Parachute repeatedly destroyed by heat and drag

[Gahooligan]

I had something like this not too long ago.

It doesnt always work and kinda relies on luck, but try to come in as shallow as possible. Then, wait until youre in the thickest part of the atmosphere, and youre just seeing mach effects. hopefully youre only going 500-800/ms at this point. Then, try to tilt your craft sideways so the side of it is facing your velocity vector. Try to use the body drag and lift to slow your decent. The point is to bleed as much speed as possible before you open your chute. Cut it as close as you can without pulling the ol' 'controlled decent into terrain' manuver. If youre using a single mk1 parachte you probably dont need to to open your chute untill youre at 2000-1000 meters, depending on your weight and the terrain height. It's a seat-of-your-pants manuver and it doesnt always work...but with enough quickloads im sure you can pull it off.

That is, assuming your craft has the control wheels to muster enough oomph to fight the aerodynamic forces tha are trying to align your craft with your velocity vector. Even if you cant get sideways any amount of deflection will help you, maybe more than you'd think.

Edit: seems i misinterpreted the question. Someone on the steam forums had this problem. Theier discription of thier problem was remarkably similar. For them it ended up being a staging problem. They didnt realize they activated the cute prior to reentry and couldnt figure out what was going wrong.

The icon representing your chute should be white prior to and during the hot parts of reentry.

It will be blue if it's been activated/deployed but youre too high up and it's waiting for some atmosphere.

Then, yellow after it deploys as drogue.

finally, green when its fully deployed.

Red means bad stuff happened or you used it already.

If you already deployed it out of atmosphere theres still hope. if you have an engineer on board they can EVA and repack the chute. Putting it back into it's non-deployed state.

Edited November 3, 2015 by Gahooligan
I need to learn to read gooder

[ineon]

When you right click on the chute is there an option to deploy the chute, or is there an option to cut the chute? If it give you the option to cut the chute then you have probably fired the chute too early by accident. You might be able tweak the other settings in the right click menu to change when the fired chute deploys and not let it deploy too early.

[Warzouz]

You can also add a drogue chute which can be open at 700m/s on Kerbin. It's not very useful on other bodies (maybe on laythe) but very efficient on Kerbin. You need only one (or 2 for symmetry), even for really heavy ships (tested up to 450 tons).

On Duna : regular chutes can be open at 700m/s which is nearly low orbit orbital velocity.

On Eve : atmo will slow you down at less than 100m/s without any chute, if you survive the heat...

Air brakes are also very useful to slow down.

[KerikBalm]

You can also add a drogue chute which can be open at 700m/s on Kerbin. It's not very useful on other bodies (maybe on laythe) but very efficient on Kerbin. You need only one (or 2 for symmetry), even for really heavy ships (tested up to 450 tons).

On Duna : regular chutes can be open at 700m/s which is nearly low orbit orbital velocity.

Those numbers seem too high too me, I know I've lost parachutes on Duna going far less than that.

[jwbrase]

You are deploying too early. Even after reading this and several other posts I did not realise exactly how late you should deploy.

I put the pressure tweak on the stock parachute at maximum and lower it manually to get the chute to deploy when I am under 4000 meters, even 3000 .... and closing 200 m/s seems to work fine.

Do note that the thread had been quiescent for about 5 months before you responded.

That said, for the benefit of anyone else having this issue, I have had chutes randomly end up marked as deployed in my save files despite their stage not having been activated yet, and I have the feeling this is what happened to the OP. There's no real solution other than editing your save to repack the chute.

[Athougho]

Hi, I've just restarted playing KSP after a long break and I'm having exactly this problem in Science mode. Using the - only available - MkI capsule; with a Commutron 16 antenna and a pair of symmetrically mounted Mystery Goo containers. (Oh, and I added the heat shield that the wiki tutorial doesn't mention.)

I've tweaked the chute to deploy at 0.5 atm/1,500m; I seem to be below 500m/s when the chute deploys and it's immediately destroyed. The chute indicator is white shortly after launch, but goes to red once I'm too high to use it and remains red until I'm well into the atmosphere again after all the heat and noise of re-entry - until shortly before it deploys in fact. I have the chute staged as the only item on Stage zero and I leave it to deploy automatically as above. So I am about 99% sure that the chute is not deploying early. Is this a glitch in Science mode? I'd really like to know how to fix it.

[sal_vager]

Hi Athougho, the chutes will be destroyed if staged and then exposed to high air speeds or temperatures, you need to wait until the icon turns white again before staging so they are safe inside their container.

If you are dropping straight down you may not slow down in time though, so try a parabolic or arcing trajectory instead of going straight up.

[Plusck]

I think the wording of the options when you right-click the chutes are causing problems, because the terminology gives entirely the wrong idea. This is similar to how the parachute icon/background colours tend to confuse people.

So to clarify:

Staging / activating: if you stage / activate your parachute above 250 m/s or so, it will be released immediately and IT WILL BE DESTROYED.

"Deploy" pressure / height: this only applies AFTER the parachute has been activated / released. You cannot make a parachute activate automatically. You can change the settings so that it is partially/fully open at certain heights/ pressures. Generally there is absolutely no need to change these settings until you go interplanetary. I can't even imagine a scenario on Kerbin where this would be of any benefit.

In any event, there is no way of tweaking the pressure/height settings to guarantee that your chutes won't be destroyed, because your speed at these pressures/heights can easily exceed the speed at which they will be destroyed as soon as they deploy...

 

edit: and it doesn't help that the wiki currently gives zero information about the icons, safe activation speed or anything, and refers mostly to the pre-1.0 situation, and references a Scott Manley video from 2014 which simply cannot work these days (at one point you have open parachutes with reentry heating visible on them...).

Edited December 15, 2015 by Plusck
wiki concerns

[Athougho]

Thanks to those who offered help. I actually took some advice from nobodyhasthis and installed RealChute (so thanks to StupidChris for creating that). Now I have pre-sets that act as I would expect chutes to act, but I also have more information available so that I can design custom chute set ups for myself later on. I can truthfully say I couldn't manage without it.