georgir

Every now and then the craft will become uncontrollable while in map mode. The "SAS" indicator becomes somewhat greyed out and the keyboard controls stop responding. Switching map mode off and back on and then toggling the navball back on restores the control, so it is not a matter of lacking a pilot, electricity, comms connection, time warp or anything like that. I get a feeling it usually happens after editing maneuver nodes, but not always and the relationship with that is still not clear to me. Just now it happened after I made a node and burned its required burn, just as I pressed the final "x" to end the burn. If it had happened a second sooner it could have been disastrous.

I just had my first set of satellite contracts, launched by piloted carrier rocket before I even built my CommNet. They did not complete in the same way you describe, and a bit of experimenting showed that they needed to have a working connection for active probe control in order to complete. Either enabling all ground-stations (I had chosen only KSC as I'm ex Remote Tech user) or disabling CommNet entirely in the difficulty settings would do the trick, or just launching a 2G antenna polar orbit craft and waiting for alignment. But note, acquiring a connection while the contract satellite is loaded does not re-evaluate the contract condition, you'll need to switch away to the space center or other craft and then back to the contract satellite while it has connection for it to complete.

I'm seeing this too and it is a major thing in this case. A small ion/solar powered probe on its way to minmus is having its APO reduced quite quickly and visibly over time, maybe by as much as 500-1000 m each second if I switch to the craft. Currently it is 48 120 000 m so as a percentage the drift is not too huge, but it still matters because if I set a maneuver node for my circularization it becomes visibly offset from the orbit in a minute, and after that if i try to edit it by a tiny amount it jumps up and shows wildly different resulting orbit... Now, I can just wait for the probe to get closer to Minmus without it being active, i.e. in the tracking station. So it is not a problem that'll break my game in this particular case. Still it is something that'd better get fixed somehow... What is it due to? Some accumulating rounding errors? But when I dont have thrust, why isn't the game doing the calculations in the same manner that it does for inactive objects?