Rescue craft falling from space

[Hoody]

Hi. First post here. I've been playing for a month and I absolutely love this game and the community.

Just wanted to share a weird experience/bug.

I had one of those "rescue kerbal and their ship" from the Mun missions. The ship turned out to be a Mk1 crew cabin. My first attempt to retrieve it with an advanced grabbing unit failed when I ran out of gas trying to land on it. So I trashed that ship and redesigned a better grabber. 

I returned to the Mun, but I find the kerbal standing there all by herself — no crew cabin in sight. This is terrible news because I planned to use the cabin to bring her home. I decide to attempt to "dock a kerbal" when suddenly I become aware of an object in the sky. It's the Mk1 crew cabin falling at high velocity from the sky for no discernible reason. Direct hit on my newly designed rescue ship. Totalled it.

Why!? How? Hilarious.

 

Edited November 6, 2016 by Hoody
grammar

[Scotius]

Early on, don't bother with retrieving derelict capsules - setting up a proper salvaging rig costs more than a capsule is worth. Later on, the potential profit for capsule retrieval becomes a chump's change compared to money from contracts etc. - so it's still not worth the effort and time LOL. Just put an empty capsule on a rescue vessel, grab your passenger and go home.

[Hoody]

Thanks Scotius. I take contracts for the challenge rather than the cash. Although I went back to that contract and combined it with two "retrieve component from orbit" contracts and it was pretty profitable in the end. I think my ship cost about 240k and it netted upward of half a million. 

I was just confused as to how the cabin would end up 1000s of meters in the air directly above my landing site!

[SpacedCowboy]

Would love to see a video of that. No expert here however, sounds like a contract bug.

ps. Welcome to the Forums

[radonek]

I assume that "falling" craft actually was not on suborbital trajectory, but high-velocity collision orbit.  Did you return kerbal back to cabin? If you just leave him floating along, he is on different orbit and will drift away. Further maneuvering of either kerbal or cabin is likely to increase relative speed. 
 

[Hoody]

radonek, no that's the thing — the contract was to retrieve from the surface of the mun. After my first failure, I left the kerbal and the cabin on the surface pretty much where I found them. On my return, I found the kerbal but no craft. Once I landed, the cabin materialized in mid air. I spotted it just as I was maneuvering around trying to dock with the kerbal on the ground (by getting her to jump up into the armed klaw). It fell on my ship and exploded it. So weird.

[problemecium]

It's a long-standing terrain bug. The capsule was saved while in contact with the terrain, and while the game was loading and the levels of terrain detail came in one after another, for at least one of them the terrain was slightly higher so that the capsule intersected it. Thus the terrain ended up reading the situation as a capsule being jammed into it really hard and pushed the capsule out into space, after which it fell back down and had the misfortune to land right on your rescue ship.

[samstarman5]

Had a rescue on the Mun contract, but landed way off the mark. Figured I could EVA over, refresh the tanks in whatever capsule the castaway was in, and bring both back to the lander with EVA.  Just as I get in sight of the capsule, I see it proceed to drop and explode, leaving the castaway kerbal standing out on their own.  Definitely a mission gimmick, to be sure. Otherwise the stranded kerbal would have been killed.

That being said, I got close enough to switch to the stranded kerbal, had them EVA to the lander. Then I turned on infinite fuel and brought back the kerbal I sent out to meet the stranded kerbal, and went home.  No more kerbals stranded on a surface for me.

[Sharpy]

Your problem: sometimes, as physics of the location kicks in, and exact geometry of the terrain loads, the objects in question are located a little below the surface. The result is the objects getting ejected upwards rather violently. My Minmus base, 48 drills, 6 ISRUs, 27 largest ore tanks and several tall towers covered with gigantors, would get launched whole good 50 meters up.

A tiny capsule - it could fly much higher.

Well, bad luck.

Regardless, 'rescue from surface' with the Klaw is an awful work. Install KIS and KAS, and send the rescue craft with an engineer armed with a screwdriver. Maybe a pair of kerbals to help carrying the stuff; also, a KAS winch and a box of KAS ports for these payloads that are too unwieldy to carry around, and are better strutted to the rescue craft.

This here:

Returning from Minmus, after recovering the kerbal and the crew cabin, plus two contracts for recovery of other parts. The cabin was a little too heavy to lob around the surface, so I just had the engineer attach a port, extended the winch cable to it, left it in release mode letting the cable extend the full 80 meters, and launched like that - towing the cabin to the orbit on the end of an 80-meter long cable. Only then I winched it in and attached more permanently.

And this is another one: this time only orbital recoveries, but four of them - one kerbal+part and 3 parts. The "part" the kerbal was in was a 10-ton MK3 laboratory from a mod. The craft has two winches on two ends so I was able to maneuver the lab to the deck, then I used KAS pipes to strap it to the deck.

 

[Hoody]

Thanks a lot for clearing up the bug guys. I thought I'd gone mad. I learned early on to get into the f5-f9 habit, especially for bugs like this. 

Thanks for the KIS and KAS suggestions. I've heard of those mods but not delved in. I only have Engineer and a few visual mods installed currently. I'm committed to doing everything in stock in my first career mode, which has resulted in some hilarious cobbled-together, ugly-as-sin creations to perform simple tasks. You should see some of the awful contraptions I've devised for surface rescue and multi-contract missions.

But I will definitely pursue some choice mods once I've exhausted my curiosity with the limited base parts.

In the meantime, I'll be looking out for raining payload. 

[Curveball Anders]

I never bother about saving the crafts, only the crew (and given the fee to recruit a new kerbonaut, rescue missions are severely overpaid).

And many has said.

On reload the capsule was found below the surface, the game 'adjusted' the position of the part in question.

Hilariously enough the kerbonaut was above the surface, so the pod was sent to the air, leaving it's inhabitant on a surprise EVA ...

Edited November 7, 2016 by Curveball Anders

[Terwin]

3 hours ago, Hoody said:

Thanks a lot for clearing up the bug guys. I thought I'd gone mad. I learned early on to get into the f5-f9 habit, especially for bugs like this. 

Thanks for the KIS and KAS suggestions. I've heard of those mods but not delved in. I only have Engineer and a few visual mods installed currently. I'm committed to doing everything in stock in my first career mode, which has resulted in some hilarious cobbled-together, ugly-as-sin creations to perform simple tasks. You should see some of the awful contraptions I've devised for surface rescue and multi-contract missions.

But I will definitely pursue some choice mods once I've exhausted my curiosity with the limited base parts.

In the meantime, I'll be looking out for raining payload. 

I gave up on recover from surface missions after recovering a heat-shield from the Mun.  It was quite a challenge getting it into my nose-mounted klaw.(I got it by haivng my kerbal push it up a slope where I laid down my vessel with the rear legs extended and the front legs retracted and had my kerbals kick it towards the ship until it hit the trigger of the klaw.)