What Makes a Rover Disappear?

[canaith]

I'm relatively new to KSP, which is odd to say when I have 135 hours into it, but, you know, it's KSP. 

My most challenging project so far was to build and deploy a rover to the Mun to handle some missions there. Oh, the failures! When I finally got the rover landed, there were some funny problems I had to work through with funny consequences that I wish I had recorded. At the end of the "day", though, the mission was finally accomplished, and I left the rover parked right outside of my Mun base.

The next day, though, when I went to pull some science from said Mun base, I saw that the rover was gone. There is no trace of it anywhere. 

My question is "What happened to the rover?", and, more importantly, "How can I park a rover in a way that keeps it from vanishing?"

Thanks!

[bewing]

There is nothing that makes a Mun rover disappear, ever. That's a horrifying bug, that I have never experienced.

Which version of KSP is this? Are you running any mods?

[canaith]

When I parked the rover, I had no mods. I installed the Kerbal Engineer mod after I noticed the rover was gone. I bought Kerbal from steam and am running the 1.2.2 64-bit version.

It's got me afraid to build anymore rovers until I know what I should have done differently. Is it possible to lose it if you don't leave the brakes on or something?

[Snark]

No, that's definitely not it.  When you leave a ship to go look at something else in a different place, it goes "on rails" and is basically nailed in place (if it's on the surface).  There's no reason that this should happen, ever.  I've been playing KSP for two years and have never had anything happen like you describe, and I've left all kinds of stuff parked on planets, including rovers.

So, no clue what happened, but I'd chalk it up to a freak accident and don't worry about it-- I'd say it's unlikely to happen again.  If it does ever happen again, then that means you likely have something weird about your setup that's worthy of investigation.

In any case:  no, there's not really anything you could have done to prevent this, or to do to prevent it from happening.  Sounds like a bug.  Accordingly, moving this topic over to Technical Support.

[bewing]

Hmmm. Maybe the rover is classified as debris (because it has no probe core?), and you have all the debris hidden in the map view, and the rover is still there? How do you know it is gone? Did you try to use [] to switch to it?

To modify snark's comment, though -- if you park a rover and leave the brakes off, and then switch focus to something close by (within a couple of km), then the rover does not get put on rails yet and can roll down a hill and destroy itself at the bottom. But usually not completely -- there are almost always some pieces left.

Edited June 18, 2016 by bewing

[kcs123]

Better question is, where you have parked your rover ?

There was issues with flags/crafts parked too close to runway/launchpad. For some strange reasons it might be deleted after you launch second craft from runway. More often happen in career game if you upgrade runway.

That being said, I encontered those bugs few KSP versions ago, haven't checked if that bug still exist in KSP 1.1.2.

[canaith]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

Hmmm. Maybe the rover is classified as debris (because it has no probe core?), and you have all the debris hidden in the map view, and the rover is still there? How do you know it is gone? Did you try to use [] to switch to it?

Well, I parked the rover and took a picture of it with the Kerbal sitting in it, then the Kerbal moved to the science lab. When I reloaded the game later, I went back to that same station and the rover was gone. 

As for probe cores, the only one I had was the rover body itself, which I assume is core-like because it lets me drive with no pilot. Granted, it was upside down (silly me), which means I had to land on the Mun manually because all the maneuvers were backwards. To drive it, I had to teach myself that 'S' was forwards. 

So, yes, it was a very silly rover, but it is the only friend my lone Mun scientist had and so the entire program is pretty upset about losing it.

Edited June 18, 2016 by canaith
last paragraph

[Anth]

The rovers i have made did the same thing on minmus...I remember hearing an explosion after changing to the ship that dropped it off, but i was 5+km from the rover...didnt think much of it and took the ship on a suicide run...then went back to the space station...

also had it happen once with a rover for getting science off every building of the ksc with 1.1. but i put that down to it being in contact with a water tower. and that was when I went from the space center to its location.

[bewing]

Odd .... I just had a flag vanish. That's never happened before.