Claw Issues

[Boomerang]

So I realize that I'm a bit late to the party, but I've just about ignored the claw part and the asteroids since .23.5. Just wasn't terribly interested them relative to other things I was doing.

Because a C-class rock came into the Kerbin system with a nice periapsis, I figured I'd take a break from playing with bases and catch it. Everything goes fine and and I end up with a less-than-pretty orbit, but the orbit is low enough to keep out of the Mun's SoI.

A few days later I send a second ARM probe with more fuel and better engines with the intention of transferring a little fuel to the first probe, deorbiting it, then tweaking the asteroid's orbit with the second, better probe. Everything goes fine again. Except that after transferring a little fuel and monoprop to the first probe, I go to release it from the rock and my screen falls a few hundred meters behind the asteroid, focused on seemingly empty space.

The first probe *did* detach, drifting a couple meters from the asteroid, but I can't switch to it either via keys or the map view. The *name* of the original probe is in the map view, but when I switch focus to it, I end up looking at the empty spot trailing the asteroid.

I can detach the second probe from the asteroid perfectly fine. Of course this means that I could just transfer most of the fuel to the first probe and do my orbital tweaking that way, but that doesn't fix my detachment problem.

It seems to me like for whatever reason, the game isn't handling the separating of the asteroid and the original probe properly and it's behaving as though there was some lag in the process and the craft ended up trailing the asteroid. So it thinks the CoM of the probe is in empty space when it's actually right beside the asteroid. This leaves me with 'three' crafts: the asteroid, attached to the second probe; the original probe, detached beside the asteroid and upon which I cannot focus; and then a phantom craft trailing the other two, where the game *thinks* the original probe ought to be.

Anyway, my question is essentially whether this sort of buggy behavior is still to be expected with the claw, or if perhaps there's something I've done to trigger the problem. I've got ways of working around the issue and honestly I'll just terminate all the flights and delete the asteroid from my save file if it's going to be a serious problem, but I'm curious.

Edited July 29, 2014 by Boomerang

[Tex]

The way the problem appears to be behaving doesn't appear to have an origin with the Klaw, but a simple random chance bug. My suggestion would be to backup the save file, then use your second probe to go and take back the fuel from the first probe, reattach to the asteroid, and then terminate the first probe from the Tracking Station. If you can still switch to a "phantom craft", we can work from there.

Are you using any mods? If so, what are they? Mods can seriously affect the way the game handles situations in some cases.

[Boomerang]

Thanks for the reply. And embarrassingly enough, after going back to check on what you inquired about (the fourth time I've reloaded this save to check on the problem) I was able to detach the problematic probe fairly normally. The staging icons still showed the two engine from the second probe that it was no longer attached to, but otherwise I was able to control and deorbit it.

I'll chalk it up to a random bug.

[Sirrobert]

Yup, that's happened before on seperation of accents from Kerbin.

Suddenly you're looking at a spot 200 meters below the rocket