Unkillable Kerbals?

[Lar-E]

I haven't been playing KSP at all lately, I'm in the middle of a very intense semester and need all the time and brain power I can get; but last night I was fooling around with my 5-year old, building silly rockets and blasting them off, and we noticed that it was almost impossible to kill our kerbals. Is it just me? We'd forget to put parachutes on, drop the craft from nearly-space, big explosions, but the command module would stay intact, with Jeb grinning like an idiot the whole time. I'm running stock, latest update, with deadly reentry installed, on a fairly crappy old computer.

[Thomas988]

By default, it's either the Big Three always come back to life or all Kerbals, can't quite remember. Plus, if you drop a Kerbal even from high up landing them on their helmet will save them, since it is pretty much indestructable. If that's not the case, then I guess you're just lucky!

[RAINCRAFTER]

Command Module... What command module(s) did you use?

[Kerbart]

By default, it's either the Big Three always come back to life or all Kerbals, can't quite remember. Plus, if you drop a Kerbal even from high up landing them on their helmet will save them, since it is pretty much indestructable. If that's not the case, then I guess you're just lucky!

I think the OP was clearly mentioning that their capsule remained intact. I agree, sheer luck -- or just not trying hard enough!

[Jovus]

If you're using the Mk1, I suspect Deadly Reentry makes that pod a little tougher by accident, since it adds ablative shielding. (I've intentionally crashed it into the ground at ~2m/s faster than its listed crash tolerance, and it survived. Not so without DR.)

[soulsource]

I always had the impression that the chance that a part disintegrates during a crash is proportional to its velocity, with the crash tolerance being the highest speed at which it is guaranteed to survive impact.

Another thing: If you don't crash capsule first, but have the rest of the ship hit the ground before it, this might slow the capsule far enough that it survives.

[CG_Kerbin]

their are difficulty options when creating a space program and one of the options is to respawn kerbals when they die.Also bill Bob and jeb can't die

[tater]

It's really hard to kill them in stock, and pretty hard otherwise as well. If if were not for time warp accidents and the odd kraken event, I'm not sure I'd lose any.