Chris Windle

Yes, this has been happening to me as well, since the first release. It seems mostly random, but there are certain things where it becomes almost predictable. Such as, reverting to VAB to modify something. Many times it dies in the VAB while making changes or while loading. Another place where it crashes a lot for me is on final approach landing on a planet or moon. If I do manage to land, it happens alot after I eva a kerbel onto the surface to explore. It also seems tied to a specific save. i.e. once I have certain ship design that has caused the game to crash, if I completely restart and load that same saved game, it will either crash very quickly or before it even finishes loading. And in none of these cases am I hitting a low memory condition, with it using at most 50% of my RAM. Very frustrating and always results an me shutting it down and swearing I am not playing KSP2 until next release. But, then the urge to accomplish something creeps back in and I grit my teeth and deal with several crashes (and maybe make some progress) before I get a ship designed and ready to fly somewhere, then deal with more crashes while trying to load at my destination. Then, I finally run into a particular build that seems to crash right away, so after about 5 crashes in < 15 minutes, I get frustrated and shut it down and swear I am not playing it again until next release

My Integrated Flight Test - The booster didn't land on a platform, but did land near the runway. https://www.facebook.com/chris.windle.794/videos/876094914249621

First to post hitting airstrip island with an unmanned probe: https://www.facebook.com/100000371147328/videos/pcb.7081285911893710/295395856745899 Hitting a hole in one: https://www.facebook.com/100000371147328/videos/pcb.7081285911893710/1381502502714621

My lap: https://www.facebook.com/100000371147328/videos/pcb.7081285911893710/310508201844134

Here are two steps of the challenge, going under R&D Bridge and landing on VAB: https://www.facebook.com/100000371147328/videos/pcb.7081285911893710/1070329281081825

I don't thing this week's challenge was very difficult, just brute force everything with little rockets and pray you don't need any struts. Until all the booster are gone... Setup a rendezvous with the Mun... Smoothest first time landing on the mun without even needing a retry. Val was sure happy to plant the flag: Not a lot of fuel left for the voyage home, but in the spirit of Cavemen components, who needs a heat shield, just point at Kerbin and use up all of the fuel. Even with all of the fuel spent, I still was on target for splashdown at the KSC, just overshot it a little. Got to hand it to those small parachute packages...they really do the job perfectly for a return trip to Kerbin in a one-Val capsule. nice gentle landing, let Kerbin do all the work Next stop, Duna!

Yes, this wasn't that difficult of a challenge, except my VAB kept closing spontaneously. But, I finished the New Horizons probe and designed the rocket: D Launch went flawlessly, gravity assisted off of Jool, which sent my trajectory out of the Kerbol system, but missed the Eeloo window. Then, I realized that I was video capturing the unused display the entire time. So, all I managed to capture was the probe after 715 years travelling away from the system: But, even after 715 years at 4604 m/s, if I scroll out...way out....I can finally see the Kerbol SOI:

I am posting this a couple days after the latest challenge is already available, but since I saw only a couple entries, I thought I would post my challenge results that I only just finished. Last week I upgraded my PC main hard drive to an WD-Black 2TB SSD and not only is the startup and access times loading so much faster, obviously, I haven't seen one crash in KSP2 since then. I can't say that my old drive was causing the crashes that I did get before or not, but I am really glad for the upgrade. Thanks to my son Sean for the awesome present. The rocket for my shuttle launcher is the same base rocket I used for the Korolev Cross challenge in Week 21. The launch was smooth after I balanced out my load and got all my operational pods pointing in the same direction. Before that, my shuttle kept spinning out of control in orbit. Val was physched about the trip: It's a little dark, since we deployed the first stage of our new space station on the dark side of kerbin. But, we had a nice view of the mun when we did: I would love to say the landing was smooth, but we tumbled nearly out of control for the first 50,000m to only get control and level it out around 5,000m. It was looking pretty good on approach: And then we ran out of fuel before getting the runway lined up: And it ended badly: But, in true Kerbel fashion, we tried again, this time paying more close attention to the remaining fuel and landed perfectly, my first successful landing of something bigger than a medium-sized jet. Even P.A.I.G.E. said I didn't fail! But, I was surprised that Val had to deal with almost 4.2g. Is that normal?

Since we were going for pretty pictures, I didn't bother dealing with any sort of functionality requirements. I put some boosters on wings attached to my boosters, to boost them away in an interesting pattern. Likewise, while I could wait for the boosters to be empty after I was just about in orbit (which I did do), It ended up looking way more cooler to separate them just after take off. My rocket didn't quite make it to orbit because of this, but since it was un-kerbeled, what's the harm in the name of science and art. What do you think? I am still working out how to get this rocket to another planet or moon to try for the Val goal. And here is a top-down view: But, the coolest is to see it all happening in real time: https://www.facebook.com/100000371147328/videos/pcb.6668985576457081/668898095136383

After missing the last two weeks of challenges due to the VAB crashing on me, usually within placing or moving just 4-5 parts, with version 1.3.0, I managed to create a simple plane without it crashing and was able to complete this challenge. But, I tell you, this was extremely difficult without a controller to fly the plane. I must have crashed and reloaded over 500 times to get one clean run of the Val challenge. Air-Show tricks: https://www.facebook.com/100000371147328/videos/pcb.6603933059629000/288624440307915 Val Challenge: https://www.facebook.com/100000371147328/videos/pcb.6603933059629000/760525699137974

This looks a lot like many of my own e-mails I send out to my development and QA team after finding and fixing a bug. I still do this, even though I know that about 80% of the readers stopped reading it after the first paragraph and skip to the last paragraph which summarizes the end result, but I still do it with the hopes that at least one of the readers finds it helpful by either providing context when testing it in QA or in finding and fixing some future bugs. Plus, I know on at least one occasion where my boss told the entire team that, after reading the entire thing for the third time, he totally agreed with the product release delay in order to find and fix the issue. I know from experience that it can be frustrating getting unhelpful feedback from people, as you spend sometimes weeks trying to find the one line of the code that is causing the problem. I often hear the comment about finding a bug is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. However, If the cause of the problem stood out as obvious as this thing that is totally different from all of the other things around it, it would would make the job of debugging so much easier, even when your software has millions of lines of code. However, nobody writes code where the line of code with the bug in it looks any different than the lines before or after it. If they knew it was going to be a bug when they wrote it, they would have fixed it in the first place. So, in reality it is much closer to trying to find a very specific needle in a needlestack, sometimes when you don't even know which specific needle you are looking for. It is very easy to skip right over the right needle, after sifting through thousands of other needles, already. So, in similar fashion as my issue summaries of my own, I will summarize by saying, from one dev to another, great job on explaining the way the system works and how you found the solution. There are those of us out here that do read the whole thing and find the information useful.

I decided since I finally posted completion of a challenge last week, why not go for two weeks in a row. I have never built a base before, but figured it couldn't be too difficult. I decided instead of just going to the Mun, I would shoot for Duna and try landing my base right next to the Kerbel Face, in order to meet the Val and Tim C challenges. I wanted to meet the other challenges, too, and since there have been so many problems with docking ports, I decided to build the entire base as a single transport and send it all in one, go, complete with habitat for at least 20 Kerbels and a large communication/observation tower. Then, I would send the pressurized rover as a second trip using the same transport vehicle used to send the base. I figured if Matt Loane can send huge satellites, floating bases, bases in the Mohole, all in one go, why can't I? I even designed my base with a similar look to one of his. I forgot to take a screenshot on takeoff, but here we are entering Duna orbit, trying to locate our landing spot: And here we are beginning our descent to Duna: And here we are using the atmosphere to our advantage (is 52 parachutes a lot?): And after 17 tries, here we are finally landing almost on top of the face: It was at this point I realized that I sent the base without any Kerbels. No problem, I will just load up the rover with Kerbels and bring them on the next trip. I have made many rovers before, but mostly smaller 2 Kerbel units, with outside seats. But, I have had so many issues trying to get the rover attached without completely scrambling it all up during the build or in-flight, so I decided to use a pre-built good-sized rover off the kspbuilds webiste, to avoid this problem. I am not sure why I thought these rovers would be immune to all of the problems I have seen, but I must have thought this for some reason. I grabbed the Draken Nomad, primarily because it was pressurized, held 12 Kerbels, and already come with a sky crane attached to it. I couldn't just use the stock version, so I added some LED light strips to give it a neon underglow. Of course, it took several attempts to attach the rover to my launch vehicle, without rotating the engines or scrambling the rover up so much that it looked like it had been in a head-on collision going 120mph. But, In the end I had it attached and we launched it towards Duna. I even remembered to get the screenshot this time: It was at this point that the Kraken arrived, unannounced, to setup camp for awhile. I don't know how many tries it took to get the lander to Duna without blowing up mid flight, flipping the launch vehicle uncontrollably on launch or having the rover flip upside down trying to land, or hitting the ground going sideways, or all sorts of other wrong endings. Here we are bringing down the rover to Duma (almost guaranteed that this was not one of the successful landings): After repeated reloads and attempts to land without crashing, I was beginning to get dejected. I have learned to save as soon as I land and cut the engines, because this seems to be the most common occurrence of the game crashing for me. But, this time it was especially bad. I think I looped 6 times loading my save, having it immediately crash and then restarting the game and repeating this, before I finally stopped for several hours, before gaining enough patience to try it again. Sp. after the break, I finally managed to land with only a short drive to the base, without the PC crashing or the rover crashing., yay! But, upon driving to the base, guess what? the base was gone. I had to think for a bit...did I load the wrong save at some point before launching my rover? I checked the tracking station, and yep there was no base there. This was close to a point where I considered scrubbing the entire challenge, but I was not going to let this beat me. So, I loaded up my save with the base, and repeated the whole process of sending the Rover to Duna, retrying to get it to land without crashing and finally got the rover to the base, only the base was not there again. what? I figured, this was some Kraken BS, while Tim C Kermin speculated it might be the spider people came and dismantled our base and took it all underground, before we could get there with the rover. All I knew is that I was going to get to the bottom of it. So, I enabled the lazy orbit mod, loaded my base save, switched to the VAB,, grabbed my rover, and then just landed it next to the base....and poof, the base was still gone. I went to the tracking station, and it showed my base was still there. I tried to take control, but It wouldn't let me do that because I was controlling another vessel? Back to that problem that happned pre patch 1 issue. So, I jumped one of my Kerbels out of the rover and then took control of my base, and this worked. So, where was my base? it was inside Duna and falling inwards, of course. After repeating dozens of experiments trying to figure out how to get my base and the rover to Duna without one or both of them sinking into the planet, I discovered I just had to have one Kerbel be onsite, not even in the base, and the base would remain on the surface. I guess as long as there is someone around that can see the base, the base is not allowed to defy physics. But, if there is nobody around to see it, then physics don't apply. So, after so many hours of repeating the same thing over and over, I finally managed to get my rover and 12 kerbels to the base on Duna. I had them all come out (except one stayed inside to make sure the base didn't randomly teleport somewhere) to take a successful challenge screen shot: And then, I was so exhausted, I declared I was done and called it a day. Then, after waking up 12 hours later, I decided it was time to post the screenshots here. .

Yes, this is very frustrating, spending much time designing a cool rover vehicle and then trying to carefully attach it where you want it and, whoops, in less than 1/2 second your cool vehicle looks like something better sent to a junk yard.

I have the same issue and have spent weeks trying to design a lander that can undock, land, and return to mothership, because either the lander keeps wobbling and breaking off of main ship during launch (because no struts) or won't undock (because struts prevent it). I have had to come up with other ways to attach the lander and put the docking port on the side or somewhere else, so the lander can return to the mothership and dock.

This one happens to me all the time and it is very easy to reproduce. The easiest way is with small parts (that have not much to grab onto) that have the wrench icons to size them. For example, start with a blank VAB and add the XS Payload Fairing. Then attach an xs decoupler on top of it. Now, select the combined object. Congratulations, you now can't put it down because instead it activates the Fairing creation. But, since you are cursor is over the wrench and it stays there, clicking will just toggle in and out of edit fairing. You also can't delete it for the same reason. One way to get unstuck is to attach it to something, hold down the mouse button and move the mouse outside the wrench circle and let go. But, this requires you to have a part already there to attach it to. Sometimes switching to out of the program to another Windows window and back can allow you to get unstuck, but this is rare. Another way out is to hit Escape and exit the VAB to somewhere else and then come back again.

The Val Level Challenge for Week #15 - Dock with Moho - Airbrake around Eve, Land on Gilly using just a jetpack, plant the flag and return to Kerbin. Taking the original rocket created to go to Moho, before the lander was eaten by the Kraken. So, rip the lander off and put a simple pod on the top, since we aren't going to need a lander. Look mom, no hands. no maneuver points. We will let Eve pump the brakes! Aerobraking around Eve...why did I choose a second stage that was purple? And here comes Gilly... ok, so I packed 3 times more fuel than I needed. Here comes the sun, which means it is just about time to jump out of a perfectly good ship, without a parachute! It was right about here that KSP2 crashed 3 times until I was able to jump out of the ship and head to the surface of Gilly, successfully. Look mom no hands again, and no lander, and no parachute....wait, this seems like a bad idea now! It turns out, when you are only going 20 m/s, landing is not very hard. Note to self - next time make sure you are at the top left before pasting screenshot to ms paint. Another note to self: take two kerbals on missions so one can stay on the mothership in orbit, because apparently, unmanned vessels like to deorbit when nobody is there to stop it. Quick, we better get the heck off this rock and rendezvous with the mother ship before it crashes. Wow, I didn't know you can do ship maneuvers without a ship...oh wait, you can't because I don't have enough fuel? huh? Well, at least I can see my trajectory after running real fast and jumping in the air and going straight to escape trajectory? I knew I parked that ship out here, somewhere...there it is! Ok, course back to Kerbin is plotted and we are on our way back! Look at that, perfectly lined up with the KSC, and even though you can't see it, there is way more fuel than I needed. But, every other time I have tried one of these challenges, I failed to make it home, because I didn't have enough fuel. This time, I was going to be sure to have enough. Ok, apparently I was coming in too fast and over-estimated how much the Kerbin atmosphere would slow me down and we overshot the KSC a little, by a hundred a thousand meters or so. But, at least the parachute deployed. I thought for sure this was going to malfunction. And Samzon Kerman is the first of my kerbals to successfully complete a weekly challenge with documented evidence (I completed several the first 2-3 weeks after release, but failed to document the landings, and failed to return back to Kerbin, because of Kraken attacks or poor planning on fuel requirements. Someone call me an Uber to get back to the KSC!

Update: So, I finally launched my satellite deployment rocket and now trying to get it setup for the first satellite release at 1/3 of orbital period, and there doesn't seem to be any display of orbital period anymore. My math is not bad, but I know from experience if my orbital period is not exact to the microsecond, I will slowly lose my spatial separation of 120 Degrees. So, I guess the communication network is on hold for now.

A very simple goal: Create a rocket and launch 3 small satellites in orbit around Kerbin for initial communication network. 1) Start by creating base satellite, place HEC, place communication disk, save game and workspace. place 2 radial solar panels. crashes and exits. 2) Restart and load save, Attach fuel tank and engine. crashes and exits. Repeat this step 4 or 5 more times until the base satellite is complete. 3) Restart and load save. Make copy of satellite 3 times and stack. save game and workspace. add small fairing. crashes and exits. Repeat this 3 or 4 times until able to complete before crashing. 4) Restart and load save. Add rocket base and engine. Repeat this 3 or 4 times until able to complete before crashing. 5) Move to launch pad and test launch. Launch went ok, but ran out of fuel before orbit. Revert to VAB. crash and reload. Repeat 3 or 4 times until able to get boosters attached and to the launch pad. 6) Need to take a break from all the reloading and go play something that doesn't crash constantly. 7) Note: This was on Sunday, following a similar experience on Friday and Saturday, where I did successfully land on the Mun, and then on Minmus. These actually went pretty well, with less crashing after I reduced the graphics settings to medium. However, on Sunday it was crashing more frequently.