What was your closest call in terms of delta-V?

[LostElement]

Dunno if this counts, but I ran out of fuel when I was doing a transfer from Mun to Kerbin. I managed to get on a escape trajectory, I was planning to do an Atmospheric reenty but when i ran out of fuel I was 70Km away from hitting the atmosphere. So I got Bill out and pushed. I got it down to 22Km and I made it.

[VoidPointer]

My first Mun landing, in the demo. I'd promised myself that if I could land on the Mun, I'd buy the game. I started off knowing nothing about orbits or delta-V, and thinking that going straight up was how you got to orbit, so obviously I wasn't the best at Mun landings. I stopped in midair several times on the way down. Looking back, I probably had enough delta-V to make a return to Kerbin if I knew what I was doing, but as it was, I ran out of fuel about a kilometer up. Luckily, I had overengineered my RCS so much that I was able to land safely using the translation controls!

To this day that's still my favorite landing.

[JordanL]

Just yesterday I was returning from Mun, but I forgot to factor in the boil-off on my H2 (using RealFuels).

So... I had monopropellent. That's right, I RCS'd prograde for almost 12 minutes and returned my ship. I would have just gone back to get the ship, except I also had TAC Life Support installed, and hadn't unlocked docking ports yet, you there was no way to come save him in time.

Made it back with all my science.

[Blind Dead McJones]

There was a period when I would try to land by killing all my horizontal velocity at a high altitude and falling straight down because I thought it was the best way to get an accurate landing. Not only is this not very accurate at all, it's horribly inefficient. But I landed somewhere to drop off some Kerbals on the Mun and sent the return trip back. I also didn't know about efficient transfers, and I ran out of fuel with a Kerbin periapsis of about 55km. A very brief Mun recapture brought it down to 34km. So I got back to Kerbin, but only by the skin of my teeth.

[OgreMagi]

my first mission to the MUN used a stock lander and decided to try to orbit and land a second time, ran out of fuel about 50 Meters from the ground, and made it worse because I forgot to change the RCS settings and tumbled the craft before I got it under control .

But I only broke one of the lander struts and it was the start of my first rescue mission..

[JordanL]

my first mission to the MUN used a stock lander and decided to try to orbit and land a second time, ran out of fuel about 50 Meters from the ground, and made it worse because I forgot to change the RCS settings and tumbled the craft before I got it under control .

But I only broke one of the lander struts and it was the start of my first rescue mission..

You know, rescue missions have quite a different feel if you have TAC Life Support installed... if you didn't build in a margin for error into the life support, it's almost impossible, and extra life support resources are heavy.

[Redwizard000]

First trip to Eeloo. On the return to Kerbin I literally had just enough fuel to reenter. I thought I was going to need to mount a rescue mission but I was able to get PE < 70,000. Took a few orbits to finally land.

[goldenpeach]

When I do my Duna manned mission, I alway arrive in orbit with something around 5 m/s left(I use mechjeb, this is where why I do the same "score" every time).

I could use my stage designed to ease the exit of kerbin SOI(I couldn't make a stage big enough to exit properly) but I would use more fuel that should be use for the mission.

(I have to say that I have more than enough fuel in the CSM at the end of the mission(by that I mean that I can have more that 1000m/s left) so it wouldn't be a huge problem).

EDIT: I have just finished a manned mission to Duna and, at the end, I had between 3000 m/s and 3500 m/s(forgot to check at the very last moment).

And that's with a fuel leak that caused me to loose some fuel(even if it should be compensated by the leak of RCS fuel that emptied my only tank of RCS); all thank to the Dang it! mod(a really cool one )

Yeah... I will probably get punished for that in 0.24(I mean: that just fuel that get burned during reentry!) but it give me a small margin

Edited June 18, 2014 by goldenpeach

[AlamoVampire]

The closest ive come in terms of DV? Well, it just happened on a test mission to Jool in Sandbox, I was at 98 or so units of liquid fuel after performing my final burn for descent INTO Jool's atmosphere! take a look!

[Pirwzy]

Landing eleven Kerbals on the Mun, this is what my descent stage had left in it on touchdown.

[weezl]

Second trip to Duna.. on this one I didn't grossly underestimate the amount of fuel needed (like I did on the FIRST one.. 'nuff said), but I hadn't twigged to the ability to use parachutes on Duna (I just winged the mission because it was late and decided to try a landing.. definitely a break from my normal over-planned approach to this game).

I'd never made a landing on Duna.. so didn't know the target altitude for touch down.. started my burn early.. and it became VERY evident that I was going to be very close on fuel.. basically waited until what I thought was the last second and burned down to a soft landing.. right clicked on the fuel tank (since the fuel thermometer in the lower left showed nothing).. it was 0 fuel 0 oxidizer!!! EEEK.

Normally don't like to do landings quite THAT close.

And note a Kerbal was on board.. and I do NOT like losing those little guys to foolishness on the part of the monkey at the wheel.

[RocketBlam]

My closest call is 0. Running out of fuel and having to use my RCS thrusters to lower my periapsis into Kerbin's atmosphere.

[SofusRud]

One time, during a career mode early mun mission, I accidentally EVA'ed Jeb duing the LKO-Mun burn. The ship didn't have a probe core, and so I had wait for it to go 2.5km from Jeb before it stopped accelerating. I then made the rendezvous with the ship with my Jeb on his jetpack, and had to do everything by eye, no navball. I made it back to the craft after 1 orbit, and with 0.05 units of jetpack fuel left.

[Phylan]

Landing eleven Kerbals on the Mun, this is what my descent stage had left in it on touchdown.

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/3263169007255576548/96488F6F299FB05BC4F8535B5332DE9C2AC43A79/

Does stacking the RCS like that make it more maneuverable? I guess it makes sense that it packs more thrust, it just never occurred to me to do that.

For my part, weirdly, it was this:

I thought ~3,000 would be plenty to get back into Laythe orbit but I came up well short. Ended up reverting to quicksave, dumping pretty much all my monoprop and got up there with ~30 m/s to spare. Still can't figure that one out. TWR too low? After reading around I had the impression that ~2,400 dv was enough for Laythe surface to LLO.

[Pirwzy]

Does stacking the RCS like that make it more maneuverable? I guess it makes sense that it packs more thrust, it just never occurred to me to do that.

It does make it more maneuverable, but it also burns through the monopropellant faster the more nozzles you have shooting off. My big fuel deliveries for stations all have a setup like that just to make docking less painfully slow.

[Sky_walker]

If you put these directional RCS thrusters at the bottom of your craft you can use it as a regular engines. That's how most of my lunar probes are build - I first use remaining fuel to decelerate as much as it gets, then eject, and then use RCS thrusters mounted at the bottom to align myself for perfect vertical drop and slow down for a soft landing. With enough fuel they might also work for delivering cargo back in the orbit.

I even build tiny Kerbal lander with tons of thrusters (most mounted on a set of 8 Modular Girder Segment attached to RCS tank for added stability) - it's good enough to make a short trips around the KSC trying to collect data for a new experiments in a campaign when I research something nice.

[SDIR]

I remember on a rescue mission after the original mission failed to reach the Munhole. The rescue mission made it back with no fuel and had to burn all but 0.38 units of my RCS to make it back to Kerbin.

[Brapness]

Went to Duna from Moho via a sun fly-by, not sure what the delta-v figures are but I went from 10,000 units of fuel down to 50.

[Superfluous J]

I just got my refueller back to my mothership on my Jool-5 mission, and it had 11 m/s of dV left in the tank after zeroing out their relative velocities.

I also learned a lot of tricks for navigating the Joolian system, though I have no clue how to take advantage of most of them

[Vonar]

Was testing out a two-stage Munar lander. The Mun landing was going great, right up until I was about to touchdown when I noticed my decent stage had a whole 5 seconds worth of fuel left. Thankfully the second stage had more then enough fuel to leave the surface of the Mun, and reach low munar orbit. But the last few seconds of that landing were pretty tense.

[Bean]

I've had to get out and push a couple of times...

[Vahal]

on 0.23 I made an undersized lander for Minmus an I saw Jeb in a pretty bad situation. Then I tried to tweak around the ship course and finally had this.

I kept some fuel inside the tank to slow down at the last moment since I underestmated too the weight of the beast for the parachute... Jeb managed to land safely. He did even come back with Mün science reports!

not mention for the classical "Get out and push dude!"

[jwenting]

running out of fuel on my Eve probe just after it hit an entry trajectory. Thank providence for a thick atmosphere and overengineering the parachutes and landing struts