Violent shudder when physics load.

[Motokid600]

For the longest time now ( I think it started in .21. ) my craft would shake when the physics load on the pad. And it seems the larger the craft the more violent the shudder. So violent that the ship explodes. This is my current project. Its a large Duna base and this thing explodes on the pad atleast 50% of the time.

I have these camera rovers all around KSC equipped with the Lazor camera that can track. And along with Romfarer I extend the load distance to 100km and I watch all my rockets take off from the ground and all the way to orbit. So I have to switch to these rovers to toggle the cameras and once I switch back to the rocket BOOM. Half the time atleast. So does anyone else experience this? Anything that can cause it? I tried with a default draw distance, no Romfara and cameras. Still does it. Even when I come off of warp it has a high chance to explode.

[Lazro]

The Kraken strikes back!

The reason is that when physics loads, the rocket accelerates from N/A to 175 m/s. The upshot is that this tends to break things quite heavily. I suggest add more clamps at the middle, see if that helps.

[SRV Ron]

The huge 5 meter tanks of Novapunch are so weakly held together that they are prone to excessive wobble without tons of carefully placed struts.

[Motokid600]

MOAR STRUTS?! Lol.. thanks fellas ill give it a try.

[Vanamonde]

For one thing, gravity suddenly asserts itself when physics kicks in, yanking with a strength proportional to the weight of the parts. Attaching launch clamps to more points will transmit the shock to the unbreakable clamps.

[merlinux]

Can hardly tell looking at your pic, but it looks like the bottom clamps are attached to the SRBs, try attaching them to the main body of the rocket, I find it helps on my large rockets.

[Mokmo]

It looks like the 5m novapunch tank... That thing is so wobbly between the thruster and the tank even strutting the hell out of it with modded struts can't seem to make it stop...

More launch clamps at the top, right now it looks like the bottom is taking all the weight.

[SRV Ron]

I have had to resort to structural cubes to give a place for struts to mount properly for tapered parts especially the huge five engine booster that will oscillate excessively during flight.

[-Velocity-]

In my experience, the 5m Nova Punch tanks are useless. Nothing sticks to them. I just use a bunch of the 3.75 KW Rocketry tanks instead. You can make a nice asparagus rocket out of them, since stuff attached to the sides of them doesn't just randomly fall off like with the NovaPunch 5m tanks.

Edited October 4, 2013 by |Velocity|

[Motokid600]

Hm. I stopped having the problem with parts falling off the tanks. I have struts clipped inside and the rocket does just find after launch. It's just when it's on the pad the things a ticking time bomb. I tried more support. More struts, more clamps. It helped, but the damn thing still detonates catastrophicly if I switch to and from vessels to activate cameras. So what I do is I switch vessels under time warp then drop to x1. It helps, but again id say 50% of the time when coming out of warp BOOM. I just kinda hold my breathe every time now and hope for the best.

[Gus]

Do you know whats colliding with what? Have you pressed F3 to see what fails first?

[Motokid600]

No collision that I can see in flight log. There is an early entry stating that one of the fuel tanks are colliding with a launch clamp, but I can't seem to remedy this. And I can't tell if its happening before or after the failure. Other then that the flight log is just full of aftermath. Idk. Maybe its the clipped parts, but it does this with all my rockets. Clipping or no clipping. Hm guess this might just be something I have to deal with. I hope come .22 we get some bugs worked out. This being one of them lol. As if..

[HansBlix]

Oh god yes, have had this problem many times in the past, and previous posters are correct it seems to be the physics kicking in. Couple of things you can do:

Add more clamps, and have them at different levels of the rocket (MOST IMPORTANT)

5m fuel tanks are definitely dodgy, especially their joint with the engine... moar struts!

The above got me to a point whereby the rocket wouldn't shake itself to pieces completely, however, on occasion parts would still break. The final thing that got this sorted for me was immediately turning off gimballing when the physics loads. Not sure why but i found doing this via an action group reduced the duration of any shaking/swaying. See below latest creation, took a lot of playing with struts and supports, but can get it up 100% of the time now.

http://i.imgur.com/45N4AAl.png

Good luck,

Hans