Your Most Recent Moment of "D'oh!"

[MajorThomas]

I've sent fuel trucks along with Kerballed ships, to aid in coming home. At least once I've forgotten to deploy the solar panels on the fuel truck, resulting in a dead ship out there among the planets.

[Soda Popinski]

Currently flying my first mission to Jool in semi-hard mode (FAR, DRE, KIDS, RT2, Kethane).

Plan was to fly out to Jool and mine enough fuel to tour the moons and return to Kerbin. After travelling ~100 million km, I had to load every last bit of fuel onto my kethane lander... ran out about 5 meters from the ground, landed and toppled over.

Good thing I have no qualms about hitting F9. Eventually landed with ~10 delta-V to spare.

[Guapo]

Ran out of gas on the way back from the Mun, elliptical orbit between just past Mun orbit and 65k elevation. I waited till i got back to apoapsis, lined up retrograde, spacewalked, pushed with Bob's jetpack, got back in; successfully modified my periapsis by 20km...

...you're way ahead of me, obviously, and you've guess that when i was back in the capsule I found i'd burned the wrong way and my 65k periapsis was now 85k!

[Demon_82]

A few minutes ago. I used my most simplistic plane to do a short trip to Island Runway succesfully, so I let Jeb walk around a bit, only to find that the ladder I had on the wing wasn't useful. Jeb went up, and then he fell off, instead to getting over the wing. And again, and again. Next aircraft will have ladders tested before to leave someone stranded out there. Happily this time it's been so close to have Jeb back at home for dinner.

[Loerelau]

If you play with remote tech: Put a reflectron on everything! Learning the hard way now. Love remote tech!

[Merinsan]

Last night I decided to make a new large space plane, but I didn't have the parts - I needed more science!

So, I designed a big ship with 12 Science Jrs, 12 Goo containers, thermometer, gravity scanner and seismic scanner. Its mission was to fly around Minmus, sucking the science out of biomes before returning.

As I approached Minmus, I decided I should do science high above Minmus. Right clicked the Science Jr, clicked the button, full science still! Right clicked the goo canister, and the button didn't appear. Tried again, same. I then looked at the text that the window was displaying and realized it was an RCS tank... I brought 12 tanks of useless RCS fuel to Minmus.

The mission continued though, and I got 4 biomes done, before needed to head back due to low fuel, for 2500 odd science. Sadly, this is not the first time I've used RCS tanks thinking they were goo canisters.

[James_Eh]

Having obsessed about a return mission to Eve for a month or so, over the last week I have spent ~ 30 hrs game time testing, building and launching. Last night @ 7 PM I finally completed fuelling up the monster in orbit (with, I dunno, the 15th docking mission?!?).

Alas I had to go play hockey at 8:30. So I headed out to hockey, of course stuck around for a beer or three after the game, and came home. Started KSP up again (who needs sleep) and headed out to Eve with plans to do the actual landing tonight after work. Not too much thrust on the drive section so it was a bit of a slow process, a few more beers went down.

I spent all day at work (slightly hungover what with the 3 hrs sleep) looking forward to the Eve attempt. Got home, powered up, and couldn't help but notice that last night I seemed to have pulled off a pretty good aerobrake - at JOOL !!! Had shut the game off after acheiving an encounter with Tylo.

I usually only F5 right before I leave Kerbin orbit, so held my breath and F9'd. Nope. Seems as if I was concerned about screwing up my fuel tank release en route, so I hit F5 during the mid-course Jool fine tuning.

There are many life lessons to be learned here, but I have decided that Eve is mainly to blame.

[Merinsan]

Having obsessed about a return mission to Eve for a month or so, over the last week I have spent ~ 30 hrs game time testing, building and launching. Last night @ 7 PM I finally completed fuelling up the monster in orbit (with, I dunno, the 15th docking mission?!?).

Alas I had to go play hockey at 8:30. So I headed out to hockey, of course stuck around for a beer or three after the game, and came home. Started KSP up again (who needs sleep) and headed out to Eve with plans to do the actual landing tonight after work. Not too much thrust on the drive section so it was a bit of a slow process, a few more beers went down.

I spent all day at work (slightly hungover what with the 3 hrs sleep) looking forward to the Eve attempt. Got home, powered up, and couldn't help but notice that last night I seemed to have pulled off a pretty good aerobrake - at JOOL !!! Had shut the game off after acheiving an encounter with Tylo.

I usually only F5 right before I leave Kerbin orbit, so held my breath and F9'd. Nope. Seems as if I was concerned about screwing up my fuel tank release en route, so I hit F5 during the mid-course Jool fine tuning.

There are many life lessons to be learned here, but I have decided that Eve is mainly to blame.

I've played KSP drunk plenty of times (and my drunken healing in WoW was near legendary), but never once have I flown to the wrong planet due to being drunk! Clearly, I am not drinking enough!

[federicoaa]

I made a nice rocket with two SCANSAT satellites for duna and ike and an duna lander, all together in a single rocket.

Took me a couple of hours to engineer that thing, got it to duna, set a nice polar orbit, decouple a sat and the lander, transfer to ike, decouple the sat and start the radars, go back to duna satellite to realize I forgot to open the solar panels and it run out of electricity, the same for the lander... oops!

[_Aramchek_]

Creating a refuelable jet, a small fuel truck and tanker so I can have my completely persistent airbase up and running.

Going out for the first flight, and the plane flies and lands beautifully, I park the plane near the hangar, re-fuel it, run over to the area I had designated for parking, get Jeb out of the jet.....no ladder.

This is easily fixed, but still...

[Madrias]

My favorite screw up has to be the overengineered unmanned rover/lander I built. Took off down the runway, made it to Orbit in 3 stages. Cruised around Kerbin once just to do it, sailed to the Mun, orbited, landed, no science was done (Sandbox craft, but I wanted to do this anyway). Took off from the Mun, orbited, travelled to Minmus, managed to get an orbit, pulled off a bloody fine landing if I say so myself (third successful landing out of 30), cruised around a bit, then took off. Got my orbit, transferred to Kerbin, grabbed an orbit and pulled my re-entry.

It was about this time that the batteries finally died. Yep, completely overengineered rover design. Had just enough juice to leave Kerbin, make it to the Mun and Minmus, then back to Kerbin, without solar panels. And runs out of battery just before I can pull chutes on the lander section.

It came hurtling down fast enough to keep reentry effects going from 22KM down to 12KM. It hit Kerbin's Pea Soup hard enough to jerk upwards under lift for just a moment, a fleeting moment of gliding, then continued screaming through the sky at roughly 400 m/s. And then slammed smack-dab into the side of the control tower.

I got yelled at for laughing at 4 in the morning. It was worth it. My unplanned, unguided missile of a return stage actually hit the control tower with no control, no engine, no fuel, no battery power remaining. Not even enough to deploy the parachute. I laughed both at that, and the thought that if that happened in a cartoon, the parachute would have to deploy seconds after impact and float down to cover the debris.

[Max Grant]

I was planning to deorbit a space station orbiting Eve, which had eight scientists aboard. I decided to send the U.K.S. Aurora, one of my Challenger-class interplanetary shuttles, to pick them up and bring them home. The ship has room for exactly eight people aboard, but fortunately I had the foresight to install a probe core before the launch.

The Aurora entered Eve's SOI as scheduled, and I adjusted my trajectory for an aerocapture. About 100km up, I retracted my solar panels and waited for the ship to clear the atmosphere.

http://oi40.tinypic.com/2eav2up.jpg

Once the Aurora had returned to space, I saw that I had indeed entered orbit but my apoapsis was much too high. So I timewarped to the apoapsis, quicksaved, and began burning prograde to trim my periapsis. Or rather, I tried to.

That's right, I had forgotten to extend my solar panels after clearing the atmosphere and was now out of power. And since I had already quicksaved, there was nothing I could do but watch sadly as the Aurora returned to Eve and disintegrated in the atmosphere.

I have learned to leave a few small solar panels that do not retract somewhere on the surface of most of my vessels. It just saves heartache. Nothing to remember.

[Comrade Jenkens]

This one is pretty common but my most recent.

I was pretty happy with my free return trajectory round the Mun with its periapsis of 15km What I didn't notice was after the SOI change it switched to 3km. That 5km high crater edge sure came as a surprise!