My satellite turned unresponsive shortly after reaching orbit!

[Dr Jones]

Hello fellow Kerbals .

I've got a problem with my recently launched satellite! Shortly after reaching a stable orbit it went dead and I can't control it any more, I've got electricharge remaining as well as solar panels.

The only mod I've got installed is Advanced-Fly-By-Wire.

The satellite is controlled by a Probodobodyne OKTO for remote control and Mk1 command pod! I'm wondering if these two are causing some kind of conflict for reasons unknown. (maybe I should check the atmospheric pressure :O)
As mentioned before there is electricharge left on the onboard rechargeable batteries and command pod - The Probodobodyne OKTO is left with 0 electricharge though, although the info-window (when right click on part) says it is operational. Further the darn thing is placed right on top of the battery so I'm sure the connnections are in order

Do anyone have an idea why my satellite suddenly went dead?

Edited January 5, 2016 by Dr Jones
Added info.

[Streetwind]

Do you have buttons showing in your rightclick menus? Such as "toggle torque" for turning the pod's reaction wheels on and off? Press some of them. Does the expected action happen? If no, your craft is actually dead. If yes, it is not dead, and is just not responding to control inputs, which is a different thing altogether.

For example, speaking of reaction wheel toggles: check that your reaction wheels are active in the first place

If you do not get any buttons in rightclick menus: make sure you are not in timewarp. Sometimes I confuse myself with being unable to control my craft, only to later notice that I was still at x5 on-rails timewarp all along, because I didn't press the timewarp down button often enough when coming out of a higher warp.

Failing all of these: screenshot, please? Ideally with rightclick menus open on pod and probe core, and the resource window open.

[Snark]

Welcome to the forums!

Normally, what I'd expect for your having gone dead would be that you ran out of electricity, but you say you've got that covered.  (What you describe could also happen with the RemoteTech mod, if you don't have a communications link back to KSC, but you're not running that).  Are you sure you haven't accidentally turned off the battery, or something?

The other thing that happens to people sometimes is that they launch a satellite with an OKTO2 or QBE probe core, and don't realize that those two cores don't have reaction wheels, and so they think their probe's dead when actually it just can't rotate.  However, you say you've got a Mk1 command pod on the ship, and that has reaction wheels (assuming they haven't been turned off), so that doesn't sound like the problem.

So yeah, what Streetwind said, please post a screenshot.  It's easy to do, just F1 to take screenshot, drag-drop it on imgur.com, copy the image URL, then use the "Insert other media" button here to "Insert image from URL" and paste the URL.  In addition to including the items that Streetwind suggested, it would also be good to have the right-click menu for your battery open as well.

[mrmcp1]

It sounds to me like the OKTO probe has run out of electric charge but that the batteries still have charge. I think it may be possible (if I remember correctly) to transfer some of the electric charge from the battery to the probe. Right click on the probe then whilst holding the alt key right click on one of the batteries, it should give you the option to transfer the charge from the battery to the probe. 

[Snark]

1 hour ago, mrmcp1 said:

It sounds to me like the OKTO probe has run out of electric charge but that the batteries still have charge. I think it may be possible (if I remember correctly) to transfer some of the electric charge from the battery to the probe. Right click on the probe then whilst holding the alt key right click on one of the batteries, it should give you the option to transfer the charge from the battery to the probe. 

You shouldn't need to do that:  electric charge is global to the ship, so if there's any electricity anywhere on the ship, it should be available to the probe core without transferring anything around.

The only case in which this would not be true would be if there's some electricity stored in a battery that has been "turned off".  In that case, yes, you could revive the probe core by manually transferring charge, as you suggest... but a better solution would be to just turn the battery back on so that the probe core can use what's in it.

[Dr Jones]

Thanks for all the replies, the problem got sorted out after I took a hike to the space center (dreaded doing that as I didn't want to risk my probe lost in space) and then later tried fiddling with the probe again - and it worked! I ran into this problem again afterwards when the probe's electricharge ran out and I didn't have the backup batteries switched on - again a "reset" solved this problem which I now regard as a small bug

Again thank you all!

[FancyMouse]

I think most likely you might have left time warp on for the initial problem. Going back to tracking station and then go flight is for sure going to reset time warp to 1x.

Edited January 6, 2016 by FancyMouse