Little cloud during launch?

[MaxwellsDemon]

I've noticed that, shortly after launch, I see a little poof of cloud (sometimes more than one) come down past my view... it's roughly at the altitude I'd expect the tropopause to be.  (I don't have any mods installed to add clouds.)   Is that indeed a marker of the tropopause, or is it something else?

[TheKorbinjer]

2 minutes ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

I've noticed that, shortly after launch, I see a little poof of cloud (sometimes more than one) come down past my view... it's roughly at the altitude I'd expect the tropopause to be.  (I don't have any mods installed to add clouds.)   Is that indeed a marker of the tropopause, or is it something else?

I believe this is a bug. It's part of the smoke plume that comes from your engines.

I'm guessing the game anticipates where you're going to be and places them ahead of of your trajectory.

This is what I've got from it.

[Geonovast]

Does it happen about the time you hit 343 m/s?

[bewing]

It's an interaction between the "particle emission system" (for the smoke clouds from the engines) and the "floating origin reset" code that causes it, and it's been around for years -- it's been impossible to stomp out completely.

There is also a sound that accompanies it, and a twitch in your SAS controller output too.

 

 

[MaxwellsDemon]

Huh!   And here I thought it was a "feature" rather than a "bug." 

(I guess one player's bug is another player's feature?)

[RealKerbal3x]

I watched a youtube video of KSP uploaded in 2012 and it happened in there.

[bewing]

3 hours ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

Huh!   And here I thought it was a "feature" rather than a "bug." 

(I guess one player's bug is another player's feature?)

You are free to think of it as a feature.

Before I understood that it was a bug, I thought of it as a feature too. See, sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

The only thing that got me upset about the whole thing was the SAS twitch used to be really enormous. But that part of it got fixed in like 1.2.0 or something.

 

Edited March 15, 2018 by bewing

[Gargamel]

I remember reading a bug report and various complaints about this back in .18.