Stories from Kerbal - Err, where is the decoupler?

[Vindaloo]

Just want to share this awesome thing that happened in my game last night. Due to some unfortunate errors at mission control I had three kerbals stranded on Mun with not enough fuel to return to Kerbin (who the heck presses quicksave when they want to quickload? silly kerbals). Anyways, rescuing the mission and all of its sweet science became our top priority, so the team shelved its plans for a new space plane and redesigned the Munar Adventurer IV (renamed Munar Rescue) with plenty of delta-v for a trip to Mun and back.

Everything went amazingly well, the exit and capture orbits were textbook and the intercept to target course was plotted without much trouble. The landing was a little iffy due to the lander's probe core stubbornly wanting to land on the side of a crater wall, but after a few tweaks Munar Rescue landed within 850m of the target. Fantastic! The kerbals EVAed over to the rescue capsule and set for home! Once the ship hit about 100 km altitude over Kerbin it was time to ditch the last of the fuel and engine, and descend with the capsule alone. This is when things went wrong. The mission planners had forgotten to put a decoupler between the capsule/heat shield and the fuel tank!

Some simulations were run (save, load, repeat) and it was determined that the ship could not survive re-entry with the fuel tank and engines attached, the aerodynamics of the ship would send it in a deadly tumble at 2000 m/s and the heat from re-entry would do the rest. Was there any way to wrench victory from the jaws of defeat!? The flight engineer, Thomden Kerman came up with a plan! The heat shield would be decoupled from the main capsule, thus also separating the fuel tank; hopefully then the fuel tank (being less aerodynamic than the capsule) would just tumble away. The trick would then be to keep the capsule and heat shield lined up so that when the drag hit the heat shield it would just shove it back right up against the capsule and protect it from deadly re-entry burn. It was mad! But it was our only hope... AND IT WORKED! Mad cheers rang throughout mission controls as the capsule finally made it through the re-entry and deployed its parachutes, the team had made it home safely!!

This was an amazing rescue, and I couldn't believe Deadly Re-entry actually factored in that a piece of space debris (which is what the heat shield became after being detached) could protect a ship right behind it. I cheered so loud that my wife and daughter ran over to see what happened. Note: this is my first game of KSP ever (I chose to use both FAR and DER for some additional stress, lol). Whew! What fun!

[dryer_lint]

Dang.

This is why I don't use DRE!

[Pecan]

...I cheered so loud that my wife and daughter ran over to see what happened...

Congratulations, I hope they were impressed.

[Vindaloo]

Congratulations, I hope they were impressed.

Yeah, I had hoped that as well...