Part damage due to exhaust. Important?

[Daffs]

I see in some of my flight logs that the exhaust of an engine has been damaging another part of the ship, but nothing bad ever seems to happen. So is this important or just something that will be switched on in the future like the deadly re-entry affect?

Edited August 17, 2014 by Daffs

[OrbitusII]

This is one of the things that is either ok to ignore or is a really bad thing to have. If you're getting it when firing separatrons to decouple spent stages, it should be fine (the ok to ignore thing)

What the log is saying is that a part is being hit by the thrust of an engine. Usually it's not an issue, just be careful that your main engines aren't aiming into other parts of the rocket or else they'll explode (the really bad thing)

[sal_vager]

If they damage it enough the part explodes, and can also overheat making it go bang sooner, also it blocks thrust from the engine in question

[Daffs]

Ah ok, I won't worry about it, nothing has exploded yet. Usually get it when I've misslaigned stuff and a jet engine has an exhaust on a strut. Worse case was an engine firing on an air intake

[SRV Ron]

If they damage it enough the part explodes, and can also overheat making it go bang sooner, also it blocks thrust from the engine in question

Can make for a really bad day if your engine is taken out by an exploding spent stage. A set of sepatrons to push the spent stage out of the way can easily fix the issue of slow separation.

[M4ck]

An engine firing on another part of the same vessel basically cancels its thrust, while still consuming fuel and making the second part overheating until it blows.

[Jimbimbibble]

You can actually use explosive decoupling. Put a couple of SRB's on top of each other. Stage when you're a couple of seconds away from burnout and it overheats/explodes the previous SRB.

[RocketPilot573]

It mostly causes overheat warnings, even parts that aren't in the staging menu have that same overheat thing... If it overheats too much then BOOM.