Got my first serious Kraken bite - 2 rockets, 1 asteroid

[Redchrome]

So I've had minor nibbles by the Kraken before - ship stuck pointing in one direction in spite of torquers and reaction jets until I switched to the Space Center and back again - but last night I had my first real run in with the Kraken tearing things apart.

I sent a rocket to push an asteroid and managed to capture into a really elliptical polar orbit. Then, having read about people putting multiple rockets on a single asteroid, decided to try it. Got two ships clamped onto the same asteroid! Woohoo! Only problem is that they were pointed 90 degrees to each other. So I tried moving both of them to a 'flatter' spot on the asteroid where hopefully I could get both pointing sort of the same direction. When moving one of them (the original one I had attached to the asteroid), I found that if I had both RCS and SAS engaged at the same time, the ship would shake violently and RCS would fire lots of directions trying to control it. The shaking got worse the farther I was away from the asteroid/other ship. This makes sense based on what I saw in HarvesteR's talk at unity 2013, as an example of compounding floating point variations.

I got both rockets moved around and pointed at about 20 degrees from each other, both aimed roughly at the center of mass. Firing both at the same time was controllable and looked pretty cool in a wacky kind of way. Looked even more cool to have this thing flying over Kerbin's south pole. I wanted to take a screenshot, had to look up how to take a screenshot, went to remap the keys (function keys don't work quite right on my Mac for OS reasons), switched back to my ship.... and suddenly the Mechjeb dialogs all go away and when I look at the map view my ship weighs 0.1t and there's a string of debris there.

Oops. Guess I should have learned about savefiles sooner.

My ship (admittedly the more structurally unsound one) was reduced to its probe core. the rest of it was in a string of debris across several hunded km. The 'explosion' was violent enough to cause most of the debris to almost stop in its orbit and start falling toward the planet. Somehow it even slowed the whole asteroid and put it on a suborbital trajectory! (Tho not quite as straight toward the planet as some of the other stuff, the periapsis was lowered from ~90km to ~53km).

That's not good. I've spent too much time nudging this thing around, I'm not giving up on it. Is any of this debris a usable ship? Yes! One of the rockets (the second and sturdier one) is still functional. So I try to re-capture the asteroid with the working ship. Crap, the grabber seems to be 'jammed' and won't clamp onto anything and can't be disarmed/pivoted (no such options visible in the right-click dialog for the part).

Quit game, restart game.

Aha! Grabber can be 'reset' now by disarming and rearming it.

Why won't SAS hold a pointing at the target now? It'll stabilize, point prograde, retrograde, normal, antinormal, radial, antiradial, but won't point towards the target (button isn't available, even tho it was working before). Oh well. Grabbed the asteroid again with manual pointing. Nudged it back up into an orbit that won't decay.

Not pointing exactly at the center of mass. Navball is screwed up, says I'm pointing near opposite the center of mass. Unclamp from the asteroid... now SAS is working properly again. Reattach to asteroid. Not perfectly lined up, but as long as I don't thrust too hard it's controllable now.

So it was a bit of an adventure... but that's what real spaceflight is like. Stuff goes wrong and you have to figure out how to fix it with limited tools and limited time.

[Redchrome]

As the saying goes, "Folks, this ain't normal".

Couldn't have made a prettier debris cloud if I tried tho.

Note that some parts stayed sort of on their original orbit.

[waterlubber]

The Klaw is the buggiest thing in KSP. If you get hit with that kind of kraken, which I hate more than Satan, (makes unintelligible ranting grunting sound) your best bet is to check your craft for clipped parts. An RTG or the sort clipped inside can cause that. I really don't know the real cause of it, I do know that on crafts that have a high part count and lots of radial connections tend to do this more often.

Procedural Fairings seems to cause issues as well...

[Redchrome]

Thanks for the advice @waterlubber.

The rocket that came apart did indeed have a couple of RTGs around a probe core, along with an antenna and a gravioli detector. Unfortunately I had put a Tiny probe core in line with a grabber (which is a Small) and some Small tanks. So it was pretty floppy to begin with. Once I used all Small-diameter parts for my probes, it got much stiffer. I eventually got a few more rockets stuck to it (and my docking skills have gotten much better!), nudging it closer to the equatorial plane every time (and thus making the next launch easier). It flies better than you might think, really. Now let's see if the Kraken bites me again when I try to tie this to another asteroid or five.