Antenna no longer working

[Laie]

So, I captured myself an asteroid, and snatched it into a highly eccentric orbit around Kerbin. The plan is to fix the inclination for cheap at the apoapsis.

And now I cannot place a maneuver, because I have no downlink.

The vessel carries a HG-55: that's 15Gm class, fully sufficient for Duna. I cannot understand why it fails me at the edge of Kerbin SOI. I also think it must have worked before -- after all, I've been similar far from Kerbin when I snatched the asteroid in the first place. And I planted maneuvers while out there. In short: it used to work and now it doesn't.

--

Later: fast-forwarding again towards periapsis, I don't get any link whatsoever. Even if the main antenna fails, at ~2000km I should be well within reach of the command module internal transmitter. Something's wrong here.

Still later: Well, for screenshot's sake I picked the "asteroid" icon when renaming my vessel. That works fine unless and until I leave the flight scene. The next time I come back, the antenna is out of order.
Picking any other icon in the "Rename Vessel" dialog, plus another scene change, will fix the broken antenna.

So, problem solved. I'm putting this in gameplay questions anyway, just because I couldn't find anything when I looked. Oh, and if somebody who's familiar with the bugtracker could please check if that is a known issue?

[AHHans]

1 hour ago, Laie said:

Well, for screenshot's sake I picked the "asteroid" icon when renaming my vessel. That works fine unless and until I leave the flight scene. The next time I come back, the antenna is out of order.

Ah, yes, that thing. If you label a vessel as debris or asteroid, then you won't be able to control it if you switch to it again and no crew is on board. Even if you park it next to the KSC with full batteries, you still cannot control it. (IMHO one of the more annoying features of KSP.)

1 hour ago, Laie said:

Oh, and if somebody who's familiar with the bugtracker could please check if that is a known issue?

I'm sure that is intentional, and not a bug.

[OHara]

There are a couple bug reports https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/13520 https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/14181 and the first one explains why, even if it was the intention of the programmers, it is confusing behavior.