Weird problem trying to recover from surface of Mun

[stratvox]

I have a contract to recover a part landed on the surface of the moon. When I get too close to it, all of a sudden its altitude doubles; that is, it goes from resting on the surface of the Mun to an altitude above the surface equal to the altitude of the surface. It is perfectly stationary until something moves into physics range, at which point it starts falling. Needless to say, falling from the height it does (~4.8km) causes it to be destroyed when it hits the surface. Any ideas as to what is going on here? And is it possible I can edit the save file to fix this particular problem?

[Cunjo Carl]

@stratvox Though I don't know the root cause, it seems to happen whenever something is placed on a 'weak' patch/seam of dirt. When the area is loaded, the object sinks a bit into the ground and then pops up to ~5km. If you happen to know where one of these places is, you can do silly things like launch flags. I may be completely off-base for suggesting this, but I've heard that v1.2.9 (1.3 prerelease) available through steam has a bugfix for a major terrain glitch. Perhaps this one is fixed in the latest version?

I'll go test my flag and see if there's a way I can make it not launch. I don't know of anything offhand, though.

Edit: My save for this has become lost, sadly. Best of luck to you!

Edited March 20, 2017 by Cunjo Carl

[fourfa]

This happened to me recently.  Quick while it's falling - hit Alt-F12 to bring up the debug console.  Activate Cheats -> no crash damage.  Let it crash, then uncheck it.  Problem mitigated.

[stratvox]

1 hour ago, fourfa said:

This happened to me recently.  Quick while it's falling - hit Alt-F12 to bring up the debug console.  Activate Cheats -> no crash damage.  Let it crash, then uncheck it.  Problem mitigated.

Unfortunately that's not working. After it lands, as soon as I get a craft within about a hundred metres of it, it teleports itself up 4.1 km. It's weird... it'll stay there completely permanently until I either "fly" it from the tracking station or another craft gets too close to it.

[fourfa]

If you can "fly" to it from the tracking station, you could also use Alt-F12 -> cheats -> set orbit and try retrieving it from a stable orbit.  If that doesn't work, probably best to just cheat the contract complete, adjust your funds and reputation to what it was before, and move on.  My experience with haunted bugged craft like this has been poor.

[sal_vager]

Can you upload the save to dropbox for us? One of us my have different luck.

Or try enabling the gravity hack and lowering the gravity, the part should land much more softly.

[stratvox]

I ended up cheating the contract out of existence. Tried getting the part to land softly (and did), but as soon as I got anywhere near it it was up at 4100m terrain altitude again. Cheated it into an orbit, hooked it, took it back to Kerbin, when I was aerobraking all of a sudden I was on a very retrograde Kerbol orbit that would take me to periKerbol in 50 days and just BOOKIN'! 

At that point I gave it up as a bad job and destroyed the contract. Would be good to know if this is a common problem; I'm feeling very hesitant to take any other recover part A on body B contracts.

[sal_vager]

10 hours ago, stratvox said:

Would be good to know if this is a common problem;

Well it should not do this, but it'd really help if you could post an issue here and attach your logs and save, the devs could use that to find what's going on.

[stratvox]

That's gonna have to wait until I get home from work tonight. I'll see if I can dig a good save up that shows the issue... KAC should help

If I find one, I'll grab the logs off it and fire them up there too. Gotta be careful... don't wanna trash the progress I made last night.

Ease!

[sal_vager]

6 minutes ago, stratvox said:

KAC should help

We really need stock issues, even having mods installed can affect the game.

[stratvox]

Well, I'll see if I can set something up that'll allow me to test that contract without mods, but... my game's modded. Mostly visual and info (eye candy, KER, KAC, the IVA mod with control panels) with only one parts mod (the one that gives you small lights to mount on your craft; I keep the ambient vacuum light at .03 using planetshine and that means that lights on craft are a must).

That will take me a while though, given that I'm gonna have to load a save into an unmodded install and hope that it allows me to get it going on without trashing it completely.

I'll let you know

[sal_vager]

24 minutes ago, stratvox said:

my game's modded

You know this is the unmodded support section right?

Have you considered that one of your mods might be causing this? It may go away in a clean install.

[bewing]

Then you posted this issue in the wrong tech support forum, ya know.

[stratvox]

Crap. I thought I posted in the gameplay questions group, not the umodded installs group.

<sigh>

[sal_vager]

1 minute ago, stratvox said:

Crap. I thought I posted in the gameplay questions group, not the umodded installs group.

 

Facepalm!

I moved it and forgot, I thought this was a tech issue, moving...

[stratvox]

Yeah.... I was looking more for finding out if other people had encountered this problem or not, to find out if I needed to dig deeper. I mean, if I'm the only one getting it, that means that I need to start looking carefully at my mods list to see which of these might be blowing it up, or if it turns out a group of folks are having this we can compare mods to find out if it's something we're all using or not.... yadda yadda yadda.

Nice to know that I'm NOT losing my mind....

At any rate, when I get home (which looks to be a while yet; I'm an email admin for a Very Large Canadian Email System and right now we've got both a pump'n'dump and a bank of montreal phish hammering my servers) I'm going to move my current install, reinstall vanilla, drop the save game in there and see what happens. If it's reproducible under those conditions, I'm going to go visit the bug tracker and fire up the relevant files.

[Urses]

@stratvox

Why i have the urge to write Starfox?

I have same issue, if i spawn a ressource Lode with USI some of the Lodes spawn on Terrain glitches (contaktpoints of 2 Polygons ?) And so i get a nice Meteor. I think after the spawn the engine try to decide where the element CoM is and through engine adjasting and CoM movement between the both we get a cumulative velocity.

At the moment when the item get to much speed the engine calculates a orbital point for this speed. And you get a Fliing Hollander. And sry i don't have found a solution for it.

My way is let them Crash... but maybe a better head can Beginn smth with this Information.  And I think its Stock behavor.

 

 

[klesh]

Interestingly timely, it would seem Scott Manley suffered from this same bug in his most recent upload (from today!)

 

 

[Loren Pechtel]

On 3/20/2017 at 0:12 AM, fourfa said:

If you can "fly" to it from the tracking station, you could also use Alt-F12 -> cheats -> set orbit and try retrieving it from a stable orbit.  If that doesn't work, probably best to just cheat the contract complete, adjust your funds and reputation to what it was before, and move on.  My experience with haunted bugged craft like this has been poor.

How I handle such impossible contracts is do the mission, but if the game won't allow the completion (or, in one case with a mod, didn't register completion when I had accomplished the goals) I then Alt-F12 it.  I don't worry about adjusting anything because I did what it should have taken to accomplish it.

(For example, if I rendezvous with a stranded Kerbal and it proves impossible to get him out I hyperedit the capsule home and leave the seat on the rocket empty.)