Help! Glitch in staging - any way to save this ship?

[mellojoe]

Here's a quick rundown of the problem YouTube video here to demonstrate. Please excuse my poor narration skills and the darkness of the vid:

Ship worked perfectly in testing on Kerbin. Now, though, when doing it live, we have a glitch. This is after we have ditched all of the side small fuel tanks, too. We've gone through about 4 stages to get to the point where we are here. We fire the stage and the focus SHIFTS to the dead booster. And it only kicks off ONE booster, not both. The main craft is now out of control with a dead booster still attached, and we are controlling a dead booster falling to the ground. By the time we shift focus back to the main craft, it is out of control.

Is there a way to edit the save file or the persist file or something to fix this somehow? I've tried reloading previous saves. Am I dead in the water? please help! I'm desperate. I so wanted this to work. I've never done a return trip from Eve. This is my first time, and I've spent WEEKS getting to this point. Please give me any solution you can think of.

I'm willing to try anything.

Only mods installed are Kethane, KAS, and Crew Manifest. Flight Engineer is installed but not used on this craft.

Thanks.

[merendel]

Thats odd. Not sure how that problem would even arise let alone how to fix it. My best suggestion would be take that stage and split it in two. Stage off the booster that is not disconecting first, then the glitchy one and then swap back to the main craft if it still swaps focus. not a perfect solution but at least your craft will spend only a moment off ballanced and should be balanced for the moment your out of controll and hopefuly wont end up in an unrecoverable spin.

[mellojoe]

Bump.

I'm thinking of trying to launch a new ship from Kerbin and then maybe copy the craft file and paste it over the one on Eve. Will this work? Will it make things worse?

[SSSPutnik]

You can get the save file, replace the ship with a new one.

Or hyper edit a new ship in.

Shifting focus I guess doesn't help? Are you positive you are controlling the ship from the right point? You should be able to edit the staging.

[Liowen]

Have you checked what happens under F3 to see if something is breaking or whatever? The only other thing I could come up with is that oddball has a probe body attached inside the fuel cell, but that is not likely. Just something to check. I would suggest if it is just that stage do it manually just cut throttle for a second or two pop them loose and throttle up. Honestly I would check the F3 data when i happens though might shed more light onto this.

[Jacob01]

I've had a similar problem to that. I was doing a mission to Duna and had two probes to deploy on the mothership, but only one would decouple and the other wouldn't. I used the same mothership on a recent Dres mission and the probes decoupled fine. I think the problem you are having could be solved by launching the flight again.

[mellojoe]

The main problem with redoing this mission is the complexity:

This ship was designed to land at Eve using its own fuel, make a precision landing next to a Kethane refinery, refuel, and then lift off from Eve. It has taken so much time to get here that if I have to re-do it, it would end up being faster to scrap this whole plan and start with a different one entirely going the traditional route of landing a fully fuelled ship that just lifts off again immediately.

I'll probably have to decouple that stage manually, but the loss of delta-V while I cut the engines, slow, and then re-fire them could mean the difference between making orbit and not...

... and that makes me a sad panda.

[Wooks]

I´m baffled, definitely something wrong is going on. Please do an F3 after staging on both objects (ship and tank) and share it with us. You still can follow through your mission in this state, run the first stage, shut down the engines and stage both tanks separately as fast as you can and turn on engines to continue. I know, I know but sometimes what are you going to do?

Only mods installed are Kethane, KAS, and Crew Manifest. Flight Engineer is installed but not used on this craft.

Thanks.

On a side note Mods have a nasty habit of breaking things when mixed sometimes, not ALL the time but sometimes.

Edited February 20, 2014 by Wooks

[Liowen]

While this might not sound like the idea solution it might be easier to do, move that stage up a level and drop it with another one. Have you tried it without the mods to simulate the same event, this is more to rule them out as the problem? I am not sure what KAS and Crew Manifest do in terms of game play, but I would want to rule those out before saying it is a glitch of the game.

[Rhyunix]

If it works fine, and the rest of the ship can get to orbit and function, whack-a-kerbal it off

[mellojoe]

I'll try tonight to fly it as is: cutting thrust, staging manually, then firing it back up. We'll see if I can get Jeb off Eve.

If not, my backup plan is to leave that stage attached, then drop it and the next stage together and see if that helps. Finally, we'll try some save file copy-pasta with a new ship.

[jfull]

You do know you can alter staging at any time in a mission, right?

Sorry, I can't watch the video, so I don't know if the problem is something that can be fixed with that.

[Arsonik]

I'll try tonight to fly it as is: cutting thrust, staging manually, then firing it back up. We'll see if I can get Jeb off Eve.

If not, my backup plan is to leave that stage attached, then drop it and the next stage together and see if that helps. Finally, we'll try some save file copy-pasta with a new ship.

You should really do what Rhyunix said and ALT + F12, Enable Whack a Kerbal, and just blow that [explicative] to smithereens. The SRB that is. You don't want to blow the rest of the ship up........ do you?

[mellojoe]

SUCCESS!

All the tips you guys mentioned were great, but nothing worked. Even hack-gravity, cut thrust, manually stage, re-engage thrust, unhack gravity didn't quite work. It sort-of did, but caused other problems including the ship losing all gimbal control somehow. Was pissing me off.

So, I launched an exact copy from Kerbin, set it on the launch pad, copy-pasta the save file coordinates, and put a brand new duplicate on Eve in exactly the same state. Parachutes popped, one landing gear broken, fully fueled, just waiting on the pilot. I boarded Jebediah, and the thing worked perfectly. Got me into orbit on Eve with 17 units of fuel left. First time ever. WHEEEEEE!

Now, I'm docked up with my return shuttle (just a fuel tank and a nuke engine) and hopefully I can get back to Kerbin. But, the hard part is over. I have successfully rescued Jeb. And I have a blueprint for finally being able to land on Eve and return home. I'll have a full mission log up eventually

[SSSPutnik]

Well done!

[-ELF-]

A bit late entry, but still...

Looks like the part that was controlling the ship was with the glitch booster.

Seems like you needed to right click your control pod, and select Control From Here option. I bet it would solve a problem. Do you still have glitchy ship on Eve?

Will you, please, try this? It will either render my guess useless, or we will have a solution.

Thank you, anyway.

[mellojoe]

I did "control from here" on the pod. And i tried it by "control from here" on the top docking port, too. The broken booster was in the middle of the ship, with a ring of drop tanks on the outside. I would be travelling at nearly 100m/s at about 10km when it would all go wrong. Trying to manually detatch them by first cutting throttle caused me to start to fall backwards ... which killed any chance of actually making orbit from Eve. It was a true mystery.