How to protect your parachutes?

[Loren Pechtel]

12 minutes ago, fourfa said:

Funny, I updated a third thing while you must have been reading.  Last thing is if you're really REALLY not pre-deploying the chutes, then you're just going too fast when they deploy.  Anything over 250m/s and they'll rip off with the canned "destroyed by aero forces and heat" notification.  Not being able to slow down below 250m/s before hitting the ground - that's also pretty common particularly with suborbital flights.  Early career players tend to launch those straight up, re-enter straight down hoping to land back at the KSC, and never realize that a long arcing trajectory is crucial to re-entering safely.  That long arc is what gives you enough time experiencing atmospheric braking to slow down enough.  I've done the same thing myself many times.

I learned that lesson simply going to the upper atmosphere and Google quickly enlightened me.

I do think it's likely something is messed up with the design and they are pre-deploying regardless of the staging setting, though.

[FullMetalMachinist]

51 minutes ago, Loren Pechtel said:

I do think it's likely something is messed up with the design and they are pre-deploying regardless of the staging setting, though.

Curioser and curioser... That is an interesting problem. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the fastest way for you to get useful advice and help is to post a screenshot. If you're unsure how, see this post. Another useful thing you could do is upload your .craft file to Dropbox, Google Drive, or KerbalX.

[Snark]

Yay, looks like we've got a solution. 

Just a final note to @Loren Pechtel:    The moral of this story is, whenever you've got a problem along the lines of "why is this ship doing something different from what I was expecting," it's almost always a good idea to post a screenshot along with the question.

A picture really is worth a thousand words.  There are so many things that can go wrong in KSP that it can be impossible for you to describe exactly what's going on, because without lots of experience under your belt, it can be very difficult to know what is significant and what isn't.  Even as seemingly innocuous a word as "explode" could mean completely different things depending on exactly what you observe.

A screenshot very often lets the old hands tell at a glance exactly what the problem is.  For example, they can see exactly how your ship is designed, where the parachutes are, whether you've staged them or not (I mean really whether you've staged them, not just whether you think you have), what your reentry angle is, what exactly is happening when you say "explode", etc.  I expect that a single screenshot at the start of this thread would have answered the question instantly, rather than discussion ping-ponging for a couple of dozen exchanges. 

Anyway, glad it all worked out!

[Loren Pechtel]

5 hours ago, FullMetalMachinist said:

Curioser and curioser... That is an interesting problem. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the fastest way for you to get useful advice and help is to post a screenshot. If you're unsure how, see this post. Another useful thing you could do is upload your .craft file to Dropbox, Google Drive, or KerbalX.

Confirmed.  The staging was wonky.  The culprit seems to have been the decoupler got grouped with the parachutes and pre-deployed them when it was fired.  I fixed that and they didn't fry--but something was wrong.  I had to manually fire both stack decouplers on the rocket, they didn't stage properly.

Also, I messed something up and didn't get credit for the SRB test.

[Ehco Corrallo]

On 1/29/2016 at 6:19 PM, Loren Pechtel said:

Confirmed.  The staging was wonky.  The culprit seems to have been the decoupler got grouped with the parachutes and pre-deployed them when it was fired.  I fixed that and they didn't fry--but something was wrong.  I had to manually fire both stack decouplers on the rocket, they didn't stage properly.

Staging is evil, and is not to be trusted. Parachutes are grouped with decouplers by default (because it was the correct configuration pre-1.0), so be wary. On the lines of your decoupler failures...it happens sometimes. Staging again, though I'm not sure how to avoid it.

Edited January 30, 2016 by Ehco Corrallo