Vanishing rescue mission

[PixelThis]

Perhaps a newbie question, but I had something very unexpected happen on my last Kerbal mission.

I've had three Mun missions of various success. The first left a crater (RIP Bill), the second landed but destroyed the rocket engine and the astronaut survived. The third mission, sent up to rescue the astronaut, landed about 15km away (I didn't want to waste precious fuel moving closer). It was late last night and closed everything down and figured I'd come back today and hike my stranded astronaut over to the rescue vehicle.

Okay, so today I launch Kerbal and from the space tracking center, I pick the stranded vehicle and select Fly. I set the target to my rescue ship and a marker shows up on the screen showing it 15km away. Now the strange part, when I tell my astronaut to go EVA, the marker disappears. I think this is weird, can you only see the marker when the astronaut is in the vehicle? So I have him get back on board, still no marker. So I zoom out and can't find the rescue ship at all. I go back to the space center and it's no longer even available to be selected, like I never flew the mission at all.

Has anyone else seen something like this?

Edited November 25, 2014 by PixelThis

[Vanamonde]

Either a bug, or you unintentionally ended the flight (recovered) when you switched to the other. Did your view revert to KSC between ships?

[PixelThis]

The sequence went sort of like this:

(1) Fly out rescue mission and land on Mun

(2) Shut down KSP and go to bed

(3) Next day start at KSC and select stranded mission

(4) Set rescue mission as target

(5) Go EVA and target disappears

(6) Go back to KSC and verify that my rescue mission is gone

[The_Rocketeer]

A number of small things could be making this seem like it's vanished when it really hasn't. If it really has disappeared, you've either found a bug (which are still very prevalent) or you've accidentally removed the ship by reverting or similar.

Firstly, targets you select inside a craft are targetted by the craft, not by the Kerbals inside it. So, if you target first and then go EVA, you'll lose the target and will need to reselect it from the map view.

Second, the map view (and tracking station view) have switches to toggle what kinds of crafts are visible. These switches are hidden on a pull-down at the top of the screen in map view. If they're greyed out, no crafts or objects of that type will be shown on the map. Debris crafts, for example, are hidden by default. If your particular craft is deselected, you won't find it on the map view.

Third, zooming out and hoping to see a craft 15km away from your current position on the surface of the Mun isn't necessarily going to work. 15km is a long way, and unless the game considers the object to be close enough to be worth giving a reticule (others probably know exactly how close this needs to be), the chances of you just seeing it are pretty slim. Non-targeted craft reticules are basically grey anyway.

Pro tip: in future use the F5 quicksave feature when you quit for the night, that way if anything goes wrong first thing tomorrow you can just hold F9 and get a do-over.

[RexKramer]

As Rocketeer said, objects you targeted while inside the ship are targeted by the ship, not by the Kerbal. When you EVA you will need to re-target the ship from map view.

You can get to map view while on EVA by pressing the M key (unless you have re-mapped that to a different key..).

Otherwise, you could do it without targeting also. Get a bearing to your rescue ship, and start walking that direction.. I like setting targets personally, easy to lose your bearing while on EVA.

Finally, I suggest conserving your EVA monopropellant, don't be tempted to use it all up during the hike to make it go faster. That's just in case you forgot to put a ladder on your rescue ship, or in case it doesn't extend as planned. Speaking from experience here..

[The Yellow Dart]

I've had similar things (bugs) happen to me before. Once I sent a tug out to an asteroid to stop it in kerbin's soi. Upon getting ~300m away the asteroid spontaneously lost all its forward inertia and started falling directly toward kerbin. Once I figured out what had happened I setup a new intercept with it and this time upon getting close it blinked out of existence, never to be seen again. I don't know about you but I had mods installed and I suspect it was caused by one of them.

[PixelThis]

Thanks for the pointers, I'll give another go (and probably another one or two after that) and see what happens