Anyone else experiencing massive temp fluctuations in control modules in 1.0.4?

[Yakuzi]

Several of my SSTO craft seem to blow a fuse (specifically the Mk2 drone core) whenever they reach the upper atmosphere just before circularising orbit. I've tried to isolate the problem and found that it is associated with control modules, cargo bays and time acceleration:

Just before exploding, the temperature of the control module and surrounding parts fluctuates wildly (from 4 degrees to over 2500 degrees* within a couple of frames), seemingly triggering under these conditions:

1. the control module is attached to a cargo bay

2. time is accelerated x2

If the cargo bay is replaced with another part (e.g. a fuel tank) no extreme heat fluctuations or explosions take place... similarly nothing bad happens when time acceleration is not used. So it appears like the physics engine can't keep up with cargo bay heat management during minor time warping or something along those lines. Inigma previously posted some explosive observations on cargo bays and control modules, however, those conditions where somewhat different as to what I'm encountering here. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, and if so, with which parts and under which conditions?

I've yet to try if this also triggers with the cargo bay open or during day time (in Inigma's thread there was mention of this only happening at night). I'll keep you posted.

* Not displayed in this gif for the record

[Landwalker]

I ran into this with a probe recently, or at least, something like it. OKTO2 probe core, I think, inside a 1.25m Service Bay, along with a couple of Z-100 batteries, 2HOT Thermometer, PresMat Barometer, Goo Container, and a (mod part) radial-style Science Jr. There were weird temperature things going on from the launchpad, but it didn't finally get out of control until the craft was hanging out in space, when something (I think it was the thermometer and the barometer, not 100% sure) spontaneously exploded. Unfortunately I don't have as much detail as you have to substantiate or flesh out the event, but I definitely got weird temperature behavior.

Incidentally, the probe core itself never exploded (I don't recall if it had a heating issue or not).

[samstarman5]

Hard to tell from your picture, but do you have any radiators attached? I had issues with radial chutes getting busted upon re-entry so I attached radiators next to them, which I would decouple before deploying the chutes. Radiators really do seem to do the job they are meant to.

[ajburges]

I have this issue as well and thought it was an expression of Inigma's bug. Drives me nuts because I love to cruise along at 4x physics warp between 50 and 80 km. If I forget to open the cargo bays, I get to learn when the last save was. Ticks me off every time. At least I can fix most my Kraken issues by restarting the game.

I'm sure radiators won't help here. You are in atmo so you can't use deployed radiators, and the part is stowed so you can't use passive radiators.

[moogoob]

I have the exact same issue. Grounded my Nastybird fleet.

[Rhomphaia]

Pretty sure it is the same issue, I find cargo bays are virtually unusable now. The bug can hit fairings and service bays too, but seems rarer for me.

Opening the bay should alleviate the issue, but it will resurface when you close it again. Day or night makes no difference. It seems to trigger on when physics are applied to the craft. Either on launch, coming out of time warp, switching from another vessel or loading from the tracking station.

[Geschosskopf]

I had a similar issue with the 1.25m reaction wheels exploding for no damn reason. I couldn't see a temperature on the part's right-click menu so I instead was looking at the F11 heat color map and the F10 temperature gauges. The color was always the "cold" brick red and no temperature gauges ever appeared. Despite this, the reaction wheels would explode. The situation was as follows:

Ship

* 1-seat pod with 6 radial chutes, whip antenna, and DMagic magnetometer on top

* Quad Universal Storage thing with various science wedges

* 1.25m service bay with OKTO probe core and 4x small radial batteries

* 1.25m reaction wheels with 2x small, fixed radiators and 4x 1x6 shielded solar panels attached radially

* 1.25m heat shield

* 1.25m stack decoupler

* smallest 1.25m LFO tank with 2x radial Sepratrons

* LV-909 engine

Situation

* Did a flyby of Mun with free return

* Aerobraking pass at 40km. During the pass, nothing got visibly hot (via F10 or F11).

* After leaving the air, extended solar panels and warped around orbit (real warp, 50x and 100x)

* At altitude of 100km just before hitting air again, returned to 1x speed to retract solar panels and point retrograde

* Reaction wheels exploded almost instantly upon killing warp

I did this several times, killing warp at different places around in the orbit, but the result was always the same. About the time the solar panels finished retracting, the reaction wheel would explode, without ever showing a temperature gauge on it.

I blamed the radiators. I tried this again without the radiators and no problem.

[Tynrael]

I have encountered 2 different issues and each one seems to target just a single part, usually a battery or a probe core. In 1 version a service or cargo by causes a part to jump back and forth between 2000+ and sub 10 degrees until it explodes, heating up the parts around it in the process. Once it blows up the other parts cool down, or if the bay is opened temperatures return to normal. In the second case one of my parts will jump from sub 400 to over 2000 instantly, this usually happens to a probe core entering the atmosphere around 65-70,000 meters. Once my ship gets hit with this crippling heat issue it persists through saving, reloading, or changing scenes- but it does not happen all the time and I have not been able to build a craft that when launched will experience the problem in a way that can be repeated. When this does happen to a vessel with radiators on it, they do not help in managing the out of control temperatures.

I think (like a few others) that it may be related to the time-warp, I notice this when I move forward and then stop either to setup a maneuver node or to take more deft control of a vessel during re-entry. There are a few posts on this for both the modded and unmodded support sub-forums, FAR appears to also cause an issue similar to this for different reasons.

[monstah]

My issues with exploding batteries was caused by FAR, uninstalling it fixed them.

...which is a shame because I really like FAR hopefully it will update soon.

[Technical Ben]

That may be a false positive Monstah. I get similar bugs and don't have FAR.

[linuxgurugamer]

This is a bug in 1.0.4, known and logged

[John FX]

This is a bug in 1.0.4, known and logged

Awesome job they do over there in Squadland. The community calls out for the bug in the heating display to be fixed so they fix it and introduce another that makes your ship explode.

Wonder what version we will get to before we can just launch a ship and not suffer a bug with the heating system?

At least I now know it`s not a 64 bit hack bug...

EDIT : FAR does not cause the bug although AFAIK it changes some values that make it a little worse. Ferram is aware and looking into it although if the bug is in the main game I don`t think they will be able to do anything as it`s not caused by their mod, like bugs in W64.

Edited July 9, 2015 by John FX

[ajburges]

Wish we could hack together a work around of simply disabling heat flux for stowed parts. It could be abused, but leaving cargo bays open as plasma streams by just seems wrong. Plus, those parts can get rather toasty if you keep the door open during aerobrakeing.

Maybe just fix stowed parts to cargo bay internal temperature and add their thermal mass to cargo bay for correct average internal temperature?

Edited July 9, 2015 by ajburges

[BDelacroix]

To answer the question, yes. My science tools all blow up inside the cargo bay. I've kind of stopped playing until it gets fixed.

[monstah]

That may be a false positive Monstah. I get similar bugs and don't have FAR.

Maybe, but I think it fixed the specific triggers that were happening in my save, at least. I mean, one day I quicksaved a flight just fine, but the ship would consistently explode on load. That's when I started testing, and FAR was the one that did it.

Thinking now, I could have run a second test installing only FAR on that same save... too late unfortunately.

So far tho, no explosions, so I'm fine for the moment

[monstah]

Yeah, just had some solar panels explode randomly on a rescue mission. Nothing critical, but same bug with FAR uninstalled.

Really, this is annoying.

[PB666]

Several of my SSTO craft seem to blow a fuse (specifically the Mk2 drone core) whenever they reach the upper atmosphere just before circularising orbit. I've tried to isolate the problem and found that it is associated with control modules, cargo bays and time acceleration:

http://i.imgur.com/Up9WG64.gif

Just before exploding, the temperature of the control module and surrounding parts fluctuates wildly (from 4 degrees to over 2500 degrees* within a couple of frames), seemingly triggering under these conditions:

1. the control module is attached to a cargo bay

2. time is accelerated x2

If the cargo bay is replaced with another part (e.g. a fuel tank) no extreme heat fluctuations or explosions take place... similarly nothing bad happens when time acceleration is not used. So it appears like the physics engine can't keep up with cargo bay heat management during minor time warping or something along those lines. Inigma previously posted some explosive observations on cargo bays and control modules, however, those conditions where somewhat different as to what I'm encountering here. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, and if so, with which parts and under which conditions?

I've yet to try if this also triggers with the cargo bay open or during day time (in Inigma's thread there was mention of this only happening at night). I'll keep you posted.

* Not displayed in this gif for the record

I have craft with high ISP engines that burn from essentially 5k to Space, they overheat. A couple of things I found was to make the gravity turn later, and to reduce throttle as soon as possible, preferably below 50%. I haven't yet had parts on a craft overheat after I reduced throttle below 50%, but have many craft that came close.

Any electronic device (probe core, battery, solar panel, etc.) will heat up the quickest and be the slowest to cool down. The problem with SSTO is that you need radiators close the stack just about the engine, the longer you intend to hard burn, the more radiators you need. Having said that the heat model is still whack, and some heat may remain under very unrealistic circumstances.

Bottom line is that long burns at full throttle need some remediation.

-----

You can try putting a heat shield between the lowest tank and the engines and rigging a fuel line between the tanks, that had some effect up until 1.0.3

Edited July 11, 2015 by PB666

[annallia]

I haven't run into this problem with any of my vessels yet... I have however run into it with kerbals.

I have EVA parachutes (VNG mod) so when I lose control of a plane I bail. Problem is even at the same speeds at the same altitude every once in a while a kerbal will poof and it will say they overheated. I've done this several times to test it out, seems at 200 m/s at 5,000m every third kerbal turns into popcorn.

[TrooperCooper]

Similar problems here. Very annoying.

[includao]

Very annoying. I'm disappointed.

[Landwalker]

What distresses me most about this is statements from the Squadcast stuff that there won't be any updates until 1.1... and that 1.1 is still a ways away. Considering how often I use service bays packed full of scientific instruments (I mean, that's their whole point), having the contents spontaneously explode is really putting a damper on my games.

[TrooperCooper]

Spent the better part of the day working on a project... just to have a battery repeadingly explode in space from overheating for no apparent reason, beheading my spacecraft.... *ugh*

[Perry Apsis]

I ran into this with a probe recently, or at least, something like it. OKTO2 probe core, I think, inside a 1.25m Service Bay, along with a couple of Z-100 batteries, 2HOT Thermometer, PresMat Barometer, Goo Container, and a (mod part) radial-style Science Jr. There were weird temperature things going on from the launchpad, but it didn't finally get out of control until the craft was hanging out in space, when something (I think it was the thermometer and the barometer, not 100% sure) spontaneously exploded. Unfortunately I don't have as much detail as you have to substantiate or flesh out the event, but I definitely got weird temperature behavior.

Incidentally, the probe core itself never exploded (I don't recall if it had a heating issue or not).

I've found I have to open the Service Bay right away or the components inside overheat. I tried putting radiators on the outside of the bay and it didn't seem to make any difference. I went back and forth for a while over whether this was a bug or feature (kind of makes sense, that electronic components insulated by vacuum and inside a compartment so the heat can't radiate directly away, would overheat). But the heat stats get really crazy, with the conductive flux going strongly positive and strongly negative many times a second. Plus I've now seen enough glitchy temperature problems that I'm sure the enclosed-component thing is a bug.

EDIT:

That is, I open the service bay immediately upon reaching vacuum, and keep it that way until it's time to reenter. I haven't had any problems with overheating since I started doing that.

Edited July 15, 2015 by Perry Apsis