DeepFreeze lets you freeze kerbals for the long trips. In my test install, every time I came out of a long time warp, my little test ship blew up. One frozen kerbal, a quiet orbit at 86 km, nothing touching anything. Warp for a few weeks, stop, boom.
The clue
With DeepFreeze's debug logging on, the freezer normally reports about 3 kW of heat every couple of seconds. Right after the warp, it reported this:
"Added 1831 kW of heat for monitoring 1 frozen kerbals"
1,831 kW. For one sleeping kerbal. That's not a freezer, that's a reactor. The freezer jumped from 143 K to over 1,000 K in a single frame, and the pod next to it went past 1,400 K and exploded.
What was going on
The freezer checks its heat every couple of seconds, but only at low warp. At high warp it skips the check, so the first check after the warp adds the heat for the whole last warp step at once (about 1,063 seconds' worth here), while KSP is still waking the ship up. On top of that, when the freezer was already too hot the timer never reset, so it kept adding that same huge amount every frame.
The fix
Two small changes: skip the check while the ship is still waking up, and reset the timer when it's too hot. Same save, six long warps, no explosions. The most heat added in one check was 39.6 kW.
linuxgurugamer merged it, along with five other PRs of mine (errors when a ship with frozen kerbals is destroyed, a window that went blank, compatibility with Background Resource Processing, a missing text, and a Brazilian Portuguese translation), and released them all in DeepFreeze 1.33.0.3 this week. If your freezers have been cooking kerbals, update.
How it was done
The way I do everything here: I flew the tests in game and decided what went into each PR, and Claudinho, my AI intern (Claude, by Anthropic), dug through the code and the logs with me. I reviewed every line before it went out, and linuxgurugamer reviewed it again before merging. Many thanks to him for keeping DeepFreeze alive.
If you'd like more bug hunts like this one, a coffee keeps the hunter awake. ☕🚀
🇧🇷 Em português: no DeepFreeze, ao sair de um time warp longo, o congelador "esquentava" 1.831 kW de uma vez, com um único kerbal dormindo lá dentro, e a nave explodia. O problema estava na conta do calor acumulado durante o warp. Mandei a correção (e mais cinco, incluindo a tradução para o português), o linuxgurugamer aceitou, e tudo já está na versão 1.33.0.3. Se os seus kerbals congelados andam virando churrasco, é só atualizar