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Why does my station rotate?


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So while in orbit around kerbin, I have this station I'm working on. It's really long, so this might be the cause of the problem, also the center of mass isn't directly in the center of the station.

But what is happening is the station rotates in orbit, even after I use time warp to stop it. I don't have it moving, so I don't know why this is happening. What can I do?

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I have this too with large space stations that have many pieces. I've limited this effect by using cargo bays to stuff much of the parts inside. The structural parts are now Mk3 size and include cargo bays, it means less parts to wobble together and enter resonance...

The whole station has less parts (due to better skills after hundreds of KSP hours) and is less prone to auto-rotation.

I don't remember this but: aren't cargo bays including "invisible struts" now in 1.1.2? (like airstreams)

 

 

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On 5/26/2016 at 11:16 AM, bewing said:

Does it rotate once per orbit?

I don't know what you mean by this, but I'll try to give a good answer.

 

It rotates very slowly. like, it turns around a full 90 degrees about every 50 orbits. It shouldn't do this, though. It should stay still. 

On 5/26/2016 at 11:44 AM, Padishar said:

Do you have a trim applied?  That could be causing your station to slowly spin up again after timewarp.  Try hitting Alt-X to reset the trim and see if it stops...

I tried this, didn't seem to work. I'm on mac so what would the key configuration be?

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OK, with that description, I can say that yes I am seeing it too -- even with small ships. There are small phantom forces that make everything start to rotate slowly and drift off their initial orientation if you just sit and watch them. It doesn't happen on rails. I think it happens because all the parts of any ship are pushing on each other, and the forces do not all cancel perfectly to zero (the way they should) because of rounding and "precision" errors.

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