My asparagus isn't working anymore

[Name Lips]

I built a rocket. It wasn't powerful enough, so I surrounded it with a ring of asparagus. It still wasn't powerful enough, but it was very close. It couldn't quite get up to orbital velocity so my nuclear engines could take over.

So I started on the next ring of asparagus, adding engines and fuel in pairs to stay balanced. The first pair wasn't enough, but the second pair juuuuust let me get into orbit, but without enough fuel left for my mission.

So I figured, why not, let's add another pair of asparagus engines to the outer ring. It now has 3 pairs.

The asparagus works in two spirals out from the center, so at each stage a pair of engines are dropped.

Now things have suddenly gotten weird.

One of the spirals is consuming fuel faster than the other one. At first, my rocket seems to be doing all right. Then after a few seconds, it starts to tilt a little bit (since one side is heavier, with more remaining fuel). I can start to see the difference in the fuel bars next to the engine icons. Another 10 or 20 seconds, and my rocket is in an uncontrollable tumble, one end of its asparagus out of fuel and the other still burning.

I can't figure it out. I know how to make asparagus -- after all, they've been working properly up to this point. I've double and triple checked that the fuel lines are all pointed the right way. I've double and triple checked that all of them are using the same engines, and that all the tanks are starting full of fuel.

What else could be causing this?

[sojourner]

You've got a misplaced fuel line some where.

[Taki117]

A pic of the craft would help, bu it sounds like you have one fuel line attached to a tank, and it's partner line attached to a different tank (Common if you are using stacks of tanks.)

[relin]

Another option: you've stacked tanks radially, but the tanks aren't actually stacked. I've had it happen a couple times that, after stacking a pair of Jumbo tanks using radial decouplers, they wind up being separate tanks instead of one large tank. And since I tend to place my fuel lines at the bottom of the craft, the top tank simply fed into the core instead of the asparagus setup.

But without an image/part file, it's impossible for us to tell.

[Mobjack]

Your design is getting too complicated and is causing one of the tanks to break on the way up. When one of the tanks breaks, it can cause the engine burn out of control and the fuel to be unbalanced depending on your design.

You can try adding more struts, reducing your throttle or simplifying the design. I had something similar happen to me and eventually decided just to use two smaller launches and docking to assemble my ship in orbit.

[dom849]

Or, if you're like me and saved a complex asparagus stage in sub-assemblies, you'll find that all the connecting fuel lines were conveniently disconnected so you can experience the joy of reconnecting them.