Rescue Mission gone bad!!!!

[Ryder]

OK, KSP is *awesome*.... BUT....

I ran into a bug. It appears that landing legs, when mounted partially on the Aerospike, are prone to self destruct!

I made a good landing... but after using the map button and then coming back, the engine/leg popped off!

Anyway, I managed to achieve orbit around the Mun, even with the engine cluster fully out of balance! (Skills, baby!)

But then it happened again... I went to the map view, and on return to normal view, I heard the engines and legs blow off! I suspect that it has to do with the legs being partially on the aerospike... but there went my engines, and my ticket home.

This is how I found the second bug... collisions don't seem to work in accelerated time. I devised a daring rescue of my stranded Kerbonaut. After matching orbits, I managed to capture the capsule:

I then made a burn to take us back home... and following that, I entered time acceleration for the long trip, watching the captured capsule closely. As soon as I entered accelerated time, the capsule started drifting through my capture arms!!! All collision detection was apparently disabled. So of course I turned off accel, and that was a mistake. As soon as I went to 1x time, collision detection kicked back in, and with the capsule now encroaching into the rescue craft, it was violently ejected.... Crap! So I had to chase it down, and capture it again...

But I was successful and set the capsule to return to Kerban... and the rescue craft.

Here is where the biggest bug came in... I had two craft entering the atmosphere rather close to each other... and I hopped into the capsule to open the chute... worked great, then I needed to hop out, and into the rescue craft capsule... and IT WOULDN"T ALLOW ME TO! Some error about not being able to change craft while in the atmosphere?!?! Needless to say, not getting in the rescue craft prevented me from arming the chute... and the craft was lost

Anyway, the lesson here is, if you need to bring two craft in...place the other one in orbit, and come in the next go around...

What is the best way to pass along these bugs/experiences to the KSP developers?

Edited September 4, 2012 by Ryder

[voneiden]

The post below is based on assumptions. Feel free to correct me if I'm guessing wrong.

1) I can't verify this, but to me it seems aerospike part config file does not define the breakingTorque - this essentially means that Kerbal uses some default value for breakingTorque. The landing legs cause some torque on the aerospike, which I suppose, if the default value is very low, can make the aerospikes prone to tearing off like that. Might be a bug.

2) When under time acceleration, physics are not simulated. Not a bug. The next version 0.17 will feature (was it up to 4x?) physical time acceleration. This means also that you cannot switch crafts when flying in atmosphere, because the engine simulates precise newtonian physics only for the active vehicle (and its debris?).

Other orbiting crafts are simulated simply through calculation of orbital elements.

The reason why physics is not actively simulated, especially under time compression is basically a performance issue. If under 2x time compression you wish to maintain same mathematical accuracy as under normal game speed, you need to compute twice the amount of calculations during a given time. This might be still possible, but what about 100x time acceleration? If the computer can't keep up, one has to give up on mathematical accuracy. This quickly leads to unstable orbits that end up being hyperbolic.

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Bug reports go here

[kacperrutka26]

Why did you rescue him like that? You could use a 3 man pod and take one kerbal out then problems would go and it would be simple.

[Ryder]

Why did you rescue him like that? You could use a 3 man pod and take one kerbal out then problems would go and it would be simple.

Because, I always seem to have three in the capsule... I don't know how to leave an empty seat.... oh Krap, I just realized, I can make him hop out before launch!!!

But it sure was an exciting rescue

It was my first orbital rendezvous, so that was crazy fun