Tourist can't deploy chute?

[AgincourtDB]

Only thing coming back is the capsule with the tourist in it, has plenty of juice, so the chute should work. Didn't they once upon a time open automatically at their target altitude anyway? Weird. Guess I have to retain the probe core through splashdown. I guess that's the obvious answer, just looking for confirmation.

[sal_vager]

Tourists aren't trained to do anything so complex, they are just along for the ride

[AgincourtDB]

So complex as pushing a button?

(that's a winky face by the way, lol)

[Slam_Jones]

So basically a Tourist ship always needs a probe core (or a pilot)?

Noted.

[AgincourtDB]

Yeah that seems to be the upshot. I'm going to try Capsule ----> Probe core ----> small heat shield ----> (direction of re-entry). I've done that Mod Manager fix to the re-entry orientation bug so hopefully it'll work and the thing won't flip around the wrong way.

[Sirrobert]

Well he is a tourist. It'd be prity insulting to ask tourists to man the ship.

[AgincourtDB]

Update: configuration mentioned above worked, though it did seem like it wanted to flip around and go stowed-parachute-end first. I took the extra precaution of putting mechjeb on the capsule itself and using SmartASS to keep it pointed toward retrograde, but even then it was a few degrees off from heat shield being pointed directly along the axis of travel. Probably just using the SAS from the probe core would have worked equally well, though I think my current 'tourist' build is going to get an SAS module added between probe core and heat shield (I wonder if the weight dist. will be better that way or worse?)

Another interesting note: the tourist gained 2 XP. I wonder what that's for? Fascinating.

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Well he is a tourist. It'd be prity insulting to ask tourists to man the ship.

Actually I would think space tourists would enjoy being given something to do in-flight, and I'd imagine they usually are. I wouldn't want to go up just riding as 'cargo'. I'm more perplexed as to why the chute deploy isn't automatic (i.e., why it requires pilot or probe AI, rather than just being set off by altimeter/pressure).

[sdj64]

You can deploy a parachute "automatically" by setting the min pressure and the deploy altitude to what you want before you decouple, then stage it in space before you let go of the probe core. Once it's staged it will be blue in the staging sequence until it opens. I haven't tested this with tourists in 1.0 but I doubt this feature changed.

[Superfluous J]

It works. I do it all the time.

I like the pressure set to .25 (Opens at about 8km). I wish there was a way to tweak it to be the default.

Edit. Duh. It's in the config file. Time for some editing.

[AgincourtDB]

You can deploy a parachute "automatically" by setting the min pressure and the deploy altitude to what you want before you decouple, then stage it in space before you let go of the probe core. Once it's staged it will be blue in the staging sequence until it opens. I haven't tested this with tourists in 1.0 but I doubt this feature changed.

Thank you, good tip, I will definitely try this.