Some of your worst disasters

[Tortoise]

So tell me about some of your worst disasters/anomalies in ksp.

I've had a few minor anomalies, but tell me about yours

[Duke23]

Did you fold that ship in half? lol...

Once (in .23) I had a nice station that I had built, my computer was starting to hate it. You can tell I was pretty new by the engines still left on the station. I used it for orbital ship construction and refueling, and had a few extra modules on it "just because". Well I happened to drop a lot of spent lifter stages near it as time went on and I pulled out of time-warp once as a pretty large piece of space junk was coming through a section of the station... Took out 1/3 of it in one big kaboom. Luckily no Kerbals were injured, just horribly horribly frightened.

This is what it looked like before the incident, with a ship being built (closest to camera). I can't find an after pic, just ones that were even earlier than this one.

Edit: I take it back, I went into my old save and this is what it looks like now, with one if my interplanetary ships docked on the far end. If I remember correctly it left the structural pieces holding the missing modules and I just undocked what was left and let it float away...

Edited June 4, 2014 by Duke23

[Othuyeg]

I managed to once EVA two kerbonauts, got one in, then merrily did my deorbit burn, noticed that one seat was empty. What made this really unfortunate was that the poor kerbal was already suborbital so I could not save him. Ouch.

[pauix]

My worst failure was probably thinking that I could aerobrake at Laythe before aerobraking at Jool. Things went wrong pretty fast and now I've got a capsule with 3 kerbals stuck in the middle of Laythe's oceans. The rescue mission is gonna suck

[Boris_T_Roach]

Biggest disaster? Launching a large'ish space station to geo-stationary orbit.

All went swimmingly from lift off to 2nd stage booster burnout , that left me in a 3000km by -20km orbit, ready for the station's tug to bring the orbit to the correct 2868km one.

Waited the hr for the station to hit AP, went to turn it prograde, and noticed the lack of solar panels......... and batteries...... oh welll watch it become a fireball and try again.

Boris

[cantab]

By death toll, I killed four Kerbals when their rocket collapsed on the pad due to lack of struts and I hadn't set the abort action up.

By stupidity on my own part, when I launched my ship in the Jool collab I realised I'd stuck two antennae on with symmetry instead of just one. So I tried to shoot the unwanted one off with whack-a-kerbal. After a few misses and underpowered hits, I ramped up the projectile speed and proceeded to blast the capsule clean off the rest of the ship. The capsule and its occupants survived, but I felt like a right twit.

By explosiveness, my early not-very-serious attempts at a heavy lifter resulted in some impressive firework shows.

[Dkmdlb]

My biggest disaster:

Returning a crew of 7 from an interplanetary mission. The return ship didn't have parachutes, so I had a landing capsule sitting in LKO waiting for them. As my interplanetary ship came screaming into the atmosphere on its aerocapture pass, I realized I was coming in too steep, so I reached for F5 to quickload my last save in order to adjust my trajectory slightly... and I quicksaved.

With just one nuclear engine and very low on fuel I was unable to come up with a survivable scenario for my crew, no matter how many "simulations" I ran. They all died. RIP in peace.

[[email protected]]

A lot of my disasters now happen as a result of having a mostly broken keyboard. I have a wireless keyboard that has been dropped a time or twelve and its missing the spacebar (I'm actually at work right now) and other keys I have managed to mostly replace with keys from the number pad. It also has a habit of dieing at random intervals and not working until it is shaken back to life.

This turns everything from run of the mill launches, transfer windows, and especially landings into white knuckle moments where anything could go wrong. I like to think of it as an equipment failure.

I've had launches go straight vertical, burning all the fuel in the first stage and sailing uncontrolled for some period while I frantically struggle to regain control. I've missed manuver nodes completely, or even better...burned all of my fuel at a particular node, vastly overshooting my target.

Funnest of all though, I've had landings go hilariously awry because of this. Two nights ago I was doing a routine crew transfer at my minmus mining base and I lost control with the transfer stage still attached just after completing a burn to intercept minmus with a periapsis under the surface, I do this to keep my system clean. Typically I ditch the stage so it hits the body I transferred to and then correct with the lander into an intercept course. I had no idea my keyboard was dead until I tried to come out of time warp, massively overshooting where I wanted to be. When my controls came back I had to ditch the stage and do a suicide burn to nuetralize my vertical speed. I manage to successfully pull out of the doom dive about 30 meters above the surface, still travelling a good bit horizontally and my keyboard dies again. As I am vigorously shaking my keyboard the ship skims sideways across the surface and clips the top of a hill with the engine, ripping it off entirely. Control comes back, no engines, no rcs...still travelling sideways. I flip it around, pointing the fuel tank retrograde and hope for the best.

It took two kilometers and a lot of scattered debris to stop but Sonzan did survive. The rescue mission was one of my most creative, but thats for another time.

[Tw1]

Had Kerbin orbital velocity. Pressed hack gravity. It became a Kerbin escape trajectory. Exited to space center without realising this.

Space station was lost to deep space- the escape pods wouldn't have had enough delta V to get home.

[Xacktar]

After building the Kerbapult a while back, I tried desperately to get it into space.

Closest I got was this, most of it ended in much bigger, quicker disasters.

I should try it again with the new parts and upped stability. Hmmm.

[Felsmak]

It's not a disaster if it's intentional.

[Jack_Aubrey]

My worst disaster happened when I turn on the SAS system of a big vessel (for me ok).... the Kraken toyed with it till it was destroyed.... taken the life of almost 4 kerbals.... the three ones and Kowanski... any way the ship wasn't really good, because to access the lab you need to dock another ship first as i blocked the door to the lab. This is a picture of the vessel when it was stable:

[Taki117]

I'm not sure if this is my "Worst" but I have a couple...

There's This one where I was rescuing my Asteroid Redirect Crew and missed the Runway resulting in a hasty pull-up and bail out, all Kerbals Survived.

Then there's this one where My reentry angle was off resulting in the loss of a landing gear and a ditch in the desert.

[dr_jt]

deorbited a spent stage right into my space station.

[IcarusBen]

MechJeb landed a spaceplane on it's rear-end. It was not pretty when that thing toppled over.

I also had the Artemis 5 incident. RIP dear Kerbals.

[LaytheAerospace]

My biggest disaster was probably my first "real" mission after going to the Mun. Built a huge rover for putzing around Duna. Tested on Kerbin, worked well enough. Took me days to get the thing safely to Duna...at which point it promptly blew a tire, flipped over and detonated, killing the three man crew.

I build planes instead of rovers now.

[Guest]

One time... I got Kirrim Kerman... So obviously I put him on a dangerous mission... and 3 days before that I made a huge cloud of debris.... I underestimated the power of the Kessler Cloud.... and It destroyed most of my orbital probes.... and a Space Station....

So I sent Kirrim on a rocket-launched spaceplane to the Kessler.... Sadly he was hit by debris..... www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_S0Wz0epKY

[SRV Ron]

This Saturn 5 prototype flipped on the pad. A second set of launch clamps fixed the flipover issue.

[General Rarity]

I connected a KAS pipe to my ground base on the Mun, and... letters were wrote to Fredlock and Billy-Boblan's sisters.

[Blind Dead McJones]

I think the winglet got caught on the launch clamp, though I don't know why it only failed at one of four. Also, this is from my nooby days when I thought that monstrosity was what I needed to get a tiny little stayputnik satellite to the mun.

[TheBigCon4800]

I Have two. On a minmus landing attempt, My CSM (named hera) Was too heavy for it's proton booster, so i hacked gravity. Then, my departure stage failed to deploy and took away my main docking port. I tried using mechjeb to dock using the secondary, small port (Without realizing that it was too small) and my craft shook itself apart. My zeus lander was fine, and after "Godly intervention" (Read: Hyperedit) both of them were moved into my munar orbiting kethane mine.

Before:

After:

The second one was when i found my station mir had been shot into a solar escape trejectory. Did hyperedit, brought kerbals down safely.

]

Edited July 15, 2014 by TheBigCon4800
Found pics of first one.

[theend3r]

My biggest disaster happened recently, a few weeks ago. I built a great shuttle to take most of my kerbals from various space stations home at once. The spaceplane flew very well, had tons of dv and a very rigid structure, what could go wrong? So after collecting 7 kerbals from various locations (8 seats including 1 pilot) I came back to Kerbin and found out that I built a lawn dart that can take off just fine but cannot land. All of them died. Horribly.

[Worst at Video Games NA]

I was doing a Mun landing, maybe a little too drunk to be piloting a space craft, but what do I know, showing a couple friends who don't play much how it's done, and my lander tipped on its side and survived. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just fly this baby right off the Mun like a plane; just glide her right on up." Explosions soon ensued. RIP in peace Jeb.

[NoPanShabuShabu]

Back in the early days of my KSP life (over a year ago now,) I built a space station, and a nice recoverable space-tug. I decided to add a large crew section consisting of 4 hitchhiker containers, and in the interest of economy, they had a full load of Kerbals. So, having utterly failed to dock the crew section and running out of monoprop, I decided that the only option was to leave these guys here near the station and come back with a fresh tug for a re-attempt. I undock the containers and move the tug away, switch to map view, point the tug retrograde, and start my de-orbit burn.

I'm watching the periapsis drop down, and suddenly everything goes all crazy. I switch back to normal view, and I have just rammed the tug into the 4 hitchhiker containers full of Kerbals. 2 were totally destroyed, and the others were zooming away to orbits unknown.

This horrible space disaster lead to a cancellation of that space program (ragequit) and starting all over again.

[SourMonkey]

My failures are countless, and many of them were actually really funny.

Most disastrous though would probably be my first Vall attempt. It was back before the large docking nodes, but its flaw was a lack of thrust and fuel for an accidental Laythe encounter on the way. Spiraled out of control after that. I saved as many as I could (6 at least I think out of a crew of 14).

Worst one that was funny was when I was speeding along in an extremely hastily built Crazy Science Vehicle on Minmus at around 30m/s or so when one of my two kerbals got stuck between the fuel tank and the capsule. The other, in an attempt to get to the capsule to stop the craft, fell and started cartwheeling helplessly, watching his friend disappear in the distance.

They both kinda disappeared into the twilight zone, and I couldn't return to them from the tracking station. They later showed back up on Kerbin, I think, somehow.

Edited July 15, 2014 by SourMonkey