bob132435465768798

I have a 3 stage asparagus rocket. In trying to make my early stages recoverable, I put parachutes on the early booster stages, attempting to use the "Deploy when Safe" setting on the radial parachutes. However, I deploy the parachutes before, they don't come out as it's not safe, but the moment I decouple the stage they deploy and are destroyed. How can I prevent this?

Can you use fuel as a weight? I see no movement capability for a payload that has fuel but no engine, and you could just show (in the VAB) that fuel crossfeed is disabled on the decoupler.

What I'm getting from this is that this is all for rockets (vertical launches). Can you do spaceplanes or no?