The Kraken Cometh! (When?)

[Nikolai]

As I was putting together a rather enormous ship with a bunch of Docking Port Sr.'s and it wobbled itself apart after settling down nicely, I wondered if anyone had compiled a sort of list of things that seem to make spacecraft self-destruct -- best practices to avoid in ship construction and the like.  Is anyone aware of such a list?

Edited September 22, 2019 by Nikolai

[steuben]

SAS conflicts

Clipping

Bad autostructs, usually the ones set to root and/or heaviest.

 

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, steuben said:

SAS conflicts

Clipping

Bad autostructs, usually the ones set to root and/or heaviest.

 

Yes, clipping tend to be an thing for stuff on the pad or during launch. 

SAS conflicts is typical if you have an long space station who is kind of flexible in the middle and has reaction wheels on both ends. This tend to increase vibration over time this can also happen with long rockets with gimbals in one end and strong reaction wheels in the front. 

Last the large service bay has an collision zone, do not put anything close to the sides of them. tried make an station with 3 2.5 meter stacks with an 2.5 meter service bay in the center and large ore tanks on the sides, this blew up randomly. yes it looked good but was not. 

[Kernel Kraken]

Lots of weird, overlapping i-beams placed like a building frame.

[Fraston]

Physics warp, and by extension,  time warp, will tend to cause ships to spaghetti. 

I would just try to strut things together based on points of “bendyness” if dealing with massive, high-part-count structure.

If it looks like it will summon the Kraken, it tends to summon the Kraken. But usually not the other way around.

[Nikolai]

16 hours ago, steuben said:

SAS conflicts

Clipping

Bad autostructs, usually the ones set to root and/or heaviest.

 

Interesting.  I had a bunch of fuel tanks, clamped end-to-end.  That's literally it.  No SAS or clipping of any kind.

There might have been autostruts, though.  I'll have to check that.

[AHHans]

16 minutes ago, Nikolai said:

There might have been autostruts, though.  I'll have to check that.

I think that the biggest danger of autostruts is when they shift around. Which is also why autostruts to root or heaviest are dangerous:

• Accelerating drains fuel from the - up to now - heaviest fuel tank until another part becomes the heaviest part -> autostruts to heaviest flip.
• You stage away or undock from the root part of the combined craft -> autostruts to root flip.
• You dock to another craft -> the combined craft has only one root -> autostruts to root on one of the docked vessels flip.

[Nikolai]

Yeah... there were a fair number of parts in each of the docked sections that had been auto-strutted to the root part.  I think you nailed the problem.