I had this unpleasant experience happen tonight, and I believe I have a quicksave that can reliable replicate it. In my case on the lander portion of a duna ship I have Structural Wing Type A's attached to serve as attachment points for my landing gear. My mission plan was to send my main Duna ship on its way, then one orbit later send a tanker after it, to refuel the Duna ship for a possible Ike mission. I kept the Duna ship and the Tanker docked in LKO, where they had been for just over a year game-time. I couldn't remember why I had missed the last launch window, until my wing destructed and I realized I had had this experience with this ship before. This was shortly before the last update, so I just chalked it up to something that was being worked on, then forgot about it after migrating my save to .90 lol. Anyway, with this ship in orbit, as the launch window for Duna approached I sent up a crew, and after loading them I switched to a higher orbitting ship so I could use faster warp to get up to the Duna injection node. After switching back to my Duna ship, poof go the wings, with some nice grey smoke briefly shrouding that section of the ship. I'm running KSP .90, 32-bit version on Windows Vista. I have the latest MechJeb installed, and I know the OP was running un-modded, but from reading about this error it doesn't sound like it originates from a mod. Here are some screenshots showing the issue, and note that I wasn't even over the KSC when this happened: Note the wing just above the Navball, that didn't self destruct, and the lonely empty area between tank and landing gear just above it After this incident I reloaded an earlier quick save, then tried undocking the Duna ship from the tanker, then going to the higher ship to warp, this time a little closer to the node. I switched back to the Duna ship about 9 minutes before the node, and this time the wings didn't go poof immediately. So I made another quicksave and got the SAS system to orient my ship toward the node. At 8 minutes and 17 seconds before the node, one of the wings destroyed, again with angry grey smoke. Then at 8 minutes and 10 seconds, its neighbor explodes. I reloaded to see if it did this when the ship wasn't moving to point toward the node, but again this happened at 8m 17s and 8m 10s. It seems pretty reliable, so if anyone with better KSP knowledge wants to try it out, feel free: Self destructing ship.sfs