That Moment When...

[KerrMü]

That moment when you land on Duna, extend the ladder and want to step out and: "Hatch is obstructed, can´t exit" and you shout to your monitor "NO, it´s not you bloody..." and the game says (in this super self-confident Jeremy Clarkson voice) "Yeees, it iiiiiis".

[The Jedi Master]

That moment when you've attached a cool launcher to the Rover+Skycrane craft and you're flying it to the Mun only to realize partway through that the fixed solar panels are aligned in such a way that they will never receive sunlight, ruining the mission.

True story.

[DisarmingBaton5]

That moment when FAR tears the wings off your spaceplane and you learn quite a lot about lifting body aircraft.

[Stavell]

That moment when you warp months ahead to reach an optimal launch window for your probe you just put in orbit, and you realize too late you never opened your solar panels.

Or you are warping months ahead to reach a optimal escape burn window. Halfway through the warp the mun's gravity grabs the probe and it smacks the surface.

[MartGonzo]

That moment when you decide to watch flying your spaceplane through Kerbins clouds from the cockpit and click on EVA instead of IVA

noooooo.......come back!!!!

[Roskerbos]

One I just had: that time you spend 1 hour 20 minutes, with 3 kerbals, carefully assembling a KAS pipeline between a Karbonite drilling rig and the habitation module 200 metres away. You use your rover, with a parts box on the back, to carefully assemble the ten ground pylons and 20 pipe ends to make the link, ferrying parts back and forth from the store up at the habitation module, using the rover.

This pipe is a work of art, I tell you. A plug-ugly work of art, but a work of art, nonetheless.

You do not save during this whole process. You are Iron Man! (Anyway, what could possibly go wrong?)

You finally get to the habitation module. 180 metres of pipe completed. Just one more 20m pipe to build, and the things are linked! Your Kerbal dismounts the rover.

However, because he is 'under' the top of the habitation module (vertically speaking) by the magic of "Kerbal Occasional Ballsed-Up Physics" your kerbal does not end up standing at the controls of the rover, as you imagined he would - as, indeed, he has, for the last 19 times you've had to do this. Instead, he is catapulted upwards, about 10 or 15 metres, into some mad free fall somersault - that he could never have achieved without, said, "KOBUP". In doing so, he not only renders himself into a sad, lifeless chunk of 'rover debris', but he takes out both the Gigantor solar arrays on the top of the habitation module in a giant sparkly mess of solar panel debris.

All he wanted to do was get out of his chair... It seemed such a simple thing... Instead, he has killed himself in a physically impossible manner and doomed the entire colony to slowly freeze to death millions of kilometres from home...

F9!

Iron Man is an idiot!

That's 1 hour 20 minutes of my life I won't get back!

[peadar1987]

That moment when your solar panels clip through your ScanSat array, manage the trip to Duna fine because you keep the vessel in focus, but then blow themselves to pieces when you fly a different ship for a while and return.

[Dat_Spacewaffle]

That moment when you realize the one way (I'm still new here, I wanted to plant a flag on duna) kerbaled mission had solar panels on the TRANSFER stage, which exploded after you decoupled it, meaning I couldnt transmit a surface EVA report and a surface sample....

[GreeningGalaxy]

When you approach your ship on EVA and press F to grab the ladder, but instead of grabbing and holding, your kerbal seizes the ladder and flings himself off into space, and you have to wait a good ten seconds for him to stop laughing like a maniac and turn his jetpack back on so you can try again.

Or when you're typing a value into a mod window and mess up, then mash backspace to fix your mistake and accidentally activate your emergency escape system.

[JDCollie]

Or when you're typing a value into a mod window and mess up, then mash backspace to fix your mistake and accidentally activate your emergency escape system.

This one has cost me a spaceplane or three.

[WafflesToo]

Oh, that would've been last night...

Got a contract to perform a test on an experimental RAPIER engine. I thinks, "cool, I'm using a spaceplane as my primary launch vehicle anyway so I'll just swap out the LV45 I've been using and scab on the experiemental. What could possibly go wrong?"

Loading the cargo bay up with some experiement modules (from the Station Science mod) because why waste the flight to 'just' test out this R&D doohicky anyway, right? Fire up the turbojets, rip down the runway, and we're off. She flies normally until I hit the test window for the RAPIER and I stage to activate it, contract's fulfilled, 150k roots in the bank, now to just finish this insertion... and that's when I see it happen; the RAPIER is operating in open-cycle mode, sucking up all my intake air just as the turbojets are hitting their peak power. One turbojet starves out, stalls, and before I can reach the 'x' key the ship is in a hypersonic pancake stall.

This is the point that my PR team is thanking Korbol that it's just an unmanned aerial drone so all we'll lose is money and our rep won't take the hit.

[JDCollie]

That moment when something absurdly impossible becomes possible.

Hooooooooooly S***. How many G's would that be? He dropped 10 KILOMETERS per second in less than 70,000 meters of atmosphere. Jeb would be paste. Hell, his molecules would be paste.

It happens at about the two minute mark, btw.

Edited August 27, 2014 by JDCollie

[WafflesToo]

(part deux)

...

All seemed lost, the RAV-1 was spinning wildly out of control. She was holding together, but I knew as soon as she hit the denser air at Mach 3 that would change rapidly. BUT, I wasn't quite ready to give up yet. Closing the air intakes and popping the airbrakes put the center of drag behind the center of mass and she straightened herself out giving the wings and surfaces a chance to bite the air again. Opening the cargo bay and dumping the cargo (look out below!) I toggled the RAPIER into closed-cycle mode and started running it to dump out all of the rocket fuel she was carrying. Once she was dry I reactivated the turbojets and proceded to fly the aircraft completely around Kerbin and landed safely back at the KSC runway.

How often do YOUR biggest disasters have happy endings?

Edited August 27, 2014 by WafflesToo

[SelectHalfling0]

That moment when you realize your space shuttle keeps tipping and killing all occupants because you forgot to attach a fuel line.

[Mufasa]

That moment when you decide to watch flying your spaceplane through Kerbins clouds from the cockpit and click on EVA instead of IVA

noooooo.......come back!!!!

That is funny, but really, is your C key broken?

[GreeningGalaxy]

When you go to land on Eeloo and deploy your landing legs, and then your lander just sticks its arms up in the air like "what?"

[Jett_Quasar]

That moment when you realize..... That you just built the most Freakin' Coolest Craft EVER!!!!!!!

...and it spontaneously blows up. Doh!

JR

Edited August 27, 2014 by Jolly_Roger

[WafflesToo]

When you go to land on Eeloo and deploy your landing legs, and then your lander just sticks its arms up in the air like "what?"

That's gonna be a rough landing

[SRV Ron]

When that new Saturn 1B design goes galloping away from the pad upon launch because you didn't add braces.

[GreeningGalaxy]

That's gonna be a rough landing

Nothing broke. It'll be a long time before Jenwise Kerman sees Kerbin again, but she's alive for now, and the lander has a plenty of fuel to get around a bit, if not back to orbit.

The best part, though, is that the ship I came here in...

...brought SIX of those ridiculously underengineered monstrosities.

In addition to the backwards legs, they also have lights (but no power generation) and no scientific tools or KAS equipment.

And for some reason, I thought putting parachutes on them was a good idea.

[DisarmingBaton5]

When that new Saturn 1B design goes galloping away from the pad upon launch because you didn't add braces.

"You'll never catch me, space cops!"

[mythic_fci]

This happened just now.

That moment when after your ship crashes and you auto-switch to another craft in the vicinity, the old KIA display is shown.

And this was in 0.24.

[CatastrophicFailure]

.... The moment when you finally, finally, pull off that kewl thing you've been trying to do for ages, one failure after another, then it finally works... then it freezes and you get that stoopid little busy icon on the pointer and you have just enough time to utter "[expletive] [bleep] [redacted] [now see here!] [is that even a word?] [just calm down] [well I never!] [why you little] [same to you buddy!]!!!!!!" and then you're staring at your desktop, silently mocking you.

....The moment when you finally start to catch your breath after reading this thread, and then your wife fixates on saying "Kerbal foibles" five times fast and you start laughing again and drop your iThingâ„¢ in the fishbowl.

[MartGonzo]

That is funny, but really, is your C key broken?

nope, I just didn't think of it

still, it's a lesson well learned

[Cirocco]

A bit less funny "I can't believe that just happened moment" but just a few awesome memories I have from KSP:

That moment when you first land on the mun

That moment when you realise shortly after your first landing on the mun that you wasted so much fuel on your several tries at powered landing that you now don't have enough to make it home.

That moment when you first make orbit with your own spaceplane design

That moment when, for the first time, you realise that you forgot to deploy solar panels and tell yourslf "oh darn. Well, lesson learned, that wil surely never happen again" ...

That moment when you first succesfully land on the airstrip (with your own spaceplane design).

That moment when you completed the final de-orbit burn on the final stages of your first inter-planetary trip and know that you've done it and your kerbals are now as good as home.

That moment when things go wrong anyway and the mission is lost.

That moment when you miraculously pull it off anyway against all odds.

That last one for me is safely landing an interplanetary spaceplane on the runway when it ran out of fuel and RCS 8 km out and 5km up from the KSC. I felt like a god after having wrestled that plane the entire way down and setting her down safely on the runway.