Both engines firing after docking

[MaxwellsDemon]

I docked two vessels that had been independently launched in LKO and sent them to the Mun. The trans-Munar-injection was taking a LOT more deltaV than I had anticipated... I happened to rotated the view (which had been to the rear of the main booster stage) and discovered that the main engine on the docked vessel was firing too, fighting the main thrust and wasting fuel! I right-clicked and deactivated it, with plenty of muttered oaths... is there a way I could have avoided this? I'm sure I had "control from here" selected on the correct command pod.

Edited October 23, 2015 by MaxwellsDemon

[steuben]

"control from here" only determines where the "zero" is for the nav ball.

I think manually deactivating the engines or tying them to an action group is the only way to prevent it.

[Red Iron Crown]

I don't know of an automated method to deal with that, a docking event merges the two ships and leaves the engines in whatever state they were immediately before. It's a good habit to carefully check which engines are active after docking.

[Stone Blue]

^^

That...

Plus, I always check RCS thrusters, and any reaction wheeled parts...Especially when you have vessels docked together at anything other than end-to-end, or any vessels/structures/modules sticking out from the main longitudinal axis, that may have any parts that can change position/attitude of the whole thing.

[Stoney3K]

I don't know of an automated method to deal with that, a docking event merges the two ships and leaves the engines in whatever state they were immediately before. It's a good habit to carefully check which engines are active after docking.

If the engines are off, it may have happened because of messed up staging.

When you dock two vessels, their staging lists get mixed up in some sort of semi-random fashion, there is no good way to predict that or to exclude engines from staging.

[moogoob]

I put the engines on my towed Duna lander on an action group so I can easily disable them in such circumstances.