Cannot grab a named asteroid / grab an asteroid twice

[eddiew]

Hi there,

So this morning I finally succeeded in an asteroid diversion mission! Great! Having left it in a loose Kerbin orbit, I figured I'd go back, get some more science, and make the orbit a bit neater and maybe use it for a space station, only... it no longer seems to be grabbable.

I have tried a manned ship, and an unmanned probe, to rule out weird construction problems. I have nudged gently at the asteroid at 0.3m/s or less, and I have rammed it at 5m/s. I've tried disarming and re-arming the claw repeatedly. Consistently, using both vehicles, the claws just slide over the surface but will not bite. Sometimes they dig in and almost seem to connect, but then they spring back out again. I've spent the best part of two hours trying to find a "perpendicular" angle of attack, and the short version is that the first attachment was just not this hard.

Since I had a second asteroid inbound, I tried the same again with the same results - the initial attachment is easy and the asteroid can be diverted, but an asteroid cannot seem to be grabbed once it has been moved already. I renamed both asteroids when they were initially grabbed, and I've noticed the tracking centre now thinks both are a ships that can be terminated, which feels rather suspicious.

In the first screenshot, you can see a ground pylon from Kerbal Attachment System. This is able to connect its winch in 'undocked' mode, which vaguely tethers the ship in place, but it can't work in docked mode and can't be used to move the asteroid. Even using the winch to physically pull the ship against the asteroid, the claw cannot be tempted to grab hold.

In addition, by the time the unmanned probe arrived, the ship that was tethered in the screenshot had vanished into nothingness, although the ground pylon was still there (just visible in upper right of lower right image).

I suspect this is the same bug as reported a couple of months back: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93796-Advanced-Grabbing-Unit-cannot-re-grapple-an-asteroid?highlight=grabbing although there's too much appearing in my alt-F2 to work out if it's logging the same message.

Using KSP 0.25 via Steam, with a number of mods (obviously - sorry about the state of the UI, I was getting grouchy by this point and wasn't in a mood to be neat).

For now, I'm giving up on doing anything with my new Minimuns, since I can only assume there's an invisible kraken draped over the asteroids, swatting me away at the last moment

Cheers,

EddieW

*edited 2 days later to avoid bumping* Probably the same as http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100171-My-Claw-won-t-attach-to-the-asteroid since the asteroids I couldn't grab are B and C, while I have a mission to fetch an A class. This thread is probably not useful as the problem is known

Edited November 17, 2014 by eddiew