Landing planes in water

[r3_141592654]

I am having trouble landing planes in the water now after the Breaking Ground update. Since I had to create a new save file to get the spawns to occur, I went ahead and added a few mods. Before the mods and update I could easily land my planes in the water by flying over and then deploying chutes. I was landing with a vertical speed of -5 m/s. For some reason now under identical circumstances when I land, certain parts seem to explode and my cockpit goes shooting up into the air several hundred feet. I've had planes break apart before when landing on water, but nothing so violent as now. It seems the explosion might be coming from my Materials Lab. Is there a log somewhere that I can access to see the parts destroyed, possibly in the order they were destroyed so that I can further analyze my failed landings? I did have RealChutes installed, but removed it due to instability and lack of parachute control. Currently I think I just have mods that affect the visuals and sound (like Chatterer), but nothing which should affect the actual physics. Is it possible that it could be temperature related since after long flights the Wheezley engine is glowing hot and the rest of the craft is hot due to flying at Mach 1 for half an hour and contact with water is causing the destruction? I know that is a stretch, but at this point I'm just tossing out ideas.

Thanks

[MaxPeck]

This happened to me too.  I flew a science drone west from KSC out over the water and then attempted to parachute recover it.  It hit the water ~5m/s and exploded like it was made out of TNT.  I mean, it was a straight Michael Bay moment.  I'm not sure why, I've had other stuff land in the water just fine returning from orbit, and I've water launched vessels, so I don't know what could've caused it on that specific instance.

[katateochi]

1 hour ago, r3_141592654 said:

Is there a log somewhere that I can access to see the parts destroyed

You can press F3 to bring up the flight log (gotta do it just after or during the crash, once you've switched back to the space centre I don't think you can get that info).
That'll show you what impacted with what and what exploded. on a whole craft Katastrophe it's a bit of a mess, but scroll to the top and that should show the first things to go Kerboom. 

I would suggest taking all mods out and making a fresh stock save to determine if it's mod or core game related. Also, 1.7.1 or 1.7.2?

 

1 hour ago, r3_141592654 said:

Since I had to create a new save file to get the spawns to occur

prob not helpful now, but you can enable the surface features without creating a new save, this post explains how

 

[Geschosskopf]

Have you tried just doing a conventional ditching?  As in, get as close to the water as you can with the power off, then keep pulling the nose up to increase AoA and drag without gaining altitude, until part of the plane touches and you come to a stop?  That usually results in nearly zero vertical speed and the minimum forward speed.  Seems to me vertical speed is more an issue than forward speed when it comes to water landings.

[Vanamonde]

Thread moved to modded support, and good luck with your issue.