Can't revert flights, save the game, or use orbital cheats.

[Aloysious Tasch]

Hello,

I'm new to the forum and not familiar with it, so hopefully I put this in the right category and am doing this correctly.

After building a Vall spacecraft I wanted to test the lander, so I put it on the runway and attempted to use the cheats to put myself in Vall's orbit. The craft disappeared before exploding inside Kerbin. I reverted back and tried again. When it asks me for the orbital elevation, I usually put in zero and let it set the minimum orbital value, but this time it let me keep it at zero. This resulted in it simply floating off of Kerbin's surface with no view of the ship and no orbital map view either. I tried this a second time (same results) but when I went back to revert and try a third time, the gray screen with all of the buttons to go to the tracking station, revert, save, etc. (can't think of the name) won't open. I can't move either and I'm just stuck in space. Is it okay to shut down my computer? I spent a lot of time on the craft so hopefully it has saved,  but I don't know about the game itself. Does anyone have an idea of what happened and/or I can fix it?

[AlpacaMall]

Regarding the craft: Craft saving is separate from game saving. 

If you clicked the “save” button before launching your craft, then yes, it has definitely saved.

If you didn’t, then… I believe that it’s still saved? The game will auto-save the last launched vessel, and this can be selected from the vessel list. However, I’m not sure exactly when this happens, and someone with more experience should chime in here.

[swjr-swis]

16 hours ago, Aloysious Tasch said:

Is it okay to shut down my computer? I spent a lot of time on the craft so hopefully it has saved,  but I don't know about the game itself. Does anyone have an idea of what happened and/or I can fix it?

Probably too late, but just in case: before you do anything else, try to make a quicksave, or a named save: F5 or Alt-F5 on PC.

If that won't work either, it is okay to close just KSP, no need to shutdown the whole computer. On PC, Alt-F4 will do this. The game will close immediately without saving, but if you cannot save anyway that's not a worse result than you already have.

The craft file themselves are always saved to disk when you launch, even if only as an 'auto-save' craft file. When you restart KSP, try to look for that in your ship list before launching anything else, otherwise it will be overwritten (it's always the same name).

The getting stuck without being able to revert, return to VAB or menu, or even closing KSP, is a recent bug that has been reported several times already, but so far I've not seen anyone mention an easily reproducible case, which makes finding the cause difficult. I do notice however one clue in what you describe:

 

16 hours ago, Aloysious Tasch said:

When it asks me for the orbital elevation, I usually put in zero and let it set the minimum orbital value, but this time it let me keep it at zero. This resulted in it simply floating off of Kerbin's surface with no view of the ship and no orbital map view either.

They made a change recently in the debug menu to allow overriding the safe minimum altitude for cheating to orbit in, but they had it enabled by default. Obviously that was not what they meant to do, as it results in what you just described. It was corrected in 1.12.2 - you could upgrade to that, or just disable it in the cheat orbit window (remove the checkmark).

 

[Aloysious Tasch]

Thank you all for your help. The game eventually crashed and I was able to reopen it, and everything works fine.