Recovery bug

[volcanicshrimp]

When I was in the tracking station recovering the debris from my latest failed SSTO landing I managed to accidentally recover a spaceplane which was in orbit. Aren't craft only recoverable when they're stationary on the ground? I don't have any mods which should affect recovery afaik.

[Padishar]

Are you sure you didn't terminate it instead? Otherwise there may have been a problem with the vessel. Do you have a save from before that you could upload?

[volcanicshrimp]

I definitely didn't terminate it because it came up with the window showing you the kerbals which have been recovered.

I don't have a save from before but I could talk through what I did:

[wall of text:]

I put the first 3 kerbal spaceplane in orbit a few days ago. Earlier today I flew a second identical spaceplane into orbit, then switched vessels and tried to land the first spaceplane, crashing it in the process and killing all 3 kerbals. I then recovered the piece of debris which I was controlling (It had a mechjeb unit on that piece of debris so it counted as a probe of the spaceplane) and recovered the rest from the tracking station. While I was recovering the debris I must have accidentally recovered the orbiting spaceplane somehow because a window popped up telling me that I had recovered 3 kerbals and when I closed it the spaceplane was no longer shown orbiting.

[Padishar]

Well, it should be fairly easy to test that sequence though I suspect it will be hard to reproduce (it may require the implied restart of KSP between the launches or some other specific that you don't recall or realise the importance of). The button in the tracking station should only be enabled when the craft is either landed or splashed down on Kerbin so either you managed to click on it before the game had correctly updated the button state (this would be a bug that could be fixed by either disabling the button before recovering the previous vessel or simply testing the vessel again before actually doing the recover) or the vessel was actually incorrectly marked as landed or splashed down for some reason (this would also be a bug but will be tricky to track down if it is hard to reproduce).

[mattva01]

Just wanted to chime in, the same thing happened to me twice. A bit crazier though, since one of the things that was recovered was my crashed probe on the surface on eve! I do suspect it has to do with clicking through rapidly though, as I was also clearing out debris.