What are drogue chutes good for?

[Kyrt Malthorn]

What are drogue chutes good for, and when to use them?

Do drogues have a higher safe deployment speed, or heat resistance or something? What are those limits, because they don't say these things in the VAB. I know from experience regular chutes are safe to deploy below like, ~270 m/s.

Edited September 15, 2015 by Kyrt Malthorn

[Slam_Jones]

They'll help if you try to land on Duna, for example. Since they tend to have a higher safe deploy speed, they can help significantly drop speed before deploying standard chutes. This is particularly important for Duna, due to the very thin, very low atmosphere.

This could also potentially help if you're re-entering Kerbin atmo at high speed, and can't safely deploy regular chutes yet.

Edited September 14, 2015 by Slam_Jones

[Skorpychan]

They slow you down to where regular chutes work safely. And on Eve/Jool, they work as well as regular chutes.

[Destroyer713]

Unlike regular chutes, drogue chutes won't cut themselves until your velocity reaches 0, rather than the instant you touch the ground. This can be useful for large spaceplanes, as you can use them like the Space Shuttle's parachute to slow down and stop a vehicle on the runway if airbrakes and wheel brakes aren't enough.

Edited September 14, 2015 by Destroyer713

[DCWarHound]

As far as i know,they are safe to deploy at 500m/s and slow you down fast enough so you can deploy the main chute at 250m/s

Ever seen in real parachutes that small chute that comes out first?,that's a drogue chute.

[DancesWithSquirrels]

Oh, man, I just don't reenter without them anymore.

They work (ie, survive) at 500m/s and quickly slow you to <250 for the main chutes. I had a number of missions where I was still over 250m/s approaching ground level and either tore the chutes off or went smacko - add a drogue, not a problem.

Of course, that might have been 1.0.2 or 1.0.3 - can't remember off the top of my head if I've flown into the cumulodirt clouds in 1.0.4.

[kerbanoid]

Unlike regular chutes, drogue chutes won't cut themselves until your velocity reaches 0, rather than the instant you touch the ground. This can be useful for large spaceplanes, as you can use them like the Space Shuttle's parachute to slow down and stop a vehicle on the runway if airbrakes and wheel brakes aren't enough.

Yes, they are perfect for that. I always attach one or two of the small drogue chutes to every spaceplane design, as they are small and lightweight.

[Snark]

Other than "drag chutes" for landing spaceplanes (which doesn't come up for me, since I'm not a spaceplane guy), the only use cases I've come across for drogue chutes are:

1. landing on Duna

2. landing a super-dense craft (cargo container of pure uranium, using the UKS mod)

...other than that, in practice I've never needed drogues because my ships always slow down to under 250 m/s on their own, so I can just use regular parachutes.

[The Aziz]

I started using them since my last failure few kilometers above ground, just deployed regular chutes as always, then warped because why not, then suddenly explosion. And yes, they were marked as safe to deploy.

As someone said before, drogues are small and cheap, so I don't mind, and place them every time.