Space station disappears?

[CorruptDB]

I have a station orbiting Laythe that has suddenly disappeared. This is the second time this has happened, it happened once and I reverted to an old savegame I had from before the missions to build the station arrived at Jool. I then re-assembled the incoming parts into a new station. I was doing some things with some other stations and I noticed that it had suddenly disappeared again. There are a few pieces of debris from the construction still in its orbit but the station itself just vanished. Has anyone else seen anything even remotely like this?

I doubt I have to tell anybody how frustrating this is, the station represents many hours of work and having all that work suddenly disappear makes me not want to ever play again. What's the point of building something or launching a complex mission if ships just suddenly disappear? I have learned to deal with the numerous bugs in the program (perpetually stuck docking ports, flapping intersects, kraken lurking everywhere, etc.) but this one doesn't seem possible to work around. Does anybody have any suggestions on where to look for a cause?

[Vonar]

Yes, if you haven't quicksaved when your station is in orbit over laythe and the old quick save file happens to be a older copy then your laythe station then your station will no longer exist.

[Specialist290]

Tentatively dropping this into Gameplay Questions and Tutorials

What sort of orbit was it in, generally speaking? Do you have an older quicksave that still has the station intact? (Be sure to back up your main persistent.sfs before you check, just in case.)

[Jean Deaux]

I had frequent problems with my ships disappearing in the Jool system. I don't know what it is about that system, but check your ship inventory before you save and make sure they're still there before you do.

[KvickFlygarn87]

Maybe it was flung into Jool by a moon? Happens all the time for me, especially with Tylo and Laythe.

Edit: Disregard; I thought you were orbiting Jool, not Laythe. What orbit were you in over Laythe? What mods do you have?

Edited June 24, 2014 by KvickFlygarn87

[Tex_NL]

Just yesterday I too thought I had lost a station. It was in a circular orbit well above Kerbins atmosphere so it couldn't have 'burnt up'. Turned out for some reason it was mislabelled as debris after I undocked and simply didn't show up as it should.

[dryer_lint]

I had a probe orbiting Jool that got flung into a very wide solar orbit for no apparent reason. Then again, ALL my probes either disappear or get flung out of the solar system...

[CorruptDB]

It was orbiting Laythe in a 120 km circular orbit, which is quite a bit above the atmosphere so I don't think it deorbited. I have checked to see if it got marked as debris but it just isn't there. I have also checked the save file for any reference to this station and there is nothing other than a probe that was launched from it and the save file is several hundred kb less than the save file that contains the station. I loaded an old save file again and have rebuilt the station but I am deathly afraid it is going to disappear again. I assume it is something specific about this particular station as it has disappeared twice and I have never had any other stations/craft just disappear like that. I am currently using the following mods on 0.23.5 64-bit running on Linux:

Kethane

Kerbal Attachment System

Kerbal Engineer Redux

Orbital Construction

Kerbal Alarm Clock

Infernal Robotics

I would hate to throw this savegame away as I have complex stations around Eve, Kerbin, Minimus, Duna and Laythe which would take a long time to reproduce. It's difficult to see when it disappears if I am not actively doing something at Laythe, in this last instance I was attempting a landing on Duna (which involved several different quicksaves) so by the time I noticed my current quicksave didn't have the station anymore. I have been trying to remember to do periodic named quicksaves but I don't end up making those as frequently as I should so I lose a lot of work when having to revert. If nobody else has seen this it might be something specific to Linux or specific to my install so I guess my only hope is that it might be fixed in some future version.

[dryer_lint]

Is there a crew onboard?

[CorruptDB]

Well, it just happened again, station is gone. Of course I don't have a save for my last 3 hours of play.

Nikola: There are 4 kerbals onboard, including Bob Kerman.

[Specialist290]

Hmm... Does the station itself have some sort of control module on board, such as a pod, a cupola, a landing can, or a probe unit? It's possible that your station isn't actually disappearing, but just being relabeled as debris when you undock your craft from it because the game can't find a control pod that would identify it as a separate craft.

Have you tried switching to the "debris" in orbit around Laythe to ensure that one of them isn't actually the station?

[cantab]

If you have persistent debris set to anything other than "unlimited", then anything that gets marked as debris risks being automatically cleaned up. I've had issues with debris vanishing when I had a non-zero but finite limit set.

Also, if any ship has a part and that part becomes unavailable, the ship will be permanently removed upon loading the savefile without notice. This can occur if you uninstall or update mods after having created it. I wonder if it couldn't also arise from character encoding issues.

[CorruptDB]

I don't think that is is debris, I would see debris in the save file and there is no sign of the station there. I have checked the (former) orbit and there isn't any debris there. When this happens the save file gets smaller by (what I assume is) the size of the station. It is possible that it got marked as debris for some reason and was auto-deleted, I am at my max count for debris. I will try terminating some of the debris to see if that helps.

The station does have control, it has four RC-L01s. It also has a hitchhiker storage container where the crew is but IIRC that can't exert control. I don't think this is the result of an upgrade, I unzipped the 0.23.5 version into a fresh directory, added all new mods and started a new savegame. I haven't changed any mods since this save was started.

I have (again) reverted back to an old save, hopefully I can get some more data if it disappears again.

[cantab]

Hmmm...speculation time.

Of your mods, I'd point at KAS and Orbital Construction as the main suspects. Both let you change craft around in flight (beyond the usual docking mechanics); if those changes somehow corrupted the craft I can see why it might not get properly saved or might get deleted.

[CorruptDB]

Whelp, it happened again. I have ruled out debris, I am not at my max debris and there is no debris in the station's former orbit. I suspect Orbital Construction as well, this station doesn't currently have any KAS parts but it is an OC space dock. This time, there was an orbital anomaly in the station: the orbit mysteriously changed from 120x120 to 120x~960. I fixed the orbit and started some operations at Duna. I checked on the station several times and each time it was still there (until the last time obviously. I don't know what is doing it, but it seems like something is changing the orbit of the station when I am away from it. If it changes it to intersect Laythe it would explain the disappearing station. The crew roster in the Astronaut Complex shows the four crew members as "Missing in action". I don't have any other dead kerbals, is that the norm?

I think the next step is to break the station down into its component pieces and see which one disappears. I suspect it will be the part that contains the space dock.

[cantab]

By default dead Kerbals show as "Missing in Action". If you change your savefile to set MissingCrewsRespawn = False, they will instead show as "Dead". In my permadeath save though I did still get one Kerbal showing as MIA at one point. I don't recall the details but I think either they or their ship mysteriously vanished.

[Harry Mckay]

I've had things just disappear before too. I don't run any mods (recently added Kerbpaint, but the disappearances happened long before I installed that.)

The two memorable ones were a Space Station and a Comsat in orbit of Kerbin. I actually had three Comsats in close but varying orbits, the result of a failed attempt to put them up in geosynchronous orbit, or at least at 120-degree increments in the same orbit. A small kerballed Space Station was in a slightly higher orbit. I'm pretty sure none of the 4 orbits intersected; I AM sure that none of the satellites' orbits intersected the station's orbit.

Long story short, I suddenly noticed that the Space Station and Comsat #3 were just gone. My first thought was that somehow they'd collided and exploded, but there was no debris. I finally put it down to a bug, possibly a Kraken. Still nags at me though.

[Vigelius]

Hmm, I'd forgotten about it but actually I had a mysterious vanishing a while back. I had a two-part craft which had done a Gilly landing and was waiting in Gilly orbit for the return window, whilst I was busily doing other launches. I happened to notice that the same crew had popped up on a new flight, which confused me no end so I went back to have another look at the Gilly craft - no longer anywhere to be found, no debris, nothing.

I put it down to not having recruited enough crew, so the new flights were just drawing from the existing pool, notwithstanding the fact that they were halfway across the solar system already. Possibly something associated with the way life support mods handle crew? Never did find a decent answer.