After running out of fuel on return from Mun, Jeb spent six days orbiting Kerbin, using a combination of jetpack-assisted deceleration and atmospheric braking to enable him to return to the surface of his home planet with the precious samples he'd recovered. Finally, his vessel's orbit skimmed low enough for the drag forces to slow him to a point where proper re-entry was possible.
Unfortunately, Kerbal parachutes are hard-wired to deploy only at 500m above sea level, which does not adequately slow decent when your enforced landing zone is a 3km mountain. At least the explosion means that we don't have to worry about retrieving the pilot craft.
Kerbal Space Program. And I was so proud of being able to land on Mun successfully on only my second attempt (the first being slightly more... high-speed).
Other amusing newbie mistakes I've made include the hilarious one of not figuring out how to switch on the engines; the second rocket I made, which had multiple engines, consequently did an interesting pirouette out of the landing pad before exploding (sometime after this I realised that staging can also control engine activations), and trying to build an 'asparagus' rocket which neatly unfurled itself from a spiral into a straight line before exploding.
Coincidentally, this series of events was somewhat expected, as I have taken to naming most of my vessels with any instance of 'Explorer' intentionally changed to 'Exploder', hence my current Munar missions are being carried out by Munar Exploder D-1.
Actually parachutes open at 500m above ground level on Kerbin.
And speeding up time will make them rip, maybe that's what happened?
Possible, although I didn't speed time once in parachute deployment range. Amusingly, this was my second attempt at landing the mission (the first attempt I killed the process and went from the autosave, but was essentially the same scenario besides the six-day wait; the first time I used the trickle of remaining fuel to reduce my apoapsis into re-entry range, the second time I forgot where I was and burned it all off at an inappropriate time, hence the six-day time lapse).
On both occasions the parachute worked fine until the ship crashed into the mountain
I'm not entirely sure of the circumstances around the parachute malfunction; maybe it was a design flaw elsewhere. In either case I think I may try to ensure that future missions actually have enough fuel to make the return trip so that I can land in a less incendiary fashion.
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Topic: How did you last die? (Read 2372777 times)