The Jaws of Defeat

[LaytheAerospace]

What is the worst situation you've ever recovered from to complete the mission? "Complete" could mean the original mission parameters, or simply getting Jeb home alive.

My best was the first docking test of my "Space Truck Mk II", a 15t spaceplane with a robotic arm on it that can aim and fire a magnet with a 50m reach. Everything went great, until the docking. I managed to hit the shift key and throttled up the engines, slamming into my refueling station. Both the plane and fuel depot were destroyed, but Jeb's cockpit remained intact.

Bill to the rescue! I fueled up a second Space Truck Mk II and sent Bill to intercept Jeb's wreckage. The debris field had largely dispersed by the time he arrived, making it easy to approach Jeb's capsule. The robotic arm, for its part, worked fantastically. Bill closed to about 10m from Jeb, lined up the arm and snagged him on the first try.

With Jeb's capsule pulled in tight to the cargo area of the ship, Bill flew to my space station proper, where I keep a single plane fueled up for occasions just such as this. A short EVA later, and Jeb was safe, ready to fly home in style. Bill then proceeded to complete the original mission goals, successfully docking with the station. Both Bill and Jeb landed safely at KSC, textbook runway landings.

[Mazon Del]

My personal favorite was when I was playing with Deadly Re-entry a while back. I still hadn't quite figured out how to get good paths and so I tended to just have a stack of shields in the way and hoped for the best. I had Jeb piloting this ship that was a mix of a communications satellite deployment vessel as well as a science ship. I was playing with the communications mod, so this was pretty necessary for my first trip or two. Anyway, he was coming in for a polar landing (snagging some delicious polar science) and he was coming in a bit too hot. I left the descent rocket in place and when it began to redline, I burned the last of its fuel, but quickly the rocket, then the tank, then the separatron burned away. Then the first shield. Second. Third. I'm getting worried because its clearly going to burn Jeb up and I have nothing left. I'm freaking out going "What can I do?! I have no engines left except the worthless escape rockets!....ESCAPE ROCKETS!" and I slam my finger down on the emergency hotkey and light those babies off. BAM! The last heatshield is gone and I watch the heat-rating skyrocket on the pod itself as the tiny SRB's burn for their lives. They cut out and I see the heat level rising still. Slower, but rising. It stops with one pixel of dark space left...and then drops a pixel...then two...A mighty cheer was roared from the KSC. I am pretty certain without the DV from the escape rockets, that he would have burned.

[Baenki]

My latest incident was Soyuz 5-esque.

I am using Deadly Reentry.

Jeb was reentering from a pretty high orbit (sth. like 2500x25km).

Usually I wait to reach something like 75km before i decouple the service module. Somehow this time it didn't.

In consequence the ship reentered nose first exposing the capsule and the only parachute to pretty harsh reentry effects. The SAS was not quite capable of turning the ship around.

So I used it instead to destabilize the ship and give it some swing. After that I deactivated it and the aerodynamics started to give the ship a pretty wild spin, reentry heating still present. Luckily the service module exploded so the capsule could now do a ballistic reentry.

Post flight investigation showed that stage lock was activated...

Those one man pods are pretty sturdy.

Edited January 10, 2015 by Baenki

[Whovian]

*Lands on Duna with a lander with full fuel (I got to the surface with a stage that wasn't originally intended to be the lander)*

"I've got PLENTY of fuel left!"

(Cue fiddling around for 30 min while trying to find a Kerbin encounter within my Delta-v and life support budget.)

When I finally got an encounter, I ran out of fuel while setting up the aerobrake (this was when I was too stupid to realize that burning radial - would be more efficient than burning retrograde) and, while I did dip into atmo, I ended up on a really steep impact trajectory. I had initially imagined that the single parachute would be enough for the decently heavy ship, but figured it wouldn't be on such a steep aerobrake. I ended up launching another ship to rendezvous and attach about 8 radial parachutes with KAS.

[Nedal]

Rescuing 4 men off the surface of eve. My massive lander had an engine fall off one of the inner stages on landing, that i didnt notice and thus quicksaved after. I tried my best to use a kerbals head and knock off its counter part engine to no avail. However i was able to make it by initiating a roll as fast as i could to kinda of ascend like a slowing top, and everyone got home alive.

Recently on tylo in hard mode. I came in too shallow and had to ditch my drop tank early to get enough twr to not hit the surface and thus didnt have the fuel to reorbit. Flew in a probe lander with some fuel and refueled the lander on the surface of tylo. Got him back up to interplanetary ship, and off to laythe he went. However landing on laythe with parachutes, I ended up on a super steep slope, and toppled over and broke. Flew in rescue probe, but used 4x phys warp while running kirby up the hill to the rescue... he poofed.. rip kirby... Needed the science off that lander tho.. Flew the rescue probe back up to the interplanetary ship, pulled out a guy from the lab, went back to the crash site, picked up the science. then found out the guys head couldnt fit between two tanks and was unable to climb the ladder to the command seat.. :I But was able to knock the lander over, get him on board, then wiggle jiggle and dance with the sas and landing legs to and upright position and continue the mission...

Fun times..

[gchristopher]

When learning to play (all stock), I was trying to land on the north Munar pole and didn't know:

- That the elevation is quite a bit higher there,

- That there's a radar altimeter in the cockpit,

- Much about how to fly/land.

After my landing lights illuminated the surface of the Mun, slamming on all thrusters, I landed just softly enough to save the pilot, but hard enough to knock off a single engine and have the craft fall over on its side. He got out, took some surface samples, and planted a flag reading "SOS", "Little help here, guys?"

Then I saw on the wiki that there was a radar altimeter! I slapped a probe core on a copy of the original lander and sent it off with an empty cockpit to bring him home. When I got there, I realized "Oops, the cockpit is empty; there's no Kerbal to read the altimeter!" With the original wreckage targeted to guide me, I was able to get the robot rescue rocket over the crash site. But my piloting skills at that stage weren't up to landing both softly and accurately. After zooming back and forth over the original crash site several times, I came in too low and crashed the robot probe, also in pieces, also on its side, a few kilometers away from the stranded Kerbal.

Now that I had established that all I was capable of doing was adding to a rapidly increasing junkyard in a shadowed crater on the Munar pole, it was time to try something different.

So I ignored the stranded Kerbal for a few months while flying other missions, gathering science (for wheels!), and learning how to fly.

After a while, another rescue was attempted. I sent a ship with two capsules and a detachable rover. I landed softly as close as I could get (not very) and then very slowly and tediously drove the rover to the crash site, picked up the Kerbal, and drove him back. Rescue accomplished! (eventually)

Now the debris field of crashed ships, abandoned rover and landing modules sits on the Mun as a monument to how a Masters degree in space systems doesn't really help that much in actually landing.

[Bill Phil]

A Mun mission from a while back...

*flashback*

Jeb lands on Mun, blah, blah. But, as usual, the lander was under-designed. It couldn't make orbit... But Jeb wasn't one to quit. He grabs the science, and jetpacks to orbit. He gets on an escape orbit, and coasts to Apoapsis. He burns retrograde. And comes in for a landing. Perhaps the luckiest part of his odyssey, is that he landed on land. If he had landed on water, his hope would have been crushed. But that didn't happen. He landed on his head, and we recovered him. My rep after that one mission was in the blue...

It was my greatest mission ever, and the greatest since...

[Thomas988]

Warning: the following is a story I have told a billion times before here on the forums.

Ok, the craziest mission I've done so far (well, maybe there's been crazier lately, but this was quite intense) was my first Mun rover landing. I had decided to bring three Kerbals along for the ride, and up until the actual landing everything went according to plan. Stuff started going wrong when I first started throttling up and noticed that there was a staging error. I corrected it mid-flight as I waited for apoapsis, and just as I hit the apex my only engine decouples. I get my crew out on EVA and get them into separate orbits around the Mun, and the only reason they got home safe and sound was because I started a rescue mission immediately afterwards.

Oh, and that rover? It flipped over after a second of driving and exploded.

[Janos1986]

Not impressive as the others, but I landed for the first time on the Mun (on 0.90).

I was on a steep slope, so I went out for an EVA, the SAS turned off, and the lander tipped over on its side.

RCS was not an option, so I climbed back in and tried something desperate without thinking: I pointed the nose down, throttled up to 20â„… and hoped for something to happen. And it happened.

The ships components acted as a spring while it was scraping the ground, so it snapped back and jumped for about a couple meters off the ground, which was all I needed to make a full frontflip with a 90° roll and land it back on its legs.

That was the day Malwin Kerman won an olympic medal on the Mun.

[zekes]

So I finally got my Laythe base to said planet. It took an 8000 ton lifter to put it there, and the final plan was assemble it in orbit, and then deorbit down to Lathe. I undocked the transfer stage, assembled the base, and then i realized the RCS tug was not enough to deorbit. So I thought, all right, let's go get the transfer stage. The thing doesn't have a control pod - it'd just debris. Shoot. SO, I flew the RCS tug over to the transfer stage and hooked on. However the SAS wheels were sucking power so fast it threatened to shut down the ship. On top of that, the landing site was in the sun, so i would have to start deorbit in the dark (and i was playing with Renascence mod so dark was PITCH BLACK). So, using the nuclear engines to keep the ship alive, i rammed into the base and orbited it onto a little strip of land on the first try. Saved a 4 million kerbit mission.

[StrandedonEarth]

After a while, another rescue was attempted. I sent a ship with two capsules and a detachable rover. I landed softly as close as I could get (not very) and then very slowly and tediously drove the rover to the crash site, picked up the Kerbal, and drove him back. Rescue accomplished! (eventually)

.

I can't recall saving a mission in trouble, aside from maybe flipping upside close to landing and still landing alive if not safely. But when it comes to rescues, I'll just build a lander with wheels and drive to the rescue site, then blow off the wheels after lift-off. Here's one such example, just after accidentally ramming the stricken lander (half hidden by the navball):

And here's my Tylo rescue rover (seen during testing), which drove over 100 km to the out-of-fuel lander. The ascent stage is just an FLT-200 and a 48-7s under the command chairs:

[AbacusWizard]

Shortly after I first started playing, Jeb managed to do his first flyby of the Mun, returned to Kerbin orbit... and ran out of fuel before de-orbiting. I hadn't researched docking clamps or claws yet, so refueling was out of the question. I just needed to get that last chunk of ∆v to descend into the atmosphere and parachutes could do the rest. So I re-purposed the unmanned probe I had been designing, turning the Rutabaga III into the Rutabaga III-R (R for Rescue) by building a cup-shaped attachment out of girders and wings.

After a lot of research and experimentation to learn how orbital maneuvers and rendezvous actually work (thanks, Buzz Aldrin!), I finally met up with Jeb's little ship, maneuvered the armatures to nestle into the ship's nosecone, and fired thrusters. Visual aid:

(rescue probe) |==C <==| (Jeb's ship)

Slowed down, re-entered atmosphere, deployed parachutes, and coasted down to a safe landing.

[Leszek]

I once had a ship going to orbit to deploy the first part of a space station. This ship had a cupola module in it and like usual a Kerbal snuck into it. This one wasn't designed to have a Kerbal in it and I didn't build any way to save the ship if something went wrong. A crewed ship will always have a parachute for example and I can stage to a reentry from sub orbital if there is an issue. This didn't have anything and if it breaks the (stowaway) crew will die.

Well, radial decoupler bug saw to it that the core stage was totaled at about 20 KM in altitude. I staged to the orbital maneuvering stage and burned for orbit. This stage was designed to do the orbital insertion and the orbital transfer so it had some fuel. On the downside I was using NEAR at the time and the cupola isn't aerodynamic. Still I managed to make suborbital with an apoapsis of 85 KM. A quick check with a maneuver node shows that I needed some 350 DV to insert into orbit. I already knew from a Scott Manley video that a Kerbal jet pack has about 550 DV in it. So out I go and burn for dear life. I had to do some vertical thrusting to keep from falling down from apoapsis but I made it to an 85 X 80 orbit. The rescue mission was trivial and a complete success.

Now at least I know how Kerbals can get stranded up there. Also I now check before launch to make sure there are no stowaways.

[thadisjones]

My latest spaceplane snapped both primary wings off during an overly violent, fast reentry. Fortunately the fuel tanks were almost empty. The low mass of the plane, combined with the forward canards, the tail control surfaces, running the jet engines at max, and the compliant approach angle to the runway, turned a fatal disaster into an extremely hot and fast landing.

[_Aramchek_]

Floating a plane to the ground like a leaf using the throttle and careful piloting after it lost it's wings in a high g, high altitude turn.

[Frozen_Heart]

An a SSTO ascent I had an asymmetrical flameout. As I hadn't got the hang of engine placement the outermost engine failed first and sent the craft into a violent spin, ripping the right wing off. Luckily the ballistic trajectory came down over the small continent east of the KSC. Due to the wing design I was able to come down into a fast and unstable landing even with the wing missing. I lost the other wing but both kerbals survived.

Over time the design was refined to become my main SSTO which could both deliver crew to a station or launch a pair of small satellites. The craft lasted from 0.23 to 0.25. Sadly the removal of the Mk-3 line has made it unusable. :'(

[LaytheAerospace]

Floating a plane to the ground like a leaf

I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I...

[ShadowZone]

Before actually having a clue about Tylo and that thing called Delta V, I tried to land there. It kind of worked. The pilot survived. Just. I somehow managed to land another lander there, but it was no use. Not enough fuel left. So I sent yet another rescue lander with a rover, let them drive 60km, yes 60km across Tylo's surface and then finally get back to the mothership. That was some ordeal, I tell you! But I even brought back some Science.

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[MartGonzo]

Out of fuel 150m/s shy of my return burn after landing on Bop, Jeb had to get out and push.

[Scrat]

Sadly I don't have screenshots. Jeb wanted to get back from a Mun mission when the fuel run out in a 100 k periapsis and near Mun Apoapsis around Kerbin (I wanted to airbrake in the atmosphere). I sent up an unmanned rescue probe but it was short of fuel also and I couldn't align the orbits though I were just 20 km away from him. To make it worse the flight computer predicted a Mun flyby resulting in Kerbin SOI escape for the next round around Kerbin. All I could do was making Jeb to get all science data gathered on the Mun go on EVA and make a correction burn with the jetpack and pray. Fortunately It was enough for him to reach a stable orbit and on the next launch window the rescue mission was succesful. Jebs rocket still orbits the sun.

[Skorpychan]

Five kerbals went to Minimus for a training mission, a 'get science data from' contract, and a parts test.

I forgot the antenna.

After realising I'd cocked up the maneuver node and quickloaded. No reverting there.

Landed on the second attempt; low thrust to mass ratio.

Parts test went fine. Lookit the escape tower go!

Then came the trip home. Minimus orbit... HOW much dV is left? Oh crap. This hitchhiker container is heavier than I thought.

JUST get a Minimus escape.

Multiple re-encounters as I cruise around Kerbin orbit.

Then comes the trip back. I end up with about 14 dV left after my aerobrake is done.

Eventually, a landing. I could not be further from the KSC. Ah, well. Training complete, and I paid for the mission twice over.

Then, my newly-qualified pilot goes to test a part in orbit. An LV-N. So it's stuck to the top of the rocket with a fuel tank to go with. Everything goes well, until the landing.

I forgot to right the gear properly. It's on upside-down. Crap. Just have to land, carefully, on the engine.

Chutes partially open, that's fine.

Some wobbling, okay, the engine's heavy.

Drogues open. And tear the whole top of the rocket off. This means the LV-N, the reaction wheels, the little fuel tank, the antenna, and the solar panels.

I still have a big fuel tank with fuel in, a pod, and a Skipper. Looks like we're going for a powered landing.

The pilot disagrees. 'Follow retrograde' goes all kerbal when I apply too much thrust and go UP. I don't notice because I'm distracted by the detached parts (without the chutes) falling down and bouncing off the rocket. Rocket flips, I have to right it again, picked up lateral velocity. I have no idea how much; the KER module was torn off with the chutes.

No time to correct the lateral, but I can sort the vertical. Try and use the gear to scrape along the ground.

Boom. Engine hits first, explodes. Fuel tank explodes. Lots of explosions.

Smoke clears, and the pod's lying on it's side in the sun, surrounded by the landing gear. Then the chutes land next to it. I breathe a sigh of relief; I don't have to spend 50K funds training another spare pilot.

I'm already on the FIRST spare because Jeb's stuck in Munar orbit.

Recover the lot. LOTS of science, and the contract paid far more than I thought. Like, five times the cost of what I blew up.

[Slam_Jones]

Not super impressive, but one time I was bring Jeb back from Mun after collecting a fair bit of science.

As this was before I had installed KER, I had no idea how much dV I had, and my pod quickly ran out of fuel.

I hadn't quite made it to orbit, but I wasn't gonna let Jeb die that easily.

I had him EVA and jetpack into a stable orbit, while the pod exploded on the surface beneath him.

Sent out Bill, picked up Jeb, and returned to Kerbin successfully.

[AbacusWizard]

When I was first experimenting with planes I grew very familiar with McQuack's Maxim:

"Any crash you can walk away from counts as a landing."

[moogoob]

A little thing, but sending up a small crew transfer capsule without rememmbering to put bloody rcs thrusters on it to dock with the mun limo. Rather than waste my time reloading, I just gritted my teeth and used its LV-909 to coast in towards it's docking port at half a meter per second. Patience won out and it was a good docking!

[Levelord]

I was stress testing the Jx-42 Vector in flight and was doing a standard flight run with the retired Marin class shuttle. There was an in flight collision resulting in the destruction of the Marin (luckily it was drone controlled) and the Vector being badly damaged losing almost 40% of it's flight surfaces. There was no land in sight for a landing and there was barely enough fuel to make towards the nearest land mass. Guess we're going to have to make an emergency water landing.

Luckily I had built VTOL systems into the craft and managed to land it (with some difficulty) intact in the ocean. As for me, the JX-42 has proven it's worth as a capable craft and reminded me of that Israeli F-15 Eagle story where they had to land a plane with 1 wing.