Spontantaneous explosion staging, help!

[Vanoven101]

So, when i activate a certain stage of my ship (two radial decouplers decouplers that decouple two main side boosters), the entire ship explodes for what seems to be no reason, and i believe it's not because of any collisions that occur during the decoupling, since if i activate the two decouplers manually from their right-click menus, the explosion doesn't happen

[maculator]

Do you use sepratrons?

[Venusgate]

Are your decouplers staged with an engine activation, and is that engine pointing at parts?

[Vanoven101]

Originally posted by maculator:

Do you use sepratrons?

I generally don't use them, but i tried using them here to see if it would fix the problem, and they didn't

[Vanoven101]

Originally posted by Venusgate:

Are your decouplers staged with an engine activation, and is that engine pointing at parts?

No, the decouplers just discard two empty fuel tanks and the engines attached to them in an asparagus sequence

[maculator]

I asked if you use them because they can actually destroy parts theire fireing against.

[Vanoven101]

And another problem is the massive lag spike that comes with the explosion, which makes it incredibly difficult to see what goes wrong

[Chibbity]

Originally posted by TitanVolt101:

And another problem is the massive lag spike that comes with the explosion, which makes it incredibly difficult to see what goes wrong

Press F3 for a detailed log of what happened.

[Mightylink]

A screenshot would really help you know...

[Vanoven101]

Originally posted by Chibbity:

Originally posted by TitanVolt101:

And another problem is the massive lag spike that comes with the explosion, which makes it incredibly difficult to see what goes wrong

Press F3 for a detailed log of what happened.

i'll try that

[Vanoven101]

Originally posted by Mightylink:

A screenshot would really help you know...

i'll try to take a few, but idk how well i can capture the moment of decoupling because of the lag spike

[maculator]

If you use mods you can use this:

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/143763-131-time-control-283/

It can slow down time up to 1% of the real time or freeze it completely. Might be funny and helpfull to examine what exactly happens in the last moments of your rocket...

[Gob]

Not sure if this a bug or design issue but generally you want to move your inline decouplers so that they are about 1/3 to 1/4 from the top of the stage you are dropping, rather than in the middle where they will end up with default placement. You may also then need a strut towards the bottom.

This make the top of the decoupled part peel away first and it makes it less likely it will crash into the remaining craft.

Placement is a matter of first using the default placement. Then use the offset tool to move the decoupler up and then use the offset tool again on the dropping stage to move it back to where it first was.

[Vanoven101]

Ok, I finally figured out what the problem was with the F3 detailed log:

So, at the top of the ship there's a pretty big fairing that holds the very last interplanetary stages, and somehow whenever the simoulateous decoupling occured, the nuclear engines on that later stage bumped into the fairing and triggered a chain explosion.

I switched around the placement of the nuclear engines and the shape of the fairing, and now everything seems to be working fine.

Thanks a lot for the tips everyone gave! Your help is much appreciated!