LV-N losing thrust when overheating

[anopheles]

I'm using LV-N's to move asteroids around. I currently have four radially mounted engines directly mounted on mkII liquid fuel fuselages and some other liquid fuel storage on the vessel; each fuselage also has two gigantor solar arrays for power (and potential helping to radiate heat, I have read?)

Frustratingly, as the vessel heats up, the engines abruptly throttle down. Since this seems to occur unevenly, often leaving one engine firing on full, I basically have to turn the engine off and wait for another pulse, or risk spinning the asteroid far out of control. I can't seem to make out which component overheating causes the sudden drop in engine performance (possibly the fuselage temperature?) This is also happening long before the components are reaching dangerous temperatures...

Any thoughts or suggestions on how to keep the engines firing?

[Dspan_000]

Well LV-N's are known to overheat when on 100% throttle so go for about 50 or 75%. Also if that doesn't work try seperating the engines apart from each other as the flame from the engines might be hitting your other

LV-N's

[anopheles]

I've tried lowering the throttle; no joy. I'm currently trying to pulse the engines to make a ~500m/s delta V maneuver; after about a minute of full throttle burn, which consistently gives me 5.3 m/s of delta V before the engines cut down to a fuel usage of 0.00065U, at which point I very briefly put up the timewarp to 1000x to reset the heat of the components, and go around again. When I use 1/3 throttle, I only get to about 7m/s before exactly the same thing happens - not a great deal of advantage, the burns are much longer, and it's actually a lot harder to spot when the engines cut out!

As for the ship layout, they're not particularly close together - again, radially mounted around a 2.5m centre, with a little extra because of the shape of the mk2 fuselage. picture here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=451596981

[anopheles]

Hmm, I posted a reply which appears to have disappeared - or is possibly still awaiting mod approval.

Anyway, it's not the throttle - the effect still happens within a closely comparable amount of time, even using below 30% throttle. Also, the engines are a long way apart; there are four of them mounted radially on a 2.5m hull.

It's a moot point, as I appear to have identified the culprit - it appears to be something to do with running the ISRU, since disabling the Liquid Fuel production stopped the problem. Not entirely sure why it was having that effect, but there you go.