Amateurism, yet another silly example.

[AlexinTokyo]

I'm used to pressing space bar to take off, so that's what I did, and watched with horror as my capsule nicely separated from my lander and tumbled off onto the munar surface. Another Kerbal stranded.

Alt-L (Lock Staging) is your friend

If I had a dollar for every time I've botched a flight by pressing space instead of x, I'd have .. about 12 dollars actually. Still, my current rule is Alt-L as soon as time between stages goes above about 2 minutes.

[Bobnova]

My favorite recent one was on Mun, I'd landed a one Kerbal lander on a slope (a slope? On Mun? Shock!).

I'd also forgotten ladders, so the Kerbal in question had a rather unceremonious exit, promptly falling down and ragdolling. Down the hillside, on his face.

He finally stood up some 200 meters later, turned his jetpack on, and flew back.

Landed, grabbed a surface sample/planted a flag/eva report/etc, and fired the jetpack up again to get into the cockpit.

Unfortunately he hit his head on a landing light on the way up, and back into ragdoll mode he went and back down the hill he went.

200m later, again, jetpack, again, return to lander, again.

This time I got him to the same height as the door 10m away from the lander, and slowly moved towards it pulsing vertical thrust to maintain his altitude.

I did this until I got the board option, hit board, and all was good!

Except for one (1) small issue: I pulsed shift a little bit too long, and the engines were at 20% thrust. The engines with a Mun TWR of ~6:1.

No SAS, no hand on WASD as I'd taken it off to rest my fingers, much panic.

That was some quick piloting and a reeeeaaaaaally poorly inclined orbit, but I made it.

Felt both very silly, and very pleased with myself for saving it.

Somewhat more recently, my 4th rescue mission to retrieve a Kerbal from Duna failed due to the Duna Orbiter/returnToKerbin vehicle not having a power source.

Naturally I discovered this when the lander ran out of fuel 70m/s too slow to make orbit and the Kerbal had to jetpack to orbit. This is where the orbiter was supposed to pick him up, but the engine wouldn't light. This problem was quickly traced to flat batteries and no jumper cables. Bonus noob move I realized later: no cockpit either. Lander was supposed to re-dock and provide housing.

Thus did my 5th rescue attempt planning begin.

All because the Kerbal in question landed on a mountain slope and destroyed most of his lander. Everything but two solar panels, the massive life support supply canister, the cockpit, and a couple sensors. He lucked out on that one, sort of.

Accidentally staging has caused me issues too. I lock 'em now if I remember.

Then I crashed once because I forgot to unlock them.

[DrD]

Alt-L (Lock Staging) is your friend

If I had a dollar for every time I've botched a flight by pressing space instead of x, I'd have .. about 12 dollars actually. Still, my current rule is Alt-L as soon as time between stages goes above about 2 minutes.

Good to know, thanks. I finally pulled of a nice landing and return the other night, and stayed well away from the space bar!

[Claw]

This thread looks like it has potential to turn into a "look at the stupid thing I did" thread.

I've done the same "space bar" staging thing. Ended up splitting a ship in half in Munar orbit instead of firing the engines to deorbit for landing. At least he wasn't stuck on the surface. So next time I locked out the staging. "I'm not going to do that again!"

Shortly after I crashed while repeatedly slamming on the space bar to separate my deorbit stage after it ran out of gas at low altitude... Not funny at the time, but it is now.

[Roxette]

With KAS + a bit of Firespitter, this isn't a problem... ^.^