Ship freaks out on reload

[Manabender]

This issue is new to 0.90.

When I first launch a ship, everything is just fine. It goes where I want it to go, everything is nominal. Sometimes, I need to return to the space station briefly, after which I return to that ship. Everything is still fine.

However, when I quit the game, relaunch it later, then try to reload the ship...bad things happen.

For starters, engines refuse to work. Engine exhaust appears to come out both the nozzle and the side of the engine, the latter of which is not normal. When I throttle them up, they consume fuel at a normal rate, but don't add any thrust. This has happened several times.

Most recently, the problem got worse. Not only did the engines freak out like before, the ENTIRE SHIP freaked out. A couple radial parts flew off (while many other radial parts stayed "attached", at least as far as the game recognizes), then every part on the ship visually detached, spun like crazy, and flew in various directions, leaving the camera looking at basically nothing. When I time-warped up, the detached parts returned slowly to camera view, but remained visually detached, and all spinning wildly, and individually. Time-warping back to x1 had no effect.

I tried reloading the ship several times, and did occasionally get it to remain whole (minus the few parts that broke off). It was still spinning wildly, and mechjeb's "kill rotation" function had no effect. I was able to kill the rotation myself after considerable effort. Still, the engines were acting up as before, so it was still a space brick.

I have the following mods installed, all updated to 0.90 versions:

MechJeb2

RealChute

SCANsat

ScienceAlert

TweakScale

[SiphiliSx]

I can confirm these symptoms as well. No control authority, all engines show active but no thrust, wildly spinning parts/kerbals. I've also had a Kerbal EVA during the chaos, throwing him immediately into the closest orbital body. Upon returning focus to the ship he is back in his chair? After the EVA the ship itself seemed to freeze in place. Both the stock and KER altimeters showed no movement. When I changed focus again the game showed me Kerbin, then proceeded to zoom out to infinity.

Mods Installed:

* KAS 0.4.10

* KER 1.0.13.1

* MechJeb2 2.4.1.0

* ProcFairings 3.11

* KerbalAlarmClock 3.0.6.0

* TweakScale 1.48

[skyfire322]

I was having a similar issue as well, especially when trying to activate SAS or RCS. When attempting between the map and and ship, everything would freak out.

I deleted TweakScale, and things seemed to fix themselves.

[Manabender]

Deleting TweakScale seemed to work. Thank you!

[Rygellion]

I had the same problem and was all ready for a long troubleshooting battle, but I'll try to delete Tweakscale as well and see what happens. I made a video of the one craft I could resume without the camera flying off:

[YellowApple]

Also able to confirm similar symptoms; specifically, the following:

• Time would seemingly stop upon switching to a flight scene.
  
• One instance of a ship flying apart.
  
• During the above-mentioned bouts of suspended animation, some ships would have very strange thruster behavior without actually producing any thrust (even on ships that do not have any fuel whatsoever and are drifting aimlessly in space). Exhibit, for reference.
  
• Barrage of NullReferenceExceptions originating from TweakScale upon switching to a flight scene (I unfortunately did not save a copy of Player.log for further diagnosis, though I'd be happy to spin up a clean KSP 0.90 and try to test).
  

Given the origin of the NullReferenceExceptions, I removed TweakScale (and subsequently removed and readded some other mod that complained about a lack of TweakScale despite not listing it as a dependency in CKAN metadata), and the problems resolved themselves. TweakScale is almost certainly the culprit (and is indeed the common denominator in every "me too" post in this particular thread.

This has been reported by several others on TweakScale's thread (and at least one of those reports mentions this thread), so it's at least already been brought to someone's attention.

[skyfire322]

The other weird thing with TweakScale was that whenever I attempted to attach KW Rocketry RCS ports or engines, they would show as if they were activated, wouldn't attach, then the game would crash.

Hopefully it'll get fixed soon, as that's a really useful mod! Glad everyone was able to get everything sorted out!

[VPope]

Ok, very interesting. I just had this problem show up after a sudden crash-to-desktop while things were going fine. When reloading my quicksave, the main engine had exhaust coming out the back AND the side, and the craft pretty much immediately pinged off into nowhere space, though the map view claimed it was still on its original orbit. Like many of you, I also have TweakScale installed, among several other things.

So I pulled TweakScale out, restarted, loaded the same save, and hey... craft is fine.

Very strange behavior!

[Wicked_Sludge]

Another confirmed fix by removing TweakScale here. I was having the same issue as you all only my ships would all explode instantly upon loading them from save, sending some bits on Kerbol escape trajectory and some bits through Kerbin. The only way I could "fly" the ships was with time warp on. As soon as I went to 1x, "boom".

[DSM20T]

I was having this same issue. Updating tweakscale from 1.48 to 1.49 solved it for me. KSP AVC didn't notify me of the update for some reason.

[gizmologist]

I have also been having this problem. I haven't found a solution per se, but I have found a workaround that allows me to continue using Tweakscale.

BEFORE going to the tracking center and loading up your ship, go to the VAB. You don't have to do anything there, but you have to go there. (I suspect doing this initializes Tweakscale properly, whereas going straight to your ship does not.) Once you've been there, you can go to the tracking center and activate your ship, and it won't fly apart. It seems to be a pretty reliable, if clumsy, workaround.

[Green Baron]

Same problem, since a few days. Haven't really changed much in the game except upgraded tweakscale to 1.50.

A bit annoying cause it destroyed a dunamission that was underway for half a year and and a multi-purpose spacestation ...

The suggested workarounds did not work for me, deleting Tweakscale did. Since i didn't really use the functionality (i installed it only because another mod (KAS ?) recommended it) i can live without it. Hopefully ... cause i like KAS ...

K.

EDIT:

I must correct myself: Tweakscale is NOT the culprit. The error is deeper and it even effects the X-Window System (Linux). After having played some time, changing ships multiple times, doing manoeuvring, staging, transmitting data, then at one point switching to a ship let's it spin violently distrubitung the parts up to escape speed from the kerbolar system !

Mouse pointer still works, but clicking with the mouse outside KSP has no effect any more. Alt-Tab for switching windows is disabled as well. Will try to find hints in the logs ...

Another Edit:

Maybe the problem is connected to the savefile, not to specific mods. For me only crafts with multiple pods behave in that way. They start to spin until they fly apart. As soon as a small craft, e.g. a tandem of two probes has separated from spinning the effect stops. Each single probes rotation can then be stopped separately ...

Third Edit:

Coming closer. The thing with the mouse not working was probably just a coincidence.

... but ...

When i am very fast in switching the SAS off before the rotation tears the ship apart i can catch it and stop the rotation. Was lucky with my two probes that were only equipped with very weak torque. The problem seems to be related to the stability systems, mods are probably not guilty.

But the problem persists: the next time i switch to them, even with SAS off, the same problem starts again.

To me it seems like it's somehow connected to SAS not working correctly ?

Edited January 8, 2015 by kemde

[Defektro]

I had the same symptoms after I upgraded SCANsat from 8.1 to 9rc4.1, but at the time I just assumed that it was because of incompatible versions. After restarting the game some of my ships just lost most of their joint connections and multiple RCS exhausts are coming from odd places. I saw this thread and tried updating Tweakscale, but that didn't work. Currently I have removed SCANsat 9rc4.1 fully and for now everything seems to work.

Here is my current mod list:

Aviation Lights 3.7

Crowd Sourced Science 1.4.0

Docking Port Alignment 4.0

In Flight Waypoints 1.1.1

Infernal Robotics 0.19.3

Karbonite 0.5.1

Kerbal Alarm Clock 3.1.2.0

Kerbal Attachment System 0.4.10

Kerbal Engineer 1.0.14.1

Module Manager 2.5.6

NEAR 1.3.1

Near Future Construction 0.4.0

Near Future Propulsion 0.4.0

Near Future Solar 0.4.0

Precise Node 1.1.2

Procedural Fairings 3.11

Toolbar 1.7.8

Tweak Scale 1.50

Edited January 10, 2015 by Defektro

[Outlaw3025]

I am having similar issues and i am NOT using TweakScale. Most of it for me seems to revolve around the Mk1-2 command capsule, as the only vessels that this issue has occured on used that particular part.

Mods:

KSP Interstellar 0.90 update 0136

Station Science 1.4

Kerbal Attachment System 0.4.10

Crowd Sourced Science 1.4.0

[Green Baron]

This may not help you but maybe others:

In my case Kerbal Joint Reinforcement caused the problem of spinning and breaking vessels that had multiple pods (stations, satellites and other functional contraptions). There is a discussion in the addon's thread.

I found it out installing the stock version anew, began a new game and then added my favourite mods one by one, allways using an "untainted" savefile for each check. I know it's some effort ...

K.

[direstatus]

So I've been having a similar, but not identical, problem lately. My problem isn't that ships being docked together tear themselves apart but that ships tear themselves apart after being undocked. For me, this problem usually occurred after fixing the unrelated stuck docking port bug but could also happen under normal circumstances as well. It would manifest itself like this: select docking port, click undock, momentary lag spike, the vessels move apart about an inch or two and then bam one of the ships blows into pieces (it looks like one part detaches from the rest and 'drifts' into other pieces starting a chain reaction). Usually it would be the dockee that blows up and the docker would come out unscathed. Also a particular bug that (typically) happens rarely but has occurred 10 times (I know how many because I made a backup quicksave for each before fixing it) since I started a Mun base mission: when two ships docked together refuse to physically detach after being undocked (and the game recognizes they are separate vessels). I figured the two were related but hadn't been able to track down the responsible mod (this never happened in vanilla) until I came to this forum thread...

....Kerbal Joint Reinforcement caused the problem of spinning and breaking vessels....

...Removing KJR from the game has solved this problem for me and also made it so ships undock normally. It also seems as though NullReferenceException (aka null orbit/dead orbit glitch) doesn't happen as often anymore, but I'll have to play longer to know for sure. I suspect KJR was actually conflicting with some other mod (TweakScale perhaps? I'll have to try it, since everyone else in this thread is having problems with it) because I had KJR installed shortly after buying the game and had already made multiple stations without issue. But at some point I installed a new mod and then the problems started. I'll try to figure out which one that was.