Orbital decay?

[bewing]

I have a very small pod (about 1 ton) in an elliptical orbit around Kerbin. The Pe is around 68km, the Ap around 330km. I am mostly watching the thing orbit in realtime.

When I am not timewarping, both the Ap and the Pe fall. (In 1.0, it used to be true that when the Ap fell, the Pe would rise, and vise versa.) The funny thing is that it's acting like a drag that's decreasing with altitude. Like the 70km atmosphere cutoff no longer applies.

Is anyone else seeing something like this?

Edited April 30, 2016 by bewing

[WillThe84th]

I've seen something similar to this. I don't think it has to do with your current situation, I think it's just a bug with 1.1. I noticed while I was orbiting around the Jool system. While I wasn't time warping, my orbit began to change.

[tg626]

I've seen it, dropping ap and pe while orbiting with a personal within the amosphere, but the craft well outside atmo.

67km pe  900km ap with vessel altitude around 200km, hovering over the pe or ap marker in the map showed both ever so slowly dropping...

[Rocket In My Pocket]

I saw this back in 1.0.5 with a satellite orbiting Kerbin at 75kmAP/75kmPE.

I got it into orbit, it was fine, everything good, all systems go, etc...

Went back to the KSC, did some stuff for awhile and then later on I was back in the tracking center and noticed it's orbit was all screwed up and it was falling back to Kerbin. No idea why.

[squeaky024]

I have a station that I launched into a 100x100 orbit. Its currently at 96x97 and I can see the heights are decreasing about 1 meter every 8 seconds or so. Interesting though

Looks like I might need to send something up and boost it eventually.

Edit: Also this only happens to the active vessel, not for things "on rails"

Edited May 3, 2016 by squeaky024

[MaxL_1023]

There is a mod which does this (called "orbital decay") - is it possible you have it installed? If you are using CKAN, it may have been recommended from something else and you just "went with the flow" so to speak. 

 

Otherwise, your orbit should not change significantly over time unless your craft is inside atmosphere AND you have physics loaded. 

[JWag]

I have seen this also. Most noticeably when coming back to Kerbin from Mun. Pe at Kerbin was rising about 10meters/Second. I went around my ship and disabled RCS and engines, but still the Pe increased.

This seems to happen for me only with the active vessel, and only when not in standard warp.

 

Mods are:

[x] Science! (xScience 4.16)
Environmental Visual Enhancements (EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements 2:EVE-1.1-1)
Environmental Visual Enhancements - Config files (EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements-HR 2:EVE-1.1-1)
EVA Struts (EVAStruts 1.0)
Kerbal Alarm Clock (KerbalAlarmClock v3.6.1.0)
Kerbal Engineer Redux (KerbalEngineerRedux 1.1.1.0)
Kerbal Joint Reinforcement (KerbalJointReinforcement v3.1.6)
Kerbal Stock Part eXpansion - maintainted (KSPX v0.2.10.1)
Module Manager (ModuleManager 2.6.23)
Precise Node (PreciseNode 1.2.2)
Procedural Fairings (ProceduralFairings v3.16)
SCANsat (SCANsat v16.0)
Toolbar (Toolbar 1.7.11)

Though the ship in question was built entirely of stock parts, and KER was in partless mode.

 

[smjjames]

Can any of you guys replicate it in a pure stock install?

[Rocket In My Pocket]

3 hours ago, smjjames said:

Can any of you guys replicate it in a pure stock install?

Yeah, I can confirm this is a stock bug, I've seen it happen randomly since I started playing.

Most of the time I play completely stock, the only mod I typically use is Kerbal Engineer Redux, which would have nothing to do with this.

That said, I have yet to see it 1.1 personally.

[squeaky024]

I'm using 1.1.2 and I guess this has persisted long enough to drag my station down 5 kilometers. I do not have the orbital decay mod or any physics changing mod for that matter, and this affects anything I put in orbit, big or small.

Edited May 4, 2016 by squeaky024

[swjr-swis]

On 4/30/2016 at 2:40 AM, bewing said:

it's acting like a drag that's decreasing with altitude. Like the 70km atmosphere cutoff no longer applies.

Known and reported bug in 1.1.x: http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/9619

[FullMetalMachinist]

33 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

Known and reported bug in 1.1.x: http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/9619

@bewing probably knows that, as he's the one who reported that bug on the tracker 4 days ago . 

[lodger]

Just noticed this last night while enjoying the view of my little space station orbiting kerbin. Since this issue is already in the bugtracker, I hope one of the next patches will fix this or make it an optional setting. Nice idea though, to have certain boundaries that cause garvity do have your altitude drop slowly.

Edited May 7, 2016 by lodger
spelling

[troyfawkes]

(deleted)

Edited May 10, 2016 by troyfawkes

[Damien_The_Unbeliever]

On 03/05/2016 at 10:53 PM, Rocket In My Pocket said:

the only mod I typically use is Kerbal Engineer Redux, which would have nothing to do with this.

You should be very careful with the assumptions you make, when it comes to software. For example, there should be no reason why the Asteroid Day mod should cause all rescued astronauts to be females (or was it scientists? Or both?) And yet that's what happened. This is the magic of software at work - seemingly unrelated systems can interact in surprising ways. (And also why I get annoyed when people suggest that an easy thing to do is to add an extra setting/option for X or Y - without realizing that every additional setting added to the game potentially doubles the amount of testing that should be performed)

[Rocket In My Pocket]

5 hours ago, Damien_The_Unbeliever said:

You should be very careful with the assumptions you make, when it comes to software. For example, there should be no reason why the Asteroid Day mod should cause all rescued astronauts to be females (or was it scientists? Or both?) And yet that's what happened. This is the magic of software at work - seemingly unrelated systems can interact in surprising ways. (And also why I get annoyed when people suggest that an easy thing to do is to add an extra setting/option for X or Y - without realizing that every additional setting added to the game potentially doubles the amount of testing that should be performed)

Cool story bro.

[NikkyD]

I just created a testprobe and hyperedited it into Laithe orbit, the orbit was dropping slightly but so much that i could not place a maneuver node, not even mechjeb could place one. I mean the yellow bar next to the navball indicated that there was a node, but i could not see any and the projected dV was nA.

Did anyone else see this in conjunction with the aforementioned bug ?

[bewing]

Well, the official bug report contains a lot of reports from folks who mentioned manuever nodes, yes.

[muhqsampyla]

So that's the culprit!

I recently installed a bunch of mods (but NOT the orbital decay one) and thought one of them was somehow responsible for the decay. Just made an account to ask about it before I ran into this thread.

One of the mods I installed was the RemoteTech mod and started doing this tutorial: http://remotetechnologiesgroup.github.io/RemoteTech/tutorials/c16network/

It is really precise about the orbital period and I noticed that it decays quickly when I try to place the first satellite.  But it's good to know that I can stop parsing through my 20km mod list now.

[Sereneti]

same problem here...
magical disapearing from speed, Sun orbit , too...
no mods...

Edited May 20, 2016 by Sereneti

[Sereneti]

Mod free  , clean,installation, decreasing orbits confirmed....

 

[KerbalOmmex]

It appears that SQUAD implemented orbital decay...

So maybe it could be a 'feature', instead of a bug.

[bewing]

Yeah, well, IIRC the last time I saw a Squad member talk about implementing actual orbital decay they said something like, "All that accomplishes is to make everyone visit all their ships once a month to nudge the orbits up a bit, which is just annoying and doesn't add anything to the gameplay." Which seems like a totally valid argument to me. And as it stands, it's only on the craft that you have selected. So if you are trying to do a rendezvous, what you have to do is set it up and then switch away to some third ship to wait for the encounter -- which is very annoying (or timewarp, which is kinda the last thing you want to do when you are setting up something very time sensitive). And it messes up the maneuver nodes, and some mods. So I'm thinking no.

Edited May 26, 2016 by bewing