Kerbal vanished in orbit around the sun

[tommymsw]

I am assuming the ship got too close to another object and crashed? Or maybe it just ran out of electricity? I am REALLY new and don't really know how everything works... If the astronauts run out of O2, or die from lack of food? Anyway, is there anyway to find out what happened to the missing ship? Like a log of all lost ships?

[Snark]

Welcome to the forums! 

I don't know what happened to your ship, but here are a few things that didn't happen to it.

It didn't run out of life support.  KSP doesn't have life support; kerbals live forever unless they smack into something.  They don't even need a ship; a kerbal can live happily for years in just a spacesuit.  (There are mods you can install that add the need for life support, to make the game more challenging, but I'll assume you don't have such installed.  And even if you were using such a mod, it would just kill off the crew, not the ship.)

It didn't run out of electricity, or anything else.  When you're not actually flying a ship, it runs "on rails"; the game doesn't actually track things like electricity consumption, it's as though it goes into suspended animation until you switch back to it.  The only thing that will affect it is if it crashes into something.  (And also, running out of electricity doesn't destroy a ship, merely makes electricity-dependent functions unavailable.)

There's not really a log of lost ships.  If you remember the name of the crew, you can go to your astronaut complex, it shows not only current kerbals but also ones that are killed or MIA, you can see if they show up there (though I don't think it'll tell you what happened).

The only thing I can think of is that it crashed into something.  However, that seems pretty unlikely, if you were out in the solar system-- planets are much smaller than the solar system, and the likelihood of running into one of them by accident is tiny.  If you were orbiting Kerbin, say, then the chance of having a random Mun encounter is large; but if you're out in the solar system, a random planet encounter is very rare.

Unless you just barely exited Kerbin's SoI with very little Kerbin-relative velocity.  In that case, it might be that after orbiting for a while, the ship wandered back into Kerbin's SoI and then crashed into Kerbin.

What sort of an orbit was it on?

[tommymsw]

The orbit it was on did have it pass back into Kerbin's orbit (even tough it was in orbit around the Sun) . Although I figured it was not likely they would meet up exactly anytime soon, I did think it would be cool to try to land it again. (I had very little fuel left). So my guess was that it may have lined up and then crashed while I was playing? But didn't know if that was possible or that I may have even noticed if it did? I suppose it could have even crossed close to another planet and been thrown off it's orbit? As the orbit did seem to stretch across the paths of other planets. I'll check the astronaut complex... If it says they died, at least I know it crashed and I didn't just lose it.

[Snark]

Do you have patched conics available?

If you don't know what that means:  if you're playing a sandbox game, the answer is "yes".  If you're playing a career game, the answer is "yes, if you've upgraded the tracking station".  You can tell if you have them because when you go to the map view, your orbit line shows up blue if you have them and gray if you don't.

I ask because if you have them, you should be able to see when/if you'll be encountering a planet; there will be a marker showing the time and place.

[tommymsw]

Ok, so I looked in the astronaut complex and the "lost" section was empty. But there she was under "available". So I am guessing it was juts a glitch somehow? It wasn't a reverted flight because she was orbiting for a few times that I played and quit. I am in career mode and I do not have an upgraded tracking station. I am still in the very beginning and have not even attempted a trip to the Mun yet. The orbit around the Sun was just me being bored and just blasting a ship as far as I could. I did try to "fly" her ship once before I lost her and it wouldn't load (my PC is not a gaming PC), so it may have just freaked out from the partial load?

 

Thank you for all your help though, you certainly have made my future launches more productive!

[Snark]

Bear in mind that the game doesn't save continuously.  It has a file called persistent.sfs where the "current reality" of the game is stored, and it only saves to that file at intervals of every few minutes.  So if the game suddenly crashes (or you kill the process in Task Manager, or something similarly precipitous), anything that happened since the last auto-save is gone-- it just reverts to its previous state.

Aside from auto-saving at intervals, the game always does an immediate save when you return to KSC.