Vessel-cooking radiative flux: Bug or feature?

[btford]

So I have a potential problem that seems very different from the weird insta-boom, NaN temp, gajillion degrees K temps, etc. that are being discovered post 1.0.

My problem is that over the course of some hours spent with a vessel loaded, the various parts heat up slowly until the entire vehicle glows like a hot coal. This is in Kerbin orbit.

I enabled the thermal debug info in the context menus and found that the only contributor to the heating was radiative flux. For almost every part, it was somewhere between .05 and 1.5, which is enough to slowly cook the station. Flux drops, but does not go negative on the dark side of Kerbin. I would expect the heat to radiate out at some point, but it never does, the parts just get hotter and hotter until they explode, 1 by one. (ignore max temp is enabled in the pic below, hence the high temps for a few intact parts) The first to go was a rocket engine attached to a large fuel tank, so I don't think tiny parts are the issue.

Is this a case of me not having enough radiators? Should LKO cook a station like this?

Also, what's the best way to experiment with an unmodded install? Any shortcuts? That's quite a list to uninstall and reinstall for testing purposes.

Thanks.

[btford]

Soooo, undocked the various parts of that station into 4 separate craft. Heat started radiating away just fine. Not sure what the docking did, but it apparently was the problem.

[Yski]

Have you tried removing FAR? Apparently there's a stock bug that has to do with parts clipping into other parts, and FAR makes it worse.

Looking at the FAR thread, someone mentioned that avoiding stock batteries might help. I also recall reading that you could edit the savefile to replace an infinite with a zero somewhere on the overheating craft and that should stop the overheating, but I couldn't find that particular post for you.