Orbit path fails to appear

[Mike S]

I encountered a weird one with the Mohole in One mission.  When I was "in the hole" and landed, I wasn't really "landed".  It looked like the ship was still suspended.  Graphical glitch aside, it is nothing compared to when I decided to leave and get back into orbit.  I ascended to an AP of about 25K and spit myself into what I thought was an orbit reasonably aligned with my return craft to set up the RV.  Nav Ball details show me with an AP/PE that appears to be orbit, both numbers are close to circularlized enough for sustained orbit.  Not so fast.

Zoom to map to start planning how to do the RV...and no orbit line can be seen with my lander, no means to set the node.  The return ship I can see.  But not the lander's path.  Quite the game, restart, try it again...same thing.  Quit the game, remove all the mods and reset all game settings and old school launch to orbit...still same result, no visible orbit lines of any kind, crash or otherwise.

The only thing that seemed to fix this strangeness was to use the cheat menu and set the orbit to something close to what I was attempting and the orbital path is as it should be, and I can now set my nodes.

Has anyone else encountered something like this?  Modded or otherwise?  Is there an alternative way to "fix" this without doing the cheat?  Some bugs can be overcome with the quick save/load...but this one doesn't want to play nice.  When learning how to do the Moho transfer, I read somewhere that the orbit needed to be higher than I would Minmus or Mun...80k or something like that.  Others said 10k as minimum was ok.  But I am curious if my 25k orbit target was too shallow, should I have went to 50k and tried circularizing and then I would see the navigation circle?  I gave up messing with it and used the cheat to get home, but I am curious as to what happened and if it is a known behaviour or simply just my setup?

Edited February 7 by Mike S
typo in headline

[kdaviper]

32 minutes ago, Mike S said:

I encountered a weird one with the Mohole in One mission.  When I was "in the hole" and landed, I wasn't really "landed".  It looked like the ship was still suspended.  Graphical glitch aside, it is nothing compared to when I decided to leave and get back into orbit.  I ascended to an AP of about 25K and spit myself into what I thought was an orbit reasonably aligned with my return craft to set up the RV.  Nav Ball details show me with an AP/PE that appears to be orbit, both numbers are close to circularlized enough for sustained orbit.  Not so fast.

Zoom to map to start planning how to do the RV...and no orbit line can be seen with my lander, no means to set the node.  The return ship I can see.  But not the lander's path.  Quite the game, restart, try it again...same thing.  Quit the game, remove all the mods and reset all game settings and old school launch to orbit...still same result, no visible orbit lines of any kind, crash or otherwise.

The only thing that seemed to fix this strangeness was to use the cheat menu and set the orbit to something close to what I was attempting and the orbital path is as it should be, and I can now set my nodes.

Has anyone else encountered something like this?  Modded or otherwise?  Is there an alternative way to "fix" this without doing the cheat?  Some bugs can be overcome with the quick save/load...but this one doesn't want to play nice.  When learning how to do the Moho transfer, I read somewhere that the orbit needed to be higher than I would Minmus or Mun...80k or something like that.  Others said 10k as minimum was ok.  But I am curious if my 25k orbit target was too shallow, should I have went to 50k and tried circularizing and then I would see the navigation circle?  I gave up messing with it and used the cheat to get home, but I am curious as to what happened and if it is a known behaviour or simply just my setup?

This is a fairly well known bug. The game is not updating the state from "landed" in some scenarios

[Superfluous J]

For me, the "fix" is to exit the game and reload. I can't recall if I had to actually quit KSP2 or just go back to the menu. I think just going back to the menu is enough.

[Mike S]

3 hours ago, kdaviper said:

This is a fairly well known bug. The game is not updating the state from "landed" in some scenarios

So the cheat to orbit seems to be the only option then?  I found it finicky with polar orbit, it refused to show the path...but if I started with an equatorial path and adjusted to the polar and other adjustments, it seemed to be ok with that and I was able to go through the motions to do the RV and finish the mission.  Sort of.  I didn't catch it in the vab, but I had a docking port that was installed backward, so I could not properly dock with the return vessel.  Another cheat for that.  Feel so dirty.  lol

[Mike S]

2 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

For me, the "fix" is to exit the game and reload. I can't recall if I had to actually quit KSP2 or just go back to the menu. I think just going back to the menu is enough.

I tried that, but it didn't work as expected.  Sometimes the QS/QL works for moments when I lose input control to the ship, but that wasn't it either.  Could be worse I suppose.  Could be whatever I encountered that caused the crew thumbnail display to completely vanish...but only after I separated the lander from the return ship and created a QS...if I do a QL at any time going forward, the thumbnail display will vanish, leaving me unable to select any crewmember to EVA.  They are still on the lander, can see them in the Kerbal Manager even.  I can reload the save I did right after the first undock when the tool was displayed.  The saved game thumbnail itself will even show the rectangle that holds the crew thumbnails...but they will not return to view.  Closing the game completely and restart will not correct the problem.  The only way to fix it is to revert to the save where both ships were still docked and go throught the entire  undock and landing process without doing any QS/QL.  I became very proficient at dropping the lander almost straight down into the hole from orbit, enough so that I was actually able to accomplish the "hole in one" as it were and be able to complete that mission with the EVA on the surface.  That's where the visual glitch I mentioned above appeared...it was landed, just didn't look like it was.  The return to orbit, the crew icon display did not vanish after QS/QL.  Weird is ...yeah...why?  Some kind of game penalty for doing a QL for a descent challenge HIO?  lol  With the exception of the docking port being reversed, the rest of the mission went ok.

At least it IS playable, despite these weird glitches. 

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

For me, the "fix" is to exit the game and reload. I can't recall if I had to actually quit KSP2 or just go back to the menu. I think just going back to the menu is enough.

I just reload and it tend to work next time. Has happen twice on an Mun lander. 
Also has an minmus probe for doing radiation science who tend to clip trough terrain if warping while landed, to little batteries and solar panels so it had to pause for time between measure and transmit. 
Now that I'm done with it I should just do it for fun. Found that collision with ground also work from below  

[magnemoe]

Had an even weirder version of this yesterday, launches a huge ship for Moho, launch was smooth. Did not get the orbital lines but Ap and Pe was around 100 km after burn so it looked good. Jumping back to KSC did not fix it. 
Restarted and ship velocity was 0 but increasing , so ship was stationary 100 km up and started falling, simply recovered it and launched again solved it so just weird. 

[rogerawong]

There is a mod that fixes this bug by detecting if any vessel has "landed" status but not near the ground, and fixes it. 

It's called "Community Fixes".

Get it!

 

[Mike S]

On 2/9/2024 at 5:50 AM, magnemoe said:

Had an even weirder version of this yesterday, launches a huge ship for Moho, launch was smooth. Did not get the orbital lines but Ap and Pe was around 100 km after burn so it looked good. Jumping back to KSC did not fix it. 
Restarted and ship velocity was 0 but increasing , so ship was stationary 100 km up and started falling, simply recovered it and launched again solved it so just weird. 

Encountered another bug with a transport ship delivering two craft to Eve, one to land on Gilly and the other on Eve.  I would set the orbit around 8K and start looking at trying to do the maneuver to land on Gilly at the impact site.    Set the maneuver, and attempt to do the landing, and discover the node planner decided on its own to burn in advance of what I wanted.  A quick load later and the 8K orbit I did have is now a crash.  I think it extends from another issue with the payload bay and delivering the landers...the lander will no longer remember the orbit after a reload.  And I also experience that no fuel bug, which prevents creating a maneuver node.  Usually I can just create a new stage, move the engines to it and delete the old stage and it recovers.  For some reason, this trick didn't want to work on the Eve mission....ended up having to cheat it to complete the mission.  Hopefully the developers fix the issues with the payload bay and provide something a bit more friendly like KSP 1 had.  The ability to create interstage nodes was nice to have, not sure why it is missing completely here.

13 hours ago, rogerawong said:

There is a mod that fixes this bug by detecting if any vessel has "landed" status but not near the ground, and fixes it. 

It's called "Community Fixes".

Get it!

 

lol

I have that...it didn't do a thing unfortunately.

[rogerawong]

11 hours ago, Mike S said:

I have that...it didn't do a thing unfortunately.

1. With the mod loaded, save the game, and then re-load it.  If you also have Microengineer, you should be able to verify that the vessel status should have changed from "landed" to "orbiting" or whatever is reasonable.

2. If that didn't work... you'll have to use a text editor to open one of the savegame files and change the word "Landed" to "Orbital" or "Flying".  I saw Matt Lowne do this in one of his youtube videos to fix this problem. 
 

 

Edited February 12 by rogerawong

[Scarecrow71]

1 hour ago, rogerawong said:

With the mod loaded, save the game, and then re-load it. 

That really isn't a fix though.  It's a work-around that works whether you have the mod installed or not.

[Mike S]

2 hours ago, rogerawong said:

1. With the mod loaded, save the game, and then re-load it.  If you also have Microengineer, you should be able to verify that the vessel status should have changed from "landed" to "orbiting" or whatever is reasonable.

2. If that didn't work... you'll have to use a text editor to open one of the savegame files and change the word "Landed" to "Orbital" or "Flying".  I saw Matt Lowne do this in one of his youtube videos to fix this problem. 

As stated, save game unmodded or save game modded, both yielded same result.  Usually that's all that is needed.  

 

[Scarecrow71]

1 hour ago, Mike S said:

As stated, save game unmodded or save game modded, both yielded same result.  Usually that's all that is needed.  

 

You stated that the mod fixes this when, in reality, it does not.

[Mike S]

9 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

You stated that the mod fixes this when, in reality, it does not.

No.  I never said the mod "fixes" it.  Someone else implied this via community fix.  It had no effect.  And I am currently in another scenario with this problem on Moho.  This time with the Croissant mission.  I had no issues with the entire mission straight on up to the landing.  All navigation lines remained intact, including landing trajectories.  I was able to do the science, an EVA to get samples and then I turn around and set to launch back into orbit.  Not one thing of the mission to this point was awry and I managed to do the entire thing without any need to reload any of the saves I made along the way.  

Then I launched to return.  And lo and behold and all that fun stuff, the lines were gone.  A quick load back to before I launched and it was fixed.  That alone never worked with the previous mission to Moho.  Gotta chalk it up to "this game is methed up"....


 

[Scarecrow71]

4 hours ago, Mike S said:

No.  I never said the mod "fixes" it.  Someone else implied this via community fix.  It had no effect.  And I am currently in another scenario with this problem on Moho.  This time with the Croissant mission.  I had no issues with the entire mission straight on up to the landing.  All navigation lines remained intact, including landing trajectories.  I was able to do the science, an EVA to get samples and then I turn around and set to launch back into orbit.  Not one thing of the mission to this point was awry and I managed to do the entire thing without any need to reload any of the saves I made along the way.  

Then I launched to return.  And lo and behold and all that fun stuff, the lines were gone.  A quick load back to before I launched and it was fixed.  That alone never worked with the previous mission to Moho.  Gotta chalk it up to "this game is methed up"....


 

You are correct.  I thought I was responding to OP, but I fouled up.