Action at a distance?

[Red Dwarf]

So I've been messing around a lot with the new aerodynamics, like all of you, and I've discovered something odd. I first encountered it with a little supersonic jet I built. One of my favorite things to do with it is blow past the Space Center at low altitudes and ridiculous speeds. On one of my passes, some of my ground installations exploded the instant I passed over them. I hadn't collided with it, and my plane wasn't at all damaged, it just blew up as I went over. I wrote it off as a bug caused by extreme speed, and chose to believe my it was my shockwave that did the damage. Some roleplay always invigorates a sandbox game

However, I encountered it again. I've been testing my new spaceplane all day, and on one of my full-up tests, I ran into the bug again. I was coming in from the ocean, low and slow. On my final approach, I heard an explosion and momentarily lost control. Once I'd landed, I noticed that the left-hand control surfaces were gone, and the launchpad was burning. I had left some debris on the pad from a previous test, so I thought it was just that. However, when I read the mission report, it said that the control surfaces had knocked the launchpad and been destroyed. I was nowhere near the pad when this happened. Has anybody else encountered this?

[LittleBlueGaming]

Hehe, your sig pic is so apropos.

I've never blown anything up without touching it though, off to try and fly past the tower as fast as I can.

[Red Dwarf]

As far as I've tested, the buildings don't blow up. I was talking about a mockup of a Duna base which I hadn't bothered to clean up. It was all but obliterated after I flew past it.

[LittleBlueGaming]

Oh, I see. I just flew past the tower at about 900m/s, less than a wingspan of space, but no kablooey

- - - Updated - - -

Huh. Put a stupid little rover on the launchpad, flew over it about 100m at 900m/s, and it looked like it got hit by my shockwave, launched itself over mission control. I got out of physics range of it before it crashed, so it was sitting on the screen at the space center. Click fly, and it loaded about 20m above the ground, then crashed.

- - - Updated - - -

Got some pics finally. You can see my rover(science module and cupola) near the ground. I'm also fairly certain that it launched off the launchpad before I got to it.

[mdkendall]

I normally put flags at either end of the runway to use as navigation aids, and several times I have found one fallen over and I have had to replace it, and I'm sure my last landing I didn't hit it.

I also once put a flag on the roof of the tower on the island. Later I flew over it, several hundred meters above it, and knocked it off in to the ocean.

So yes, collision mesh bugs I guess.

[Red Dwarf]

So this ain't just me then. I'm not going nuts, at least.

This really is bizarre. I figured that it was just the engine having trouble calculating relative velocities when you pass through the loading range so quickly, but that doesn't explain how my wingtip clipped the launchpad from hundreds of meters away. I was only going about 60 m/s, and one of the tanks next to the pad exploded like I'd hit it with an asteroid. And again, this was when I was landing at the runway, in no way near the launchpad.

[*Aqua*]

It's probably the "crashed into the KSC"-bug which is around for many versions. It's a bug where a part of your plane/rocket/etc. or everything suddenly explodes when flying near the KSC. The flight log then reports that you hit a building - even if you where far away. There were players who lost satellites in orbit(!) due to this bug while they passed above the KSC.

I thought it was fixed in 1.0 but it seems it wasn't.

[KerikBalm]

I can recall at least once as I was coming in for a landing on the runway from the sea (a bit of an overshoot for my SSTO on reentry), that some things (the spherical fuel tanks?) on the launchpad just randomly exploded... it was quite annoying, as I had to quickload, and then do the approach all over again (it was career mode, and I wasn't about to pay for repairs because of some bug... which is also why I won't play without quickload available)

[Sharpy]

Exhaust flame can damage anything in its path, but in your case the direction of action would contradict that theory; exhaust would push things *away*.

[Borsek]

It's a known and unexplainable\unfixed bug. It used to be delta wing parts colliding with the launchpad if you passed its horizontal line as far as 20km away from KSC. Appears to happen after a circularization. It can happen anywhere, even in space. I think it's linked with the bug that makes launchpad rockets with launch clamps materialize in orbit on launch. With 70km long clamps. It's a weird bug, but this seems to be just another iteration of it. Good to have hyperedit for these shenanigans.

[Majorjim!]

It's probably the "crashed into the KSC"-bug which is around for many versions. It's a bug where a part of your plane/rocket/etc. or everything suddenly explodes when flying near the KSC. The flight log then reports that you hit a building - even if you where far away. There were players who lost satellites in orbit(!) due to this bug while they passed above the KSC.

I thought it was fixed in 1.0 but it seems it wasn't.

LOL, bugs? fixed? We have been going blue in the face trying to get Squad to fix these age old bugs. We are close to giving up because they simply don't listen.

[Borsek]

It's probably not them not listening, it's them unable to find the source - most of the real gamebreaking bugs are sporadic, and you will only encounter them after playung for hundreds of hours. I know to avoid using the claw, since it is particularly bug-ridden, but the rest is ok. They've fixed a lot of easy to root out bugs between 1.0 and 0.9, but I think some of the old ones are either deeply buried in the origibal old code, or hard to track down. Either way, they are most likely to be fixed if KSP is rewritten from scratch, possibly that is what's happening right now, since it is supposedly being updated to a newer unity engine iteration. One can only hope.

[Red Dwarf]

Yeah, I figure that's what it is. The shockwave bug only seems to happen sometimes, and only with particular craft. My Duna base mockup was destroyed by my supersonic pass, but the planes I had in front of the SPH were untouched. Similarly, maybe one in twenty landings have been disrupted by phantom collisions. It seems pretty much random, and all of it can be avoided by liberal use of quicksave

[smjjames]

How about colliding with the launchpad no less than 50m off the ground (after accounting for the rockets height)? I ran into that somehow after an exception occured and I kept colliding with the launchpad shortly after liftoff. A game reload cleared it out though.

[Borsek]

Yer, I'm not expert at debugging, but I am a hobbyist modder, so I know the general aspects. Sporadic bugs especially are hard to track down, once you track the bug down fixing it is usually easy. But there have been no consistent reports of this happening, and usually a save/reload or game-exit/reload fixes them anyway.