Fuel line bug or personal problem?

[Shadoworgon]

Ok i was trying to send the engine section of a ship i was going to assemble in orbit to space when my launcher kept doing atomizing itself at a certain point.

I then watched closely the next time and noticed one set of my cluster engines (pic of launcher below) kept shutting down randomly, then i saw it said fuel deprived.

Heres the pic of my ship with the fuel line setup..the fuel flows from the top tank to 2 cluster sets which drain to the other 2 sets which drains into the center.

heres the problem, one set starts using its own supply way to early..

Which leads to one engine set shutting down before the other and entering a mad spin then..well atomizing

Is this a bug or am i confusing the game with all my fuel lines?

Edit: I was able to bypass the problem by manually transferring fuel to the broken cluster

Edited July 14, 2013 by Shadoworgon

[HoY]

The only thing that could cause that is a fuel loop in your fuel lines,, are you sure you pictured every single fuel line? It looks like it should work according to the picture but we can't see it perfectly.

You could actually save yourself from having to refuel that tank in orbit by adding another pair of asparagus tanks to your lifter with the same engines on them, save yourself from having to drain the payload tank and mess with these fuel lines at all

[Jason Patterson]

It's a fuel line issue though, so you know. You've got fuel going from a central tank to multiple separate branches and then back to a different central tank, a loop in the fuel line which the game doesn't handle properly. This can be done intentionally using fuel lines but it also happens occasionally with fuel crossfeed parts that activate on their own.

In short, this is fine: (sticks are fuel lines, v shows fuel flow direction - downward)

   |
   |
  / \
 |   |
 |   |
 v   v

And this is fine:

 |   |
 |   |
  \ /
   |
   |
   v

But a combination is not:

   |
   |
  / \
 |   |
 |   |
 |   |
 |   |
  \ /
   |
   |
   v

[Shadoworgon]

Ah ok, I remember hearing that somewhere before, thought something like that was the case, anyway I got the thing to work just by manually transferring the fuel from then top tank to the tank having the issue

[Rickenbacker]

Just run the top fuel line (from the top tank) directly to the bottom central tank. Shortens the burn time of the boosters a little bit, but should fix your problem.

[UtopiaV1]

I got this bug before, if you pick up the entire rocket minus the command module, then put the rocket back under the command module again, the game puts the rocket back as best it can (as it remembers). Sometimes struts are misalligned, and fuel-lines aren't connected properly to other tanks. Just re-connect all struts and fuel lines again.

And make sure you don't loop fuel tank feeds, my ships start spinning against all reason and physics when I do that!