisters and material bays on it meaning to return with all of them back to Kerbin. Obviously the resulting return vehicle was a bit more heavy than previously used science transmission spam lab.

I landed on a border of 3 different biomes to collect as much samples and EVA reports as possible but when it came to departure i decided to do just one more suborbital hop to get experiments in a different biome. Unfortunately i used too much fuel and when it came to return i did not have enough delta v and i ended up with 400Km periapse instead of 35Km. It looked like Jeb would be stranded in orbit forever. D'oh!

Fortunately there was next Mun rocket almost ready for launch so it was quickly modified by a crack team of engineers lead by Wernher von Kerman himself. It was decided that saving Jeb is not enough and that the science experiments have to be recovered as well. The team came up with unique design intended to deorbit the whole lander, they called it simply THE CLAW, manned by brave Tomwise Kerman here it is in orbit.

One expertly set up rendezvous later

It worked way better that it should it even could rotate and translate with the whole spacecraft in its CLAWS.

Anyway after a successful deorbit burn the lander splashed down safely in the ocean and was later recovered for plenty of science.(or exploded cause it landed on the side of a mountain with 75 degree slope but thanks to the magick of quicksave that never happened).

[FlamedSteak]

My most recent one was staging some radially mounted tanks and watching the decouplers shoot away and the tanks remained attached. Turns out I had mounted the tanks slightly to the left of the decouplers.

[Captain Sierra]

Last major "Do'h!" moment was about 2 weeks ago. I had just came back to KSP after a long break and decided to see if my docking skills were any good, so I pulled a Gemini and did a dock.

What's missing? Yeah, I forgot to put parachutes or a decoupler on the manned craft. In the end, I had to send up an unmanned vehicle with an empty Mk 1 pod (had to launch twice, Bob tried to sneak in), redezvous, EVA over Jeb, and de-orbit him safely. Then I just used the probe controller on the docking target to crash it into Kerbin.

[Astronaut]

The first time i landed on Eve i had done very little research before trying to get there. But getting there was not the problem, the problem was trying to leave. Those three little kerbals are still there today but the three kerbals in the other command pod that landed on Gilly left them behind.

From that day on, before landing on a planet or moon i send a probe first and then see if i can get it back into orbit.

[Zimmy99]

Fortunately there was next Mun rocket almost ready for launch so it was quickly modified by a crack team of engineers lead by Wernher von Kerman himself. It was decided that saving Jeb is not enough and that the science experiments have to be recovered as well. The team came up with unique design intended to deorbit the whole lander, they called it simply THE CLAW, manned by brave Tomwise Kerman here it is in orbit.

Haha that's brilliant. Did you use the landing gear to stuck the science vessel in the Claw ?

[palker]

Haha that's brilliant. Did you use the landing gear to stuck the science vessel in the Claw ?

Well no, at least not intentionally i just never retracted it after taking of from the Mun i could not believe how well it worked and that it did not explode randomly. Originally i intended to make a refuel craft using KAS but than i realized i had these joints from Infernal Robotics and i was like well with this i could make something pretty krazy. The fact that the final launch vehicle for the Claw ended up looking same as the Mun rocket was caused by the the tech level not allowing me to build anything different if i wanted it to have enough delta v to get to Jeb.

I was laughing like a madman during building and entire flight of that thing plus the fact that that insanity actually has better flight characteristics than the original Mun rocket was too much for me.

[MajorThomas]

Just had a "D'Oh." First ever mission to Lathe, using a multipart probe. Had such a huge velocity going into first aerobrake I also needed to expend fuel (burn retro) to slow into a highly elliptical orbit. Then...

Used KSP Aerobrake calculator to verify my periapsis for the circularization pass. Kept getting "No Solution!" and I finally said "OK, I'll just wing it."

Of course that meant I deorbited, but was able to use the "orbiter" part of the probe stack to save the lander, and was able to land normally on a far-south, small island. Eww, dark dismal soil, nothing special about this place that the probe can see, except the view of Jool is pretty cool

The rest of the probe went into the drink, so so much for planning moon hopping to spam even more science.

FWIW, I now have enough science to complete the tree. What to do now?

[fallofshadows14]

Thinking I could play Kerbal .23 on my laptop. The older versions used to work, the newer stuff just lags like crazy. I can't wait for the day I can get a real computer...

[Lazro]

Built a low solar orbit probe, ditched the transfer stage, and prepared to use the RCS engines to drop my periapse...

...and so, another mission failed due to my strong sense of RP.

D'oh!

[arkive]

On my first venture outside the close orbit or the planet I headed for the Mun and then quickly became introduced to the importance of electricity. A rescue mission followed shortly thereafter. Also, on what I think was the very next Mun mission (one with what I felt was a mught higher degree of attention to detail) I got within 1000m of the surface and then realized I didn't include any landing gear (and I was still terrible at landing, so a legless landing was out of the question).

[goldenpeach]

I used symetry to place two set of 4 booster around my rocket.

Unfortunately, the game broke it into a set of four booster, a set of three booster and a booster alone in the staging list. "no problem" I though, "I just have to put the booster with the set of three booster!".

For some reason, I put it with the set of four booster(the fist one to ignite at launch).

As you can imagine, the rocket was fliping around as soon as I pressed the spacebar: it took a while to figure out the cause of the flip.

[LarryWallwart]

I keep leaving the lights on and draining my batteries during warp thus not allowing Mechjeb to execute the next node.

[Themohawkninja]

Yet again I forgot that launch clamps aren't forced into the first stage.

[Sabreur]

Managed to massively screw up a Duna insertion burn, successfully achieving orbit but in the least efficient way possible. Had to send a whole separate refueling mission in order to bring my kerbalnauts (and all their precious science) back home.

[Luckless]

Building two stations:

1. Fuel/staging station in LKO which has the main purpose of holding extra fuel to be transferred out to the main station.

2. Science Station/Lander Service Depot. To be assembled around Mun as it is used to conduct missions for more science, before upgrading parts and moving it around the solar system in support of stealing all the science.

About half way through my main construction mission, and the Mun station is running out of fuel. No problem! The LKO station's goal is to collect fuel from smaller easy to control tankers so fewer missions have to be run between Kerbin and the Mun, and limits the parts count at the main station.

A stage planning mistake left a few drop tanks skimming atmo when I had expected them to actually drop out of orbit. Only half a dozen tanks and space is big. Nothing to worry about eh? The 'fuel truck' probe mission however proved otherwise. A probe with a large fuel tank that was designed to be nearly empty by the time it reached LKO for top up at the station before continuing on to the Mun found a chunk of it in a glorious surprise!

No fuel truck?

No problem!

I had a small probe on the LKO station for use in moving bits around as needed. Plus I had a modular tank up there that was acting as extra storage space. While this solution would take far longer burn time to do the mission, and make docking far more annoying than the planned design, it would still get the job done. Move stuff around, top up tanks, line up transfer... And Off we go! In a horribly long burn that places me on an intercept that would sling shot me out of the local system if I didn't correct at the far end.

Not a worry, I've done it lots of times before, possibly not the most fuel efficient route in, but acceptable. Time warp ahead till I get to my desired second burn point and.... The probe doesn't respond....

Wait, there are no solar panels on this probe, just batteries, and the tank is just a tank and docking port... And I don't have enough fuel at the science station to send its tug out to intercept reliably...

So I shot a nice large fuel tank out into space. We'll say it is for a later mission.

[SargeRho]

I was going to refuel my two standed space shuttles.

On the first attempt I flew to the wrong space shuttle, which has only a cargo bay internal docking port, but luckily had enough fuel to rendevzous with the intended shuttle.