Tangled up fairing temporarily breaks manoeuvre node editor

[wossname]

My only mod is Kerbal Engineering Redux (version 1.0.16.6) on KSP version 1.0.2.

It seems quite easy to reproduce this bug, but I think it is a nasty one, although I can recover from it by "wiggling" the ship around a bit with RCS. Wiggling is a technical term.

1. Build a rocket with a tall fairing at the top and add 6 radially attached long fuel tanks in such a way that the fairing shells will collide with the fuel tanks when the fairing gets jettisoned.

2. Get in a vaguely circular orbit, 100km will do, the altitude seems unimportant.

3. Turn on SAS, throttle down to 0% and kill all rotation. You just want to be drifting and holding attitude.

4. Add a new manoeuvre node say 10 minutes ahead of you.

5. quick save here for convenience.

6. Jettison the fairing - ideally you want at least 1 of the fairing shell parts to get tangled up in your ship between the fuel tanks.

7. switch to Map view and enjoy the weirdness that has infected your manoeuvre node GUI. Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out and you'll see that something is very wrong.

On my machine (even with KER disabled) this happens reliably with a fairly typical "asparagussed" rocket. If you have RCS you can try moving in reverse to attempt to free the tangled fairing shell part. Once the shell is clear of your ship the problem seems to go away and all is back to normal in the map screen.

I noticed that while the shell is tangled in the ship, I cannot use time warp to get rid of the shell fragments (as you can with a clean jettisoning) because it complains of "cannot warp while in flight over terrain" error message. Also the blue orbit path does not appear when this particular bug is in effect. Sometimes the shell parts don't look like they are touching the rocket, but SAS seems to be trying to do some heavy corrections very fast, the ship appears to be vibrating slightly, although it remains responsive to user flight controls (yaw, pitch, roll etc). Pitching hard up seems to throw the shells out of the way sometimes, unless the shells are actually clipping through the ship and then you're in trouble.

This has happened twice with two different ship designs (although the placement of the parts is similar).

edit: This bug can also happen when in sub-orbital flight above the atmosphere, which might explain the terrain remark above.

Edited May 10, 2015 by wossname