The biggest disaster you have caused in Orbiter

[Sky Captain]

I have a question what`s the most catastrophic thing you have accidentally done in Orbiter? For me it was when I wanted to make a close ~300km Earth flyby with a super stardestroyer going 200 000 km/s. Unfortunately when I tuned my flyby I forget to set IMFD map reference from the Earth center to Earth surface. Next thing I remember was Earth growing in seconds from small dot to huge blue-green ball in real time. Impact I think happened somewhere in Mediterranean sea because I caught a glimpse of Africa and Europe in last moments.

Later I wondered how many species went extinct as a result.

 

[Ghostrider]

Fired the laser and Bussard ramscoop of a Vespucci-D straight into Western Europe. Ain't nobody living there anymore now.

 

[DarkWanderer]

Crash-landed into the White House. Much more of a disaster from american point of view

 

[insane_alien]

fiddled with some configs in orbiter, venus and earth impacted (un intentionally). everything is gone.

 

[the.punk]

fiddled with some configs in orbiter, venus and earth impacted (un intentionally). everything is gone.

Can planets touch each other?

 

[insane_alien]

no, but if it was reality then it would be pretty disasterous.

 

[T.Neo]

Later I wondered how many species went extinct as a result.

At 200 000 km/s, I somehow doubt that anything would have survived. You just ripped a nice chunk out of the Earth...

 

[Artlav]

Crashed the Moon into the Earth.

Also, made a Von Neumann probe with 10 seconds replication cycle... The universe lasted 120 seconds.

 

[agentgonzo]

At 200 000 km/s, I somehow doubt that anything would have survived. You just ripped a nice chunk out of the Earth...

Some back-of-envelope calculations:

The Tunguska event was estimated at about 10 MegaTons.

99942 Apophis is going to pass close to Earth in 2029. It's diameter is ~270m and it's mass is ~2.1x10^10kg. Normal asteroid impact speed is about 10-20km/s. Estimates of impact energy are about 880 Megatons.

So call this 10^10kg asteroid, impacting at 10km/s generating 880 Megatons.

Your SSD is travelling at 200,000 km/s, which is 20x faster, resulting in 400x the energy. I can't find any 'facts' for the mass of an SSD, but wookiepedia gives its length as 3.8km - 19km, so say 10km. Assuming it's a similar overall density to an aircraft carrier (USS Nimitz - 333m length, 88,000 tons(=8.8x10^7kg)) gives a mass of ~2.383x10^12kg.

So your SSD is 230x as heavy as Apophis, and travelling 20x faster. 20x faster equates to 400x as much energy, so this and the increased mass give a total of 92,000x more energy than Apophis, = 92,000 x 800Megatons = 73,600,000 Megatons. Or about 7 million times as powerful as Tunguska.
At almost 10^8 Megatons, this is the top level of the Torino Scale Chart, and given that you crashed it, the probability of impact is 1. So this is a level 10 event. Moreover, it's at the top range of the level 10 event, so a lot more powerful. Level 10 is described as:

A collision is certain, capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it, whether impacting land or ocean. Such events occur on average once per 100,000 years, or less often.

As it's much more powerful than the bottom of the level 10 power (10^5 MT) we can assume it's going to do a lot more than the text above. I think it's fair to say that the only things that would survive would be bacteria.

 

[Jarvitä]

-Deorbited the ISS somewhere over china (I wasn't aiming)
-Playing nuclear war with R-7 and Minuteman ICBMs

And, pretty much anything bigger than a basketball is guaranteed to destroy civilisation with an impact at two thirds of c.

 

[the.punk]

Agentgonzo:
Your calculation is good, but don't forget that 200000 km/s in relativistic range.When you're travelling near the light speed your mass will reach enormus value.

---------- Post added at 02:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:12 PM ----------

How can I modify the orbital parameter of for example the moon?
I looked in the moon.cfg, but there was no value that descripes the orbital altidude.

 

[garyw]

I've played nuclear war as well.... I'm still trying to shoot down a satellite.

I think the worst things I've done are:

Dumped a shuttle ET over East Africa
Dropped a Soyuz crew into the middle of China
Dropped a Shuttle-A cargo pod into Canada rather than white sands.....

I seem to be good at missing things during entry!

 

[razgriz31m]

I edited some Orbiter files then it crashed...DISASTER.lmao

 

[Urwumpe]

Worst and most embarrassing moment in my Orbiter career:

Planning a high speed ejection burn towards Saturn, all going well. 15 hours later, I collided with a dark object called moon.

You can be sure, humanity laughed itself dead after such a navigation error.

 

[Pilot7893]

This thread sounds like fun! Anyway, here are some of mine
-I was letting my Dad try the 2008 Firefly Jumbo addon (he's a big Firefly fan). He activated the firefly drive while still in the atmosphere. He then decided to use it to get back to Earth. We hit the Pacific Ocean so fast we could see us go from High Earth Orbit to the surface in a matter of seconds.
-Early days of Orbiter, when I still didn't know how to get Atlantis into orbit. Ended up reentering and landing quite nicely...in the middle of the Arctic wilderness.
-Then there was the time I had Two DG-IVs docked together while on the tarmac at KSC. I undocked, BAM!! Both craft shattered and went flying into deep space at about 12 AU/s I just uttered a simple "Whoops."

 

[ThatGuy]

Crashed Enterprise E into Europe doing warp 4.

 

[MeDiCS]

Worst and most embarrassing moment in my Orbiter career:

Planning a high speed ejection burn towards Saturn, all going well. 15 hours later, I collided with a dark object called moon.

You can be sure, humanity laughed itself dead after such a navigation error.

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

---------- Post added at 12:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:35 PM ----------

I think my worst mistake was to shut off the main thrusters right after lift-off (Shuttle Fleet), turning the crew into dust pretty quickly .

 

[Sky Captain]

Some of the more minor things are:

Engaged Orion nuclear pulse drive to take off from pad at Cape Canaveral
Crashed XR5 multiple times when doing some stunts (I have a habit of spending any remaining fuel after reentry before I land by doing stunts over base)
Crashed Vespucci D into US East coast (I tried to aerobrake:lol
Deorbited ISS with deltaglider
Also played nuclear war.
Engaged the SSD`s main engines to full power while in LEO (I think this would also be rather catastrophic).

Worst and most embarrassing moment in my Orbiter career:

Planning a high speed ejection burn towards Saturn, all going well. 15 hours later, I collided with a dark object called moon.

You can be sure, humanity laughed itself dead after such a navigation error.

:rofl:
Now that is some bad luck. That`s like winning 1000000 $ in a lottery. I mean chances of moon actually being in the right time in right place is extremely small.

 

[agentgonzo]

Now that is some bad luck. That`s like winning 1000000 $ in a lottery.

I'd consider winning a lottery good luck...

 

[Pquardzvaark]

Worst and most embarrassing moment in my Orbiter career:

Planning a high speed ejection burn towards Saturn, all going well. 15 hours later, I collided with a dark object called moon.

You can be sure, humanity laughed itself dead after such a navigation error.

:rofl:

Now usually I think it's been overdone, but this truely seems to be what they call "epic fail".

Anyway, right now I've been trying to perfect my re-entries before I go onto interplanetary travel, so my blunders have been limited to winding up a 1000 km from my landing zone and having to ditch after running out of fuel.

Though I guess ignoring the magnitude of the vertical velocity of my space until it's too late and franctically putting hover to 100% while ejecting the crew too late...