Mission failed but I don't know why

[Slaghead]

Ok, I don't have screenshots so I'll have to describe what happened and maybe someone can tell me if it's a game-glitch or something that I did wrong because I had to rage quit when it happened.

I was reading the forum and I saw people commenting that it is just as easy to get to Minmus as it is to get to the Mun and it yields more science. So I thought, "Hey, I want more science!". So I went and built a rocket to get me to Minmus.

I got the thing up and brought up enough fuel to make it there and back a couple of times. I thought things were golden. So I set it up for the transit to Minmus and was just watching it coast. I play real-time and that 8 day transit was a lot more painful than the few hours it takes to get to the Mun. But oh well, I've never seen Minmus up close so it'll totally be worth it.

A few days later, 3 days away from Minmus influence, I still can't see it, it must be tiny, eh? I am sitting on the couch watching a movie with the map on the computer so I can glance at the clock counting until my next node and I see my orbit going back and forth between Minmus encounter and Kerbil orbit. I frowned and got up to take a look and my ship was just spinning around all weird but otherwise appeared to be fine. So I stabilized it and saw on the map that I was heading toward Minmus encounter and figured I was good to go. Looked at the ship again real quick and noticed I had 4 staging markers with nothing under any of them. I figuratively scratched my head and figured it was just some sort of a glitch so I went to the space center in order to re-load the ship. I went in to the tracking station and found my ship and two pieces of debris from my ship which was odd because there shouldn't be any debris yet but I hadn't jettisoned anything out of the atmosphere yet. So I proceed to load the only non-debris item and I just see the lander from my ship and then a second later, I notice the rest of my ship floating next to it, fairing still intact and everything. I was getting pretty steamed because it's already been 5 days watching this thing go but I figure, Minmus is small, maybe I can still get this lander on the surface in one piece since we're already over half-way there. So, irritated but a little cooled off, I go back to watching my movie and when it's over, I check the game again, and I see a bunch of orange bars, presumably because it's overheating? I didn't have any radiators on it because it was just a miniature lander and I barely fit a couple of small experiments on it as it was.

So, I've taken the last week off from the game and I want to try again but I don't know what happened because I wasn't watching when it started its acrobatics. So, any idea on whether it was just a glitch in the game or another 1.0 new thing I need to account for kind of thing that I still don't know what it was?

Thanks for any help in advance!

[Vanamonde]

That's a glitch of some sort, and so, your thread has been moved to support. Sorry, I don't have anything specific to offer you about the bug itself.

[yorshee]

I've had this nasty overheating glitch happen where things inside fairings and cargo bays explode due to overheating for no reason - the ship spinning out of control could have been because something exploded, but this only happens if I physics warp. You say you don't time warp at all, so...I have no idea.

[jwenting]

had something similar approaching Eve the other day. Just before the orbital burn the probe spontaneously exploded due to overheating, without any warning whatsoever... First time I've had that happen, but I have heard of other people experiencing similar things in the past.