Disappearing Kerbils/Vehicles... Why?

[SlowThought]

So Bill ran out of go juice on the Mun, and called for a ride home. I duly built a rescue vehicle, launched it, got to the Mun, and no Bill, no dead vehicle. No, wait, Bill isn't even on the missing list. He's right back in the launch rotation. This is not the first time it's happened. Under what circumstances does the game harvest what it sees as "dead" missions? Is there any way to change this behaviour?

[Dwight_js]

Did you revert the flight? Maybe quickload to a quicksave made before the mission?

[WanderingKid]

Well, the reason he's showing in your list at home is because he died (somehow) and Jeb/Bill/Bob can't die, so they get respawned.

Now, what happened to your ship? I have no idea.

[Claw]

None of the kerbals permanently die (yet) unless you edit the save file.

As mentioned, did you revert or load a save from before the launch? Or maybe terminated the flight?

If the kraken ate your ship, the guys don't normally respawn because their status ends up broken. So I doubt that's it.

However, the other game bug that comes to mind that could have messed you up is if you had a NullReferenceException. There are some bugs that cause NREs, which effects the game's autosave ability. If that happened and even if you managed to quicksave, if the persistent file didn't update then your game might appear the same as before you ever launched. I'm not sure if you happened to keep track of the kerbal date when you landed to see how that compares to the current date...

[SlowThought]

I've not yet met the kraken (that I know of). Nor did I do a reversion or load a save. I did note an odd error message on my terminal screen (I'm running Linux), so maybe it was a NRE.

I had a similar case this morning... manned lift vehicle shuttling unmanned probe to orbit. Probe successfully released, but return resulted in catastrophic failure. Then, no probe. Does probe contain reference to original ship, and thus end up with a NRE when the ship is destroyed? It seems a shame that Bill should have sacrificed his life in vain.

[SlowThought]

I was set up for automatic updates... old vehicles suddenly had new parts, new vehicles spawned from old parts, bad bad things. Since disabling automatic updates, I've not seen this, nor behaviour described earlier in this thread. Once again, it doesn't pay to be on the bleeding edge...