Juno: New Origins | [minor] Looking directly at the sun causes unstoppable spinning

This is only minor and not particularly game-damaging, there's ways around it, but I think it's worth noting in case it's a symptom of something else.

Locking your heading to face Juno directly, whether by setting it as a target and setting autopilot to face the target or even just manually facing it using the manual autopilot controls, with solar arrays deployed seems to cause the craft to quickly start to spin uncontrollably, fast enough even to completely break apart until all solar arrays have exploded or been flung off into deep space at light speed.

As I said earlier, this is of course nothing major, it's just a bit quirky. Thankfully I saved moments before discovering this so there was no lost flight or anything. I think it's maybe something to do with the arrays applying torque to the craft itself and when facing the sun directly the rapid changes in direction quickly build up and unleash an ungodly amount of energy, destabilising the craft and causing it to spin.

Gamefile note: The flight I discovered this on is Sentry II, in orbit of Cylero. It's very much possible that it's an issue specific to the way this craft is built, but I've not tested that myself and can't confirm it.

0 Valprine

@Pedro Will do, if that does happen I'll reply here with a link to the new report

1.7 years ago

Dev Pedro

@Valprine thanks for the response, if you ever run into this again please report it back, so we can check what's the same in the two cases to try to trace it back

@Pedro Sorry for the late response - I just tried to reproduce it myself and also couldn't make it happen again even doing exactly what I did before. Not entirely sure why it was happening to be honest, but it did happen twice in the session - once unexpectedly and then a second time when I was trying to recreate it from a quicksave. I wish I had more information I could give but I'm not really sure why it was reproduceable in that same session but not anymore. I'm using slightly different hardware now so I don't know if it's maybe performance-related perhaps? Though that being said it happened whether the game was at normal speed or slowed down, so I don't see that being the case

Even trying to force Sentry II to break I couldn't reproduce the issue, did you nothing anything else out of the ordinary? Was it running out of battery? Did you have RCS on or off?

@Pedro only when pointing directly at it, though thinking about it it'd probably act the same when pointing directly opposite it too, haven't tested that though so can't confirm it

Does it only happen when locking your heading pointing at the star or in any other direction?

[minor] Looking directly at the sun causes unstoppable spinning

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