Kracken and Arm

[dr_jt]

I've played KSP since .17 and I've never seen as many KRACKEN attacks as I have with ARM. Is it just me? Do other people have their ARM parts based ships just fall apart or explode for what seems too be no reason? A ship will just fall apart mid flight and after a restart work fine. I had one ship that I flew twice during the same session of KSP, suddenly blow up while coasting to AP on the third flight. It was a fuel supply run to my asteroid station in Kerbin orbit.

[NecroBones]

Yep, I think it's part of that Null Reference bug, or whatever it's called.

I'm seeing it happen occasionally, with several different effects:

1. Ship starts oscillating and vibrating, harder and harder, until it explodes. The parts are shaking in all sorts of directions. I only saw a ship recover from this on its own once, and it was the docking port that flew off. It makes me think just one part can be sufficiently out of position to ruin the whole ship.

2. Ship keeps accelerating in some direction even after engines are cut. Apoapsis just keeps going up, for instance. Iv'e seen this happen, where the ship soon exploded, and I was just watching the command pod continue to accelerate without engines.

3. Ship gets stuck in some position in space / over the planet. I had this happen at launch once, where the command-pod and claw wouldn't move relative to the ground, so the rest of the ship launched through it and exploded. The command pod just stayed there, hovering over the launch pad. I've also seen this happen with asteroids, where even time-warping, the ship would stay in one fixed position in the orbit, without moving, but still registered a high orbital velocity on the nav-ball. Just stuck to a piece of space dust or something, I guess.

[MKI]

It is probably from the new joint connections. It changed the basic part to part connections which probably is why some of the game is getting funky from time to time.

Ive had random acceleration from a command pod part. I couldn't move the craft, rotate or anything. The command pod had around 5g Acceleration and pulled the rest of my craft design along with it. Restarting the game fixed it, but beyond that i couldn't figure it out or understand what really was going on.

[cantab]

It may not be related, but I've got a subtle acceleration on one of my probes. Just made the ejection burn for a Mun flyby, and my Mun periapsis creeps lower by about a metre every second. Only when physics is running, so not in timewarp or the tracking station. It's very steady, not like the jitter that's common with wobbly ships. There's a chance I quicksaved with engines running slightly, but they seem off when I reload it and the acceleration continues when they're definitely shut down. I've done every change I can on the craft in terms of enabling and disabling things, as well as rotating the probe, and making and loading a new quicksave, of course closing and restarting the game, copying either quicksave to persistent.sfs, uninstalling Precise Node, running either 32-bit or 64-bit KSP (I'm on Linux), wiping my settings.cfg, and still this phantom acceleration is there.

[Pecan]

This example may be related.

[dr_jt]

2. Ship keeps accelerating in some direction even after engines are cut. Apoapsis just keeps going up, for instance. Iv'e seen this happen, where the ship soon exploded, and I was just watching the command pod continue to accelerate without engines.

Yeah, I've had this happen twice on me. I couldn't understand why I was accelerating with throttle to zero.

Well I'm glad it not just me but sad that there seems to be a wide spread bug or bugs.

[Kerboman]

I've experienced a phantom wobble bug as well; on a small 3 part ship designed to go sundiving, I had first the rear fuel module wobble apart and explode, nearly taking the whole ship out on the way away from Kerbin; on the way back in, the front engine module went. Interestingly, both happened at about 45000 km away from the planet.

[problemecium]

The other day I had a ship just continue accelerating... but it was my own fault for letting it run out of electricity during ascent (did you know RAPIERS don't have alternators?) x_x

[Macrocosmus]

http://youtu.be/xMRcd1cWpvo

Here;s a nice video showing a nice ARM Kraken.

[Kerano]

Yep, I think it's part of that Null Reference bug, or whatever it's called.

I'm seeing it happen occasionally, with several different effects:

1. Ship starts oscillating and vibrating, harder and harder, until it explodes. The parts are shaking in all sorts of directions. I only saw a ship recover from this on its own once, and it was the docking port that flew off. It makes me think just one part can be sufficiently out of position to ruin the whole ship.

2. Ship keeps accelerating in some direction even after engines are cut. Apoapsis just keeps going up, for instance. Iv'e seen this happen, where the ship soon exploded, and I was just watching the command pod continue to accelerate without engines.

3. Ship gets stuck in some position in space / over the planet. I had this happen at launch once, where the command-pod and claw wouldn't move relative to the ground, so the rest of the ship launched through it and exploded. The command pod just stayed there, hovering over the launch pad. I've also seen this happen with asteroids, where even time-warping, the ship would stay in one fixed position in the orbit, without moving, but still registered a high orbital velocity on the nav-ball. Just stuck to a piece of space dust or something, I guess.

Yep, it all seems to be related to the same NullReferenceException bug. Once it is triggered, using nonphysical timewarp will bring about a number of different weird effects depending on where your ship is located (e.g. on launchpad = hovering capsule, low orbit = torquing/disassembly, high orbit = explosion). When you see a "stuck" orbit the ship isn't really immobile - its velocity is locked but the altitude changes. A "stuck" ship just seems to be stationary because nonphysical timewarp breaks at the same time, so you don't notice its movement in higher orbits.

More about the bug here:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/75274-Frozen-orbit-null-reference-exception-%28REPRODUCIBLE-output-logs%29?p=1070347&viewfull=1#post1070347

According to the bug tracker, the devs are currently looking into the problem.

[wasmic]

I've not been attacked by the Kraken a single time in ARM, and only very few times in 0.23.0. However, back in 0.22, the Hell Kraken attacks got so bad that whenever I went interplanetary, I had to send three copies of each mission, and oftenly, only one would survive until the destination.

Oh, wait, I have actually had a few Kraken attacks in ARM, when using phys-warp. Suddenly, my craft would spin at ridiculous speeds and my chutes would be ripped off, although this is probably a bug in RealChute and not a problem with KSP.

[dr_jt]

http://youtu.be/xMRcd1cWpvo

Here;s a nice video showing a nice ARM Kraken.

When my ship just breaks apart the pieces do fall straight down to Kerbin just like in that video. Generally during stage separation all the ARM parts from the stage being ejected will just come apart or explode rather than falling away still assembled.