Inexplicable sudden overheating

[OmegaT]

So here I am, playing career mode. I built a small "Space-crane" to help landers with moving around the Mun.

I bring the crane around to dock with the orbiting space station when all of a sudden, BOOM, and it loses one of its engine arms. F3 said that a BZ-52 exploded due to overheating.

Here it is after the loss, at a cool 300K:

So now, debug overlay loaded, I monitor the temp. Then this happens:

Look at that conduction flux!

The arm exploded seconds thereafter. I noticed that the conduction flux was oscillating between extreme positive and negative values.

So my question is: What gives?! And how many of my ships are going to suddenly combust?

Edited July 22, 2015 by OmegaT
Known issue

[steve_v]

There are many threads on this already, so I guess you could say it's a known bug... but I have seen no answers, and no acknowledgement by the devs.

About all one can do at the moment is mitigation - turn conduction factor right down in physics debug. It breaks Squad's shiny new thermal system, but it's clearly broken anyway.

As for how many ships will be affected... roll the dice. I've taken to using the "Ignore max temp" cheat and disabling conduction every time I get within physics range of a large ship, otherwise things randomly explode.

Am I right in thinking those are all stock parts? Besides KER, what other mods are you running?

Dunno what to do about this TBH, it's killing the game for me. Maybe if we make enough noise Squad will take note?

[klesh]

You'd think this is the kind of stuff they'd work out in Beta.

[Layereddiagram]

You'd think this is the kind of stuff they'd work out in Beta.

They didn't have enhanced thermal in beta.

[almagnus1]

How effective of a workaround is adding a lot of radiators?

[Edax]

I've had this happen a few times now. First was a probe I was going to send to Duna. It was small, and had 8 parachutes, but it exploded suddenly from "overheating" while still docked. I also built a spaceship in which one of the large SAS wheels kept exploding, severing the ship in two and dooming all on-board. I have a suspect that the bug involves parts mounted on others. I had a survey scanner and docking port on the SAS wheel, and the parachutes were mounted right on the probe core. Save scumming seem to encourage their spontaneous explosions, so that there seems to be no solution other then going back to the VAH and moving attachment points off the troubled part and relaunching the ship.

[OmegaT]

Am I right in thinking those are all stock parts? Besides KER, what other mods are you running?

All stock. The KER part is stowed in the service bay. No other mods.

Save scumming seem to encourage their spontaneous explosions...

Yup. Quickload now instantly causes the 'resonance' flux oscillation.

Well, if it's a known issue then not much to do except minimize or outright disable thermal physics for now. I believe Squad will do their best to sort it out and we'll get a smoother experience with this great game.

Guess that's answered, then.

[steve_v]

They didn't have enhanced thermal in beta.

You'd think that 'enhanced thermal' is the kind of stuff they'd actually test in beta, rather than pushing it out in a "hotfix". Hot, yes. Fix, no. What the hell happened QA on these new "features"?

[ClF3]

How effective of a workaround is adding a lot of radiators?

I've actually seen cases where radiators actually amplified the issue. One rocket that was exploding shortly after reaching orbit suddenly started (partially) exploding on the launchpad after I put some rads on. In another case, I had a part with rads connected suddenly explode in low orbit, removing the rads resulted in a stable situation (or rather, the problem exhibited itself a while later)

[NJP]

I take it this is a similar issue to having all the battery packs on a spaceship suddenly explode due to overheating, yes? If so then I've had similar issued where my entire orbital station quadfurcated when I switched to it because all of the individual parts had an in-line battery that suddenly exploded due to overheating in space near Kerbin.

It may not be literally game-breaking, but I'd call it the Heat-Kraken.

[LN400]

I've had a few inexplicable explosions due to sudden, rapid overheating. One basic rocket orbiting Mun, one satelite orbiting Kerbin, to name two. It happened in stock, with KER installed and now with a bunch of mods installed. The weird thing is, if I save before things go haywire, exit the game after the explosion, start it up and reload the game, everything works smoothly with no overheating or anything.

Now I'm off to figure out how to prevent the launch stability enhancers to reappear midair crashing into the ship. Even when they don't appear at 6000m, I get a sound glitch at 6000m, I guess it's the demonic laughter from a bug watching from its hiding place.

[waterlubber]

Yeah, I just leave Ignore temp on all the time. I'm so tired of redoing entire missions.

Things to note:

Service Bays are especially susceptible to this. And so is the Atmospheic-Fluid Specto-variometer. Time warping really causes it to be a problem.

[Sheppard]

Seems to be a stock bug. Anyways, here is the solution: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/126664-MAJOR-Heating-Bug?p=2072776&viewfull=1#post2072776

[Admac]

I find those 1000ec in line stock batteries by far the biggest Heat Kraken bait, and 100% avoid them now.