Ascimator

Decided to take one of my first crappy planes off. All went exactly as you would suggest, except I must have bumped into a Baby Kerbal Kraken in the process of crashing off the runway. Successfully lifted off one of the planes I downloaded from forums. Landed successfully on one of these small islands, decided to stop rolling back in the sea by pressing G. Well, it's not like I was going to even try and come back.

I use the smallest engine. My problem with landing on Mun is that I either start braking too soon, and then I am forced to freefall again, or I start braking while too low and crash. I do not want to use MechJeb, as that does not feel like an accomplishment to me.

My first Mun landing left nothing but the pod. During the second landing the rocket bounced a little and fell on its side. After getting it back up using the landing struts and ASAS I felt like a cheater, so I tried launching back home. Was just a little bit too low on fuel, unfortunately.

Still in the atmosphere, too lazy to go up all the way just to test.

I have dragged them in the stage I am decoupling, but when I decouple it, they do not seem to activate, neither if I put them in the stage the corresponding decoupler is in. I have no problems with activating the chute on the command pod, but I want to put them on the first stage so it comes down gently.

Asc for short. All that I want to say is that I love this game, for its sheer epicness (for some reason, I love the most the moment when you decouple stages, just feels so epic). I've got 3 rocket designs right now - the first one was my first attempt of building a rocket (as I did not yet know about symmetry tool, it was unstable as hell, so I crashed every time). The second one was the rough copy from the wiki. I was not satisfied with its power, so I built Serious **** MK3, the three-staged one. This one is less maneuverable, but provides moderate takeoff, enough fuel to mess around with on the orbit and the landing stage. Today I tried landing on the mun for the first time. In fact, I did, but everything except the command pod was just a little bit disintegrated (was too lazy to kill the horisontal speed). I have also performed a mun slingshot around the sun twice, both times accidentally (the second time I had a chance to get to Kerbin again, if not for Space Kraken). So here is the question: how do I get my takeoff stage to activate its parachutes?