Biggest Financial Loss?

[Bigulp]

What is the most expensive ship/station/probe you've crashed?

I just lost a 1.5 million station and 20 Kerbals. I was trying to use an engine cluster to boost into a more warp friendly orbit. Unfortunately it was a bit unstable, folding over and burning retrograde. IT ended up entering the atmosphere where it burned up.

[Sky_walker]

~800k. Testing my asteroid capture spacecrafts (yea, more than one, but still a single objective).

Next would be most likely a docking arm for fuel tanks on my asteroid station.... ~600k in total, not too painful, but.... that produced way too much space junk. Anyway - after completing that thing I have ~15 FPS near my station - and still haven't used it for anything particularly useful other than "science on orbit of Kerbin" contracts. :/

[timsfitz]

My Jool 5 ship cost over 3 million. I deleted that save when the mission failed and started over.

[Dizzle]

My Jool 5 ship cost over 3 million. I deleted that save when the mission failed and started over.

3 million? Can we see screenshots? I've never gone over 200k, I really want to see what a 3M ship looks like.

[JDCollie]

I make a 550k vessel, launched it, flew it to its destination, and loaded it up, only to realize that I had made a total noob mistake in balancing and that the ship was essentially useless for its intended role.

It is now a very expensive cargo container.

[FleetAdmiralJ]

Just recently I was sending a manned Tylo lander that cost $530,000 which wobbled apart on launch (luckily the kerbal was saved) but that was probably the single most expensive launch or other failure that I've had so far.

[JDCollie]

3 million? Can we see screenshots? I've never gone over 200k, I really want to see what a 3M ship looks like.

Never over 200k ever? Really? Dang man, you must be king of economical design o.O

[tntristan12]

I was testing an expensive new orbit capable rocket early on in my career, which made it all the way to a solid sub-orbital arc when it lost control and disintegrated in flight. Fortunately I was able to rescue the crew, but I decided not to revert the flight because I wanted to see if I could bounce back from the massive financial loss. I had to go back to using outdated technology to take on contracts at the edge of their operational envelope.

[Dizzle]

Never over 200k ever? Really? Dang man, you must be king of economical design o.O

Well, I've never had a manned mission beyond Duna in career mode. Still, 3 million, that must have been quite an epic ship.

[corvustech]

Around 1.25 million. My first attempt at a Kerbin orbital station, I made the station hub way too massive and ran out of fuel before I could slow it down to a speed that anything launching from the surface could reasonably intercept. The crew module ran out of fuel trying, and I realized that was because the station was aerobraking the tiniest bit at each periapsis. It was in just the tiniest bit too low.

My rescue ship was a brazen attempt to use massive thrust to lift the slowly decaying station. Unfortunately, I misaligned some radial decouplers and they worked like a missile, tearing the station apart and killing the pilot when the docking arms of the station went through his head.

I also learned that 200+ part ships can make you ctd if they splash down.

[nadreck]

My biggest routine booster stage costs about 300,000 and I usually get 200,000 back on it when I recover it, however before it was my routine booster stage I lost it to bad course, improper staging, and a number of other issues leading to the loss of all 300,000 even though

My current design has its chutes open on staging and I need to be careful that the orbital stage gets to 70,000 in time and with enough time to Apoapsis for me to return control before the boost stage goes below the critical altitude of 23,000M and stay with it to landing. I have fine tuned it to an Apoapsis of about 110,000M.

So far in 0.24.2 my most expensive craft has been my "Eve Lander Concept 2" (designed to return a Kerbal to orbit) which at launch cost over 500,000 and it shed extra parts worth 70,000 too early in flight be able to recovered. ELC2 also needed to be completely refueled in orbit, and my heavy fuel tender based on the boost stage mentioned above and an S3-14400 tank going to orbit, will cost about 450,000 to refuel it under optimal recovery operations. Also a nuclear interplanetary stage will be added with an effective price tag after booster recovery of approximately 200,000 and the expedition featuring this ship will likely feature two of the landers plus 2 rovers, a Gilly craft (though I might just use a rover), and fuel tender based on the interplanetary stage for the landers. I expect the expedition to come in around 2,000,000 in cost. Since I have one rover, one interplanetary stage, one lander 2/3rds refuelled already in orbit and 5,000,000 in funds I am sure I can easily afford the full out version of this and building an extensive Joolian expedition while this one is underway. I will keep nibbling at contracts too. My Duna craft is well on its way.

Oh and I probably spend 500,000 on test launches and recoveries of my Eve lander as I made about 8 flights with it, 5 of which landed successively further and further from KSC.

[timsfitz]

3 million? Can we see screenshots? I've never gone over 200k, I really want to see what a 3M ship looks like.

It's possible I am confused, but I think it cost nearly 2 million for the ship, and a million for two refuelling missions once it was in orbit. Took a lot of stupid missions to save up for it.