Flight Stage de-spawns when trying to control multiple vehicles

[BechMeister]

Yesterday I had my first real go at a Falcon 9-esque first stage landing back at KSC. I had an issue though that the second stage would despawn before hitting the atmosphere.

I was trying to see if I could swap between vehicles and control both. It was possible because my second stage had really long burns and spend the time of it going to AP maneuvering the first stage.

I found out that if i just send the second stage on a really high AP suborbital path right after separation. The game would not despawn the second stage, and i had time to land the first stage.


Me setting up first stage to go back, while the second stage is just going prograde unsupervised.

First stage landed and second stage still coasting to AP - right after this i got it into orbit.

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature to prevent spend stages littering the planet now that heat is not introduced. 

I also had one time were the first stage despawned  and my second stage just started accelerating with the engines off... I tried to make a GIF of it. I dont know why it happened. If the going from vehicle - to tracking station - to vehicle - to tracking station  - to vehicle messed it up some how?

Any way... here it is
 

[Wetzelrad]

13 hours ago, BechMeister said:

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature to prevent spend stages littering the planet now that heat is not introduced. 

It's a limitation of the physics engine. There's a "high fidelity" physics bubble around your active vessel that's only a few kilometers wide. Hopefully this problem will improve with time, because vehicles shouldn't disappear so easily. Maybe someone else can give you more advice on how to work around it.

13 hours ago, BechMeister said:

I also had one time were the first stage despawned  and my second stage just started accelerating with the engines off.

This is definitely a bug. One thing that happens to me is where a lower stage follows my current vessel on the map. I'll start a transfer burn, then time warp, and some piece of debris or other object will go hyperbolic like it's trying to keep up with me. Also related to the physics bubble, I'm sure.

[BechMeister]

Probably, I have also had first stages disintegrating and do what you describe. Looks like this: 



I made a seperate bug report for that here: 

But hmm. I dont know if they need to expand the high fidelity's bubble.. I feel that would make performance suffer. But I would also like for stages not just to despawn x)