se5a

I've had this happen with some of the airplane wheels - don't remember if they were firespitter or Airplane Plus parts. never did figure out what was causing it, just stopped using those parts.

I'm also getting this on one of my ships. did any of you figure out what caused it? I can however Rotate, RCS and Thrust normally, unlike the OP, at least before I' tried turning everything off, reaction wheels RCS engines etc, which had no affect - the ship still seems to be translating, though it doesn't appear to matter which direction the ship is facing. I don't have kerbal joint re-inforcement. I do have mechjeb and was using the rcs balancer on it, though I'm unsure whether the problem started happening before or after I used this. I also have many other mods installed. I'll take a look at the save game and see if I can see anything obvious there, since saving and re-loading did not fix the issue.

No autostrut on these parts. rotations on the original ship which is broken again: rotation1 = (-3.59844012E-06, 8.57389296E-07, -8.4508963E-07, 1.00000012) rotation2 = (0.0833686069, -0.251122355, -0.0833751857, 0.960747659) Hitches were locked and never unlocked. I've not used struts since the whole idea was a small redockable part. I could use the eva struts but that'd be a bit of a pain. I guess most people are not using the hitches for long periods of time, ie trip to destination then unloading it onto the ground. maybe being on the ground helps stop it from happening. I'll keep an eye on it and see if I can figure out what causes it.

pretty sure there's no autostruts on those parts, but I'll double check next time I load it up.

I've had this happen again, on a different ship. it too had something funky with the hitches going on. fortunately I caught it before it got bad enough that the ship started falling to bits, and I had an engineer on board. Taking the crooked adapter off and putting it back on again resulted in a still crooked adapter, until I took the active hitch off and put that back on again, then attached the adapter to to hitch, then the shuttle back onto the adapter. doing that seems to have 'fixed' it. for now. I also noticed that one of the active hitches had moved sideways from the node it was attached to, however it was the other active hitch that had the crooked adapter (this ship had two attached shuttles). I suspect there's something odd with how the adapter attempts to align the attached ship when it gets bumped. there's some sort of error that is increasing over time and getting saved, and it's applying force to parts it shouldn't be. It's hard to reproduce without having a long lived ship with a hitch, I'm unsure what is causing the problem to start happening. though this ship also did an atmo brake, so maybe there's something in that.

I also dislike the stock tech tree with a passion. parts seem poorly placed and ill thought out gameplay wise, forget the realisim argument, hell I hate that argument as long as it doesn't kill my suspension of disbelief too much, which in this case it does a bit, so ok use that argument a bit. You're trying to do contracts that require airplane parts before you have access to airplane parts, yet you have orbital parts. You're trying to build rovers well before there are decent wheels, and the lack of parts to attach rover wheels too. As people have pointed out, you're trying to get inside rockets on the mun with jetpacks before you have access to ladders, which is annoying. You're starting to build bases way before you get the node adapters and other sideways joint things, so without lots of part clipping things are kind of hard to build nicely. You want a little bit of the above, you want to be able to see the part you want in the next research node, not several nodes away. You want access to parts that will do the job now, but with the promise of a part that will do it better if only you had a few more research points. you want to see a parts a few nodes away and think "cool, I want to play with that thing!"

it doesn't help that most the stock wheels don't really promote low CG design either. that, and there's no much early parts to design a decent body/chassis for them.

The OP said nothing of the sort. I imagine you can make the body as small as you want, as long as the SOI has a larger radius than the radius to the surface of the body. To calculate the SOI: semiMajorAxis * Pow((bodyMass / parentMass), 0.4); where the semiMajorAxis is the semi major axis of the orbit ellipse between the body and the parent body. bodyMass is the mass of the body you're trying to make, and the parentMass is the mass of the body you're putting it (the body) in orbit around. So it's going to depend on how massy the body you're putting it in orbit around as well.

@jrbudda I suspect it could be the Making History Expansion's Fuel Tanks or Adapters that are causing the issue. I've not narrowed down which (or all, or even confirmed it yet) but I'm noticing a pattern, often my sats have an incorrect Dv reading (got one that has 0Dv even though it's not a nearly full tank) and they're all using the expansion tanks, as did the original ship.

Launching was fine, I've been to the mun and back since then. Though possibly during the last atmobreak something happened... except that doesn't make sense either, since I've raised the periapsis since then. I'll have a look at the save file and see if I can figure out how the rotation of parts are saved. The bit that's getting to me is that it seems to be exerting force when the ship loads into the scene when it shouldn't be. Edit: I changed rotation1 and rotation2 in the ModuleKerbetrotterHitch on this save from an even earlier save, it still looks funky, but it appears to have stopped affecting the cargobay and so far it doesn't appear to blow up if I switch away and back again. what are these two rotations and what do they do?

Pretty sure you're going to get far higher G forces driving a rover around a bumpy landscape than you will during a launch. also, this happened a long time after the launch. it's been to the mun and back since then. The problem is (I think) that the cargo bay is attempting to align itself to the hitch rather than to the ship, not that the hitch has gotten twisted, though the fact that the hitch itself has gotten a new alignment is likely also abnormal.

So this is happening on one of my ships: to unfortunatly I suspect it's causing my ship to explode if I switch away and back again. if I had an engineer on the ship I could detach the hitch completely to check if this is the case, my theory is that the cargo bay is trying to orentate itself to the hitch which is seperating it(the cargo bay) from the rest of the ship when I switch to it. explosions result. I've tried undocking it, but when I undock it separates between the ball and the hitch on the shuttle, rather than between the ball and the hitch on the ship (which is kind of strange, since the active hitch is the bit with the cup) and it's the ball which appears to be rotationally off. so undocking leaves the ball (which is rotationally kinked) on the ship. I've also tried unlocking the hitch but it doesn't help at all.

So I found a save that's a little earlier, if I switch to the ship there the cargo bay still does this, but not so badly, it snaps back into place without blowing the ship up, however if I switch away from the ship and back again, the problem comes back and the ship blows up. Here's a picture of the shuttle inside the cargo bay: As you can see, the link is kinked here, I'm wondering if the cargo bay is trying to orientate to this, instead of the rest of the ship. I've tried undocking and redocking, but unfortunately it separates between the ball and the hitch that is on the shuttle, not between the ball and the hitch on the main ship, and it's the ball that's rotationally offset. Anyone got any ideas of how to set the rotation in the savegame file?

I gave up and used MechJeb to do all my rover driving for me. it'll automatically slow down for corners when you set waypoints. people can whine about "cheating", but driving is just not fun. not when the only controls are full acceleration and no acceleration, without any sort of cruise control.

You can probability guesstimate it to some degree from your speed and current altitude, though there's prob information he's getting from somewhere else.

It totally does. someone else pointed to where in the menus it is earlier in the thread.

I've a friend who mentioned he was playing a game with his dad, his dad designed all the craft and my friend flew all the missions in IVA using: he also mentioned he had a mod which added cctv cameras for more external views. not sure if he's also using KER or MechJeb for extra info.

I'm unable to eva attach the harpoon back onto the winch in the right direction, it always wants to attach it with the pointy end inside the winch. ...or is this a KAS problem?

ve ha So this happens when I try switch to this particular ship all of a sudden. I've had no problems with it previously, but now the cargo bay is suddenly rotating when I switch to the ship. the ship loads in and looks normal, but a split second later this happens, then explosions and the ship flys apart. you can see that there is no thrust being applied, and that RCS is off. there may be forces being applied to the ship via reaction wheels, I may have set the remote tech widget to do the maneuver for me previously, so it's likely trying to line the ship up to target prograde, however there should be nothing on the ship that has enough torque to rip it apart like this. In the cargo bay there is another small ship which is attached/docked via the lynx mods hitches. I'm not 100% sure whether this is attached to the cargo bay or the fuel tank, from the picture it appears to have rotated with the cargo bay. Again, there's nothing on this small ship which has the tourque to rip everything apart, and I'd expect the hitch to break off before the cargobay. I've been switching too and from this ship a fair amount prior to this, as I was atmobraking around Kerbin. as you can see from the KER hud the periapsis is now above atmosphere so we're in a fairly stable orbit. I'll upload the log once I've found somewhere convenient to upload it. Edit: Log is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qE4QnnYFhxIDd8PSu0De-q-t3eMpu4rn/view?usp=sharing KSP version 1.4.5 Linux. x64 Mods... lots, there's a list in the log. Anyone got any ideas what caused this? And or how I might fix it? I can maybe try copying the ship from an older save, but if there's something in the 'broken' save that I can tweak it might be easier.

What really? I'm always getting burn/timeing conflicts , maybe not the specific one I posted previously, but I've always got something about to do an atmobrake right when I've *just* got this complicated base part lined up to dock with the station, or something on closest approach just when a kerbal is playing ragdoll down the hill on mun for *eternity*, or a geosat that's just got to it's apoapsis for a circularization burn... or a probe that's just about to come into coms range and needs to be given a burn order, or a plane halfway around Kerbin and 1.6kup on the way to check out the badlands... the list is endless. The number of times I've savescumed because some task has taken longer than I expected, and its either loose 30m of gameplay or loose a ship, is a fairly reasonable number. That being said, if it's more complicated than what it seems on the surface, I'd be more interested the contracts and science bugs getting fixed.

I'll have another play around and see if I can figure out what's going on. I'm pretty sure that on that design the only fuel carrying or using parts are stock. I did have a rover nearby which had a mechjeb module on it, which I temporarily moved it to this particular ship, mechjeb appeared to give a correct Dv reading. Emptying it and refilling it via KAS ports appeared to make the problem worse, so I'm guessing it's a KIS/KAS conflict somehow, I'll have another play around with just those mods and KER and see if I can reproduce it.

Could that be added as a feature? The stage/separation bit is only to give it a point in time to save and merge back into isn't it? If we could feed it two (or more) ships and a point in time, it shouldn't be too much of a code change I imagine, at least as I understand how it does what it does.

Can I use this to handle times when I get two burns on two different ships wanting to happen at the same time? ie, a transfer burn with minmus happening at the same time as one on the mun.

KER reading on the mun with mostly full tanks. Dv >3k!!! stage mass is wrong here. KER reading in the VAB for this stage. as you can see the full tank Dv should be 1110m/s and the stage weight should be 4365kg. Total mass is a little different due to not having full tanks on the mun picture, and some of the supplies will be consumed as well. Not 100% sure how to reliably reproduce this issue yet, will have to do some more experiments.

So I tried emptying the tanks, and disconnecting the tanks from the ship (KAS CC-R2 Connector Ports) Dv reads 0. connect the tank back up and moved all the fuel back into the ship and disconnect the tank again. Dv now reads over 3k. it should be ~ 1k. not sure what's going on here, is it miscalculating the amount of fuel? ship start mass looked about right, but the end mass didn't really add up, I'll have to double check that.