Confess your KSP sins

[Xd the great]

My sin? Attempting a flyback booster with kerbals on seats that work well as both cameras and airbrakes.

[Raptor42]

I sometimes click F5 instead of F9 (RIP poor kerbals...Jeb is not coming home and probably not going to live)

I've built horribly unstable ships in my early days of playing (god bless autostrut), now I build better ships (I hope so), but they're still sometimes unstable

[Randox]

I don't let the Veteran Kerbals die. Which is mostly a problem now that I am trying career, and my desire to use the Vets at first is in conflict with my utter inability to design small and simple rockets. I'm used to flying cargo rockets that maintain the launch length all the way to orbital insertion (or at least the upper atmosphere), rockets that can handle payloads wider than their boosters without complaint, because the rocket is still many times longer than it is wide.

Tumbling caught me completely off guard. I haven't had a rocket tumble since I learned not to make sharp turns during ascent in 1.0.0. The usual way I build my rockets makes them stable, so I never thing about it, so I'll happily stick an onion pod on a small fuel tank with a swivel and expect it to fly like an arrow at 14km.

Anyway, my inability to build proper rockets capable of anything less than making it to Duna combined with my insistance on using the orange kerbals but refusal to let them die has led to a few reversions. Once I get them all into orbit I'll start recruiting other astronauts and the shenanigans can begin in earnest. Or I'll learn how to make short rockets and get over my desire to use the onion pod.

Fun fact: if it lands on a hill, it will roll, and it will not survive. Never used it before. Didn't think of that.

Edited July 22, 2018 by Randox

[SalvageMarine64]

My landers tip way-way to often and despite having 70 hours in the game have never successfully docked two rockets in orbit.

[LusBax]

Ever designed an ion probe and put it in orbit just to realize that the ejection burn will be on the dark side of Kerbin? *turns on infinite electricity*

Ever succesfully brought a craft home from Eeloo just so that the push from your last stage puts your periapsis at 71 km? *hyper-edits the craft to the KSC*

Or did you ever make a duna lander with just enough TWR to take off? And added batteries/parachutes/insertstuffhere afterwards? *furiosly hacks gravity*

Just some highlights 

[έķ νίĻĻάίή]

When I get lazy, I always use cheats.

And I always use infinite electricity for ion engines 

[JoaquinJAR]

i never really made it into orbit and then to another planet without any cheat at the same time.

[Curveball Anders]

Don't if it's sins but:

1. I use revert and call it simulations.
2. I only do manual maneuvers when it's something new, otherwise I use MJ.
3. In some extreme cases I copy a save to a save-sim copy so I can try out new designs with long timelines.
   (I'm a KAC junkie and rarely timewarp more than 1-2d in a career save).

 

[kerbiloid]

Sins? Killing, stealing... But some options are just technically unavailable.

Edited December 8, 2019 by kerbiloid

[jimmymcgoochie]

Added a mod, built a crewed ship with mod parts, deleted mod, reloaded save and both ship and crew had vanished. I had put all the Kerbonauts I had on that ship so ended up with none at all. (It was just a sandbox for mod testing, but still...)

I use MechJeb for executing long-distance maneuvers like interplanetary burns. I've done plenty of them manually, but in many cases I get the transfers wrong and either end up hurtling through the target's SOI with a huge braking burn needed because I went too early, or else having to overshoot and dither at solar apoapsis for years before it drops back to the target because I went too late. 

I once built a massive ship to fly out to Neidon (fake Neptune from outer planets mod) using an ion-plasma type engine (from near future propulsion) with massive efficiency but pitiful thrust (40kN). The burn required over 2 hours to complete but the ship had so many parts (many of which were from mods, and may have been poorly optimised) that the game was running at about 1/3 speed. I started the maneuver, went away, had breakfast, had a shower, went out shopping, did some housework (hoovering, cleaning, laundry etc.), watched a film and came back almost SIX HOURS later, but it was still burning and had somehow gone about 20 degrees off course so I had to then make a correction burn just after leaving Kerbin's SOI to actually go where I wanted it to. Time to Neidon: 40 years, give or take. Odds of me ever playing that save long enough for it to reach Neidon: slim... At least it isn't a manned mission though... I also tried to do an interplanetary burn from a sub-80km orbit and ended up flying into the atmosphere so I cheated the ship into a 1000km orbit and tried again.

I once put a whole 100-ton rocket on a hacked retrograde solar orbit on a collision course with Kerbin, pointed it straight down and burned with infinite fuel, 10x hacked gravity, drag switched off and no overheating to try and complete the deployed seismic experiment. It hit the ocean instead 

Any time I see a 'recover xxx part' or 'rescue xxx kerbal' mission, I just use the hacky rendezvous button to lob the same little grabber craft/rescue ship right beside it, get the target part/kerbal then drop it back down to Kerbin, using the set orbit button if necessary. Same story for docking space station parts together. I used to do those by hand, but I have nowhere near enough patience to try and do orbital intercepts and am too cheap to fund an entire launcher to put the grabber/rescue ship into orbit of Kerbin, never mind anywhere else.

I also once 'rescued' a Kerbal from Duna orbit by dropping an entire crewed expedition mothership right beside it using the cheat menu and transferring them over just before leaving Duna to go back to Kerbin. It was only after I'd done the transfer burn that I realised I had completely forgotten to visit Ike...

I put an amphibious plane on Laythe, but turns out it can't actually take off from the water and is a bit crashy trying to land there too. Crash damage off any time I try to land, hack gravity to minimal when taking off- for some reason that makes the plane fly underwater (how the engines work under the water I don't know!) then switch gravity back to normal and it immediately bursts to the surface and usually keeps flying. I also put an electric plane on Eve but broke the solar panels, so I reloaded the save and had to land it from orbit again. 

I tried to modify the science lab to give me a bit more science when deployed on the Mun and Minmus (4 per day just wasn't cutting it) so I boosted the data limit from 500 to 5000 as I had deployed a fleet of science-collecting autonomous rovers (bon voyage mod drove them for me- no way was I spending nine hours driving half way round the Mun and another nine driving back!) and altered the processing speed number from 7 to 6 (in the part file). I ended up with labs that produced up to 900 science PER DAY and still can't find the right combination of settings to make it a bit more reasonable - I was aiming for about 24 per day which is 1 science every 15 minutes.

Edited December 8, 2019 by jimmymcgoochie

[RizzoTheRat]

I took an "illegal" loan of 5000 kredits!

I nearly bankrupted myself in a new game and didn't have enough money for the mission I wanted to fly (mun flyby) after upgrading the tracking station.  So I just Alt-F12'd stole 5k and gave it back after the mission.

[qzgy]

i haven't played seriously in months.

As to other sins, I have no issue with expending kerbals occasionally in the name of science, or abandoning them a little carelessly. Apart from a few, they deserve special treatment.

[kerbiloid]

Sometimes my favourite Kerbals were doing career faster than others.

[έķ νίĻĻάίή]

I made a kerbal fidget spinner

A kerbal on each arm

[MR L A]

On 7/23/2018 at 6:30 AM, SalvageMarine64 said:

My landers tip way-way to often and despite having 70 hours in the game have never successfully docked two rockets in orbit.

don't worry, 70 hours is absolutely nothing in ksp  I've got over 2100 hours now and there's still so much I haven't even tried yet  

[putnamto]

I purposely killed a tourist by launching him into ths mun. 

[kerbiloid]

Proved to the Kerbals that Kerbin is not flat.
Practically.
Not always freely.

[DunaManiac]

When I really need to make a maneuver, but I can't because the spacecraft is unmanned and I have no signal, I disable comnet. Great Kraken! Forgive Me!

[LittleBitMore]

I let kOS do my landings. Especially with low fuel margins.

I ignore Dres, even though it needs to be remembered. Except the one save where all I did was do Dres missions.

I once built a flyswatter. It hit kerbals flying with EVA chutes.

I often forget to turn off infinite fuel after a TWR test. I only notice this when I realize my SRB is getting more air than normal.

[SlinkyMcman]

I just revered my hard mode game the hard way, not because I killed someone, or even a kraken attack, it was because I forgot to deploy solar panels and ran out of battery, and didn't want to perform a rescue mission just to deploy them.

[electricpants]

i never do any math whatsoever when playing seriously. like, whenever i'm making a rocket to go somewhere i just take a look at the ingame deltav readout in the vab and i go "well that looks high enough." surprisingly enough it generally works out.

[fulgur]

That's not a sin, that's just being a Kerbal.
My main sin is that I forget to test how my spaceplanes fly with zero fuel. Then I go up to the station and do some stuff, sometimes going to the Mun or Minmus if it's that kind of plane, and then I re-enter and die. Then I have to revert back to launch.

[Immashift]

I play with life support.

If I'm on a return, and either my life support or EC is going to run out before re-entry, and thus kill my Kerbals, I'll angle the vessel for entry, prep everything to go off automatically, and then let them die, knowing the vessel will survive on either remote or locked controls, and I'll still get my science. I even play with no respawn, and still I let them die.

I've staged rather than throttled up before.

I've gotten halfway through a mission, decoupled, and realized I have no control over whatever I need.

I still don't know how to properly launch to a station in orbit without a Hohman transfer, despite being able to dock without RCS.

[kerbiloid]

I tend to objectify Kerbals, treating them not as individual persons with their own thoughts, rights, and needs, but like virtual 3d models powered with machine code. :(

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I tend to objectify Kerbals, treating them not as individual persons with their own thoughts, rights, and needs, but like virtual 3d models powered with machine code.

Curiously, I know of some people that do the same to Software Developers!

BY THE KRAKENS! I'M A KERBAL!!!!!!