How am I heating this up?

[HenrikH]

Well, hello.

Originally started KSP way back, but haven't really found the time and so to start until a while back, with 1.0.4. Most everything I make go kaboom, I am usually myself to blame (and can figure out why) - but I'm having an issue with heating.

I've looked through a number of pages to see if I could find anything matching, but only close ones comes up.

The thing that's heating up is my rovers (all of them so far, and only them)... More specifically the ones on Mun and Minimus (I went for actual rovers because it seemed more "right" in my head).

Now, when I drive them, they get warm - ok I can accept that, makes some sense actually.

When standing parked, at night, with or without radiators they don't cool down (they may even be heating a bit) - which is where my mind starts having issues.

Image linked below is of the Mun one, which have 5 small deployable radiators and a few of the smaller fixed ones as well. Temperature overlay is evenly orange, so it looks like heat is evening out among all parts - but not leaving the vehicle?

Thermometer on the rover says around 600, with the base in the background being below 300.

Most things I can find online revolves around batteries and science things inside equipment bays having issues - but I can't wrap my head around why it only affects the rovers? All my bases and stations so far have everything in equipment bays in the exact same manner as the rover - most of them have the bay even more crammed than the rovers to boot.

Is there any obvious solution that I'm missing? Short of going back to the drawing board for my rover concept? I really liked my light, but wide, girder structure with open seats and stuff

First career game is rather stock by choice. Only have Kerbal Alarm Clock, NavBallDockingAlignmentIndicator and Mechjeb (too lazy for constant manual dV calculations) installed for ease of play.

Screenshot

Edited August 11, 2015 by HenrikH

[Laie]

The heat system has a few issues where some parts start to pick up phantom heat. Usually it involves cargo bays and/or tiny pieces like cubic struts, but it can happen literally anywhere. Sometimes it disappears when redesigning the vessel, often the overall heat level remains safe so it's not really a problem.

However, lately the cheat debug menu has been my best friend. The occasional events have frustrated me once too many and now I toggle "Ignore max Temperature" at the first sign of trouble.

[Zephram Kerman]

Some of the radiators collect heat from other parts of the vessel, and attract the heat to them. So if the radiator is attached to something heat sensitive, that might be the problem. Looks like you have a lot of them, too. Most things don't need any radiators at all, or just one. So unless it's big, five is right out.

[Belphegor]

something about heat is just off.. in my new carreer save i did a testflight with a simple jet, it didn't reach speeds over 200m/s and the engine was all the way in the back, yet the fuel tank started glowing red during landing and stayed that way after touching down and turning everything off..

also sent a hopper to the north pole for science only to find out it's 330° over there and steadily climbing! also with all systems shut down

[Laie]

Some of the radiators collect heat from other parts of the vessel, and attract the heat to them.

The extendable types actively pull heat from the hottest parts. That makes them radiate better, however, some of that heat seeps back through their socket into whatever part they're attached to. But I don't think this is the OP's problem: looking at that rover, I don't see any reason why anything should run hot in the first place.

[KerikBalm]

Is there an ISRU/mining drill anywhere on the Mun/within physics distance?

When they first added ISRU, it was quite useless, as I found on the Mun it rapidly overheated and stopped extracting/refining any ore, but it kept producing heat (making it a rather useless heater - it produced nothing but heat unless you babysat it and kept switching it on and off).

I heard that you could use wing parts as radiators (pre-1.04, they were the best), so I tested the next ISRU on the launchpad to see if I had enough... no overheating even after significant time.

Great...I thought... then I tested without the wingparts... still no overheating... must be the atmosphere I thought... which the mun doesn't have.

Then... a rover which was also loaded, sitting on the runway, overheated and parts started exploding... from my ISRU setup working on the launchpad...

So I though that KSC must be like craft parts, and be transmitting heat... so I made another, flew it up off the launchpad, and to the grass west of the VAB, still within physics distance of the rover.

The rover again overheated and blew up when I turned on the ISRU for too long... ...?!

Granted, the terrain around KSC is also not like normal terrain (it seems to render the KSC over water from a distance, and a different coastline, then you get closer and the KSC land appears)... but I really couldn't figure out ... was going on with the ISRU and heat.

Then in 1.02 they removed the heating from the ISRU stuff.

Now in 1.04, its back... so given that you have some sort of surface base there, and my past problems with ISRU and heat, I wonder if there is something like that going on with you.

[HenrikH]

Well, I think I'm going to hope that it gets corrected in the next update, and meanwhile I'll try to firstly edit the temperature low on all the parts in the save, and alternatively ignore max. temperature - but I'd like the actual things that should overheat to overheat (one of my rocket designs overheat during launch, but dissipates heat fine once coasting and orbiting).

I wonder if one should point some bug report at this, I can easily provide the current save and craft files for Squad if it'll help them narrow down the heat issues in future updates.

Some of the radiators collect heat from other parts of the vessel, and attract the heat to them. So if the radiator is attached to something heat sensitive, that might be the problem. Looks like you have a lot of them, too. Most things don't need any radiators at all, or just one. So unless it's big, five is right out.

Yeah, it is way overboard - on purpose.

I first found that my radiator-less rovers had things overheating and exploding - so I decided to make a second Mun rover where I purposefully added way too many, simply to make sure it could darn well radiate some heat energy off. Apparently though, radiators seems to radiate not much heat off at all...

I also checked the heat-map, although I didn't screenshot that. But it's perfectly even coloured orange - so the heat is perfectly dissipating throughout the vehicle, just not leaving.

Is there an ISRU/mining drill anywhere on the Mun/within physics distance?

Nada, what you see in the screenshot is pretty much what's there - there is also a tank lying a bit away which had some fuel left (now empty with an engine on it). I land my tank that I used to get there, since I always make fuel plans to account for me mucking up a bit. Later I used that to fill up the lander/return module of the base, so it's 200 % guaranteed to be able to make the final Evac back.

First rover that went boom even did it on a drive on Mun, some 15 km away from anything except Mun rock....

[Padishar]

Have you checked to make sure that your Physics.cfg file is correct? There is an issue where some installs have incorrect values in this and deleting it and letting KSP recreate a default file also generates a broken version.

You can get a stock 1.0.4 physics.cfg file from this link. I recommend comparing the two to confirm if this is actually your problem rather than just overwriting your old file...

[HenrikH]

Padishar: Yeah, I checked against the one you linked to already and they're an exact match.

Digging a bit into my save file have yielded a clue though. The Mun base in the background has the following two noticeable temperatures for all parts:

temp = 287.874472836298

tempExt = 287.962322704184

They vary, but we're talking variations in the first decimal of the degree (I'm, guessing they've been sensible and done temperatures in Kelvin?).

For the rover, standing a scant few meters away, they're instead all around:

temp = 584.080281974798

tempExt = 576.861176453913

Assmuing that tempExt is the temperature of space around the rover, it is actually likely cooling a bit, but somehow the external temperature has ended up being twice what it should be according to the base itself.

So, I'm going to skip on trying to adjust the radiator-variable in the physics, and adjust the tempExt down to the correct value for the rovers and see if that solves it.

EDIT: Since I seem to have to wait for mods to approve my post.... Success was short lived. After dropping some 20 degrees, it started going up again... Darnit.

EDIT2: Even reducing the actual temperature along with the external one it starts going up again. It seems to be the external temperature going up though, and driving the actual temperature after it.

Edited August 11, 2015 by HenrikH

[klesh]

So unless it's big, five is right out.

You made me choke on my sloths and breakfast cereals.

[Zephram Kerman]

You made me choke on my sloths and breakfast cereals.

One... two... five!

Three, sir.

Three!

[Kyrt Malthorn]

This seems to be what I'm experiencing. I was incredibly distraught when, while testing my first rover in career mode (and only my 2nd or 3rd rover design ever) it was showing me heat guages on the launchpad and exploding within seconds. I found from the flight log that a couple cubic octagonal struts in the center frame of the rover were overheating first. Yeah, some metal beams in the middle of my rover away from all the science, batteries, and anything remotely volatile, exploded. Which made no sense.

I re-built the thing one piece at a time, testing each time to make sure it wasn't causing a repeat issue. It seems to be BETTER now, even though I've done nothing different except place those struts and parts near them manually instead of symmetrically.

Now it only blows up at low time warp. 5x or greater is fine, it explodes at 2-4x normal speed. Which sucks because I'd really like to time warp roving around the Mun. So off I go to rebuild it, again. I hope a better solution comes along.