KSP 1.0.3 destroyed some of my crafts?

[PKing Zombie Spy]

Does anyone else observe that 1.0.3 ruined some crafts? Anyway this is what I saw. It looks like every craft I had, with a heat shield and a decoupler on that heat shield, became uncontrollable in a very peculiar way. If I attempted to "fly" that craft, then:

1. some parts of the craft would appear in strange places,
   
2. no aspect of the craft would appear controllable, I could right-click on parts and observe their status but the usual buttons would not appear,
   
3. no crew would appear to the bottom right,
   
4. if at real time (no warp), time would stand still both in terms of MET, and the crafts position would not change one jot,
   
5. if I used warp forward the camera would focus on the "root" part (whatever that might be) while the remainder of the craft appeared to "fly" behind it (as if the "root" part was still in orbit, but the remainder of the craft had undergone a total dead stop),
   
6. it was totally irresponsive to all commands,
   
7. Kerbin appeared to be a flat white circle if close, and turn into concentric white circles with transparent regions if further away (see pictures).
   

All crafts without heat shields attached to decouplers were unaffected, and appear (so far) to be working normally. (The heat shield/decoupler thing could be a red-herring for all I know, it's just the only common factor between all these craft that I saw, that was not shared by other craft that continued to work fine.)

Unfortunately, the ones with heat shields attached to were also my crewed craft. So this was incredibly annoying, because I thought for a second I'd have no choice but to declare my dozens of in flight kerbals dead. See some pics (linked, not IMGed to keep the post short):

Image 1: Here is one where the center of my craft got "shoved" to the side (note the gap in the middle, and the fuel tank that *had* been there hanging off the side to the right):

Image 2: Here is one where my craft was kind of just generally screwed up, and uncontrollable. This one was especially heartbreaking because it had a lot of science on it, with the reusable landers having visited all biomes on Minmus, and all but four biomes on the Mun. The weird white circle is where Kerbin should be.

Image 3: Here is a space station in LKO. Note that Kerbin shows up as a flat white circle.

Combined, all of my "ruined" craft had 45 kerbals on them, and a total of 9039.5 recovered science from the Mun and Minmus. So it's a good thing I know how to edit the save files. (I've had to edit save files to work around bugs before, but this was by far the most extreme. I built an empty craft on the pad with lots of hitchhiker seats, "moved" the kerbals and science into it from wherever they had been, then recovered the craft.) Otherwise I probably would have had to stop playing KSP for a good few months, because that would have been so heartbreaking.

As it is, it was mostly immersion breaking to have to "edit" people into a situation where I could possibly rescue them. Shocking at first -- when I thought I'd lost everyone and 9000+ science, the product of probably man-days of effort, I felt actually like I'd been punched in the stomach -- but I feel better now that I've made a successful recovery through hax. And now I'm filled with a bit of glee that I have 9500 total science to spend.

I run Windows 8.1, 32-bit KSP, and my mods are EngineerRedux, Kerbal Alarm Clock, and Contracts Window. I haven't seen any reports of this, and I think people would be slightly more vocal if they had seen I saw, so am I actually unique?

[NathanKell]

http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/3asi15/uncontrollable_craft_kraken_fix/

If your craft had a heat shield, apply that fix to it.

[PKing Zombie Spy]

Thank you. Thank you so much. My flights are normal again. I've reverted to my old save (I at least had the foresight to preserve my save folder), re-saved in 1.0.3, and edited them along these lines (more or less).

One very small addendum to the reddit instructions: it only says to add "attN = None, -1", but also, if "attN = bottom" is missing (in case you have a craft with nothing attached to the bottom of the heat shield, which I do), you also have to add a line "attN = bottom, -1" for that as well, or the issue will not be fixed for that craft.

[AbacusWizard]

Thank you! I was having this exact same problem and had no idea what was going on; was afraid I'd have to, ahem, "teleport" the crew back down to the surface and decommission the whole station, docked ships and all. On closer examination one of the docked ships does have heatshields; I'll try the linked fix.

(That's supposed to be Kerbin. My first thought was that the Monolith Makers ignited fusion in the core and turned it into a second sun.)

Edited June 23, 2015 by AbacusWizard

[PKing Zombie Spy]

My first thought was that the Monolith Makers ignited fusion in the core and turned it into a second sun.

All these craft are yours -- except the ones with heat shields.

Attempt no landing with them.

[AbacusWizard]

"The thing's hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God!--it's full of bugs!"

- - - Updated - - -

Hot diggity, it's fixed! Starbridge Station is back in business!

The fix described in the Reddit link didn't quite work exactly as written (the relevant lines in my persistent file didn't look quite like the link said they should), but I finally tried deleting the three relevant lines (anything in a heatshield part starting with srfN or attN) and replacing them with

srfN = None, -1

attN = None, -1

attN = bottom, 2

attN = top, 0

and it worked!

[NecroBones]

I'm not sure I understand why new attachment nodes were added to the heatshields at all. Looking at the CFGs, it's a downward facing node, not coincident with the fairing node. Is it just so that you can attach without the fairing?

[SelectHalfling0]

I just killed my old save (farthest I went was minmus anyways).

[xtoro]

Luckily none if my 28 ships were affected. I'm spamming Duna and Ike so no heat shields

[Wheffle]

I restarted my career for every update before this, but I *really* didn't feel like starting over again. Thanks for that hack fix!

[KSK]

I'm not sure I understand why new attachment nodes were added to the heatshields at all. Looking at the CFGs, it's a downward facing node, not coincident with the fairing node. Is it just so that you can attach without the fairing?

If it works the way I think it's going to, it sounds useful for probes where I'm working with a mix of 0.65 and 1.25m parts. Not so much of an issue with capsules where the diameter tends to be matched to the diameter of my final rocket stage (so the auto-fairing works well enough).

NathanKell - many, many thanks for the hotfix. Definitely going to try that tonight - my 1.0 save is just getting interesting and, like Wheffle, I didn't fancy starting over yet again.

[malkuth]

Yeah sort of bad on them for adding new nodes. That is certainly going to cause a lot of HeartBreak if people don't find this fix.

[NathanKell]

1.0.4 is released, fixing this.