Duna encounter suddenly goes away?

[dryer_lint]

So, after reading the Interplanetary Guide and Calculator, going through the wiki, and messing around with maneuver nodes for about 15 minutes, I finally managed to get an encounter with Duna. Yay! Here we go! Unfortunately, about a quarter of the way through the trip, the encounter suddenly... goes away. Nothing important, right? It's probably just the timewarp-inaccuracy thing. It'll correct itself, right... ?

Anyways, as Duna got closer and closer, nothing happened. I did not get captured and my wonderful encounter icon never came back.

Does anyone know what happened here? I reloaded the quicksave and I'm on an escape trajectory from Kerbin. Is this a one time glitch or will I have to redo the whole flight?

Edited June 15, 2014 by Nikola7007
Post answered

[LethalDose]

Depends on how it happened. How close was your encounter? Sometimes small movements in on your vessel can very slightly change your orbit, which in turn, screws up your approach. Also, if you have pics, that can help.

Also, the game's in alpha... so bugs happen.

I strongly recommend quick-saving before making those approaches if possible to avoid these kinds of misses.

But yes, that sux.

[dryer_lint]

The encounter was probably not very close (it took 15 minutes of messing with the maneuver node), so I'm guessing that was part of the problem. I did quicksave so I'll try again and tell you if it worked.

[dryer_lint]

Oh! Never mind, I did it again and it worked! Woohoo, first interplanetary trip! It was probably the "very very​" slight changes you mentioned. Thanks for the help!

[nimbim]

I've noticed that Duna really likes to lose your encounters and afterwards you don't even have any close approach indicator showing up. Try to get your encounter as close as possible (<100km) to avoid timewarp troubles.

[MarvinKitFox]

Something that seems to help, is to not be at ludicrous speed when crossing from one Sphere of Influence to another.

If you are at 100000x time, your trajectory doesn't always transfer accurately from one state to the other.

Even more so if you are at timewarp, and not riding your ship. For example, if you are in mission control and speeding time up there.

For best accuracy, have your view on your ship when crossing boundaries, and at 100x or slower.

Also, when setting up a maneuver node..

If you get those awful jitters, where the path seems to flicker between two close-but-not-identical paths... Set your timewarp to 2x.(using just > , not alt-> )

The jitters are caused by flexibility in your ship, which gets nulled under timewarp.

A steadier ship give a more accurate path prediction.

And yes. save well, and save often. Use named save (alt-f5).

Just in case of....