Stage recovery and facility destruction avoidance?

[SignalCorps]

Asking a lot of questions lately, and I appreciate the help. I've really got back into KSP after ver 1.X (and watching some space stuff on Modern Marvels. "That's a cool rocket...oh yeah, KSP!") Still very much a beginner. Managed to land on the Mun several times now without killing everyone aboard the lander, and twice I even managed to land so that the lander was still operational. (Though getting docked again with the return craft still alludes me. Eventually Jeb gave up and returned home without Bill. But Bill had the last laugh as Jeb didn't survive the landing. He's still laughing up there, fuel-less in Mun orbit)

Anyway, back on topic:

It seems like the buildings at the Kerbal Space Center really don't like flaming debris falling on them. Which is problematic as I tend to generate such debris getting into the air, and the KSC always seems to start under my flight path. Is the answer to just add parachutes to everything and hope for the best? Will they deploy without being connected to any kind of control? And will that help with later stage recoveries that land much further out?

Edited May 21, 2015 by SignalCorps

[Snark]

The easiest option is to start your gravity turn early, even just a tiny smidgeon eastwards, before your first stage (SRBs or whatever) needs to drop. That will generally cause them to hit the ground just east of the pad, so no problem.

If you want to put chutes on them, you can do that and it'll work-- just make sure that you've set up the staging so that the chutes on the ejected stage are in the same stage as the decoupler that ejected them. That way, a single tap of the space bar will both eject the stage and release the chutes.

[paploo]

Hey SignalCorps,

I have had parachutes deploy if I put them on the same staging event as the decouplersâ€â€granted it wasn't my intent to do that, but I didn't double check my staging events before launch and made an oops.

I am interested in the overall trajectory of your launches thoughâ€â€at what altitude are you expending your first stage to the point that you are releasing it? Especially in 1.0, you should be angling over a few degrees right after launch, and this has been enough to arc the spent first stage tanks away from the pad, regardless of whether I'm launching a little local mission or a large interplanetary space station.

[nhnifong]

I can't offer any advice, I just blew up my runway.

[Superfluous J]

Also, tweak your chutes on the stuff you want to recover to open late. Like 100 meters off the ground. 50 could be pushing it. If they spend too long floating downward slowly, you may get 22km away before they land and if so, they'll be deleted by the game.

I personally don't recover anything. Money's pretty easy to come by so long as you keep a full docket of contracts to complete, and get as many of them per mission as is practical.

[Mastikator]

Anything that doesn't have a pod or probe will count as debris and any debris in the atmosphere will despawn if you go too far away from it. Even if it had chutes on it.

[Murph]

Anything that doesn't have a pod or probe will count as debris and any debris in the atmosphere will despawn if you go too far away from it. Even if it had chutes on it.

I'm not 100% sure, but pretty sure it's still basically the same as it has always been, I don't believe it changed other than increased range in 1.0. It doesn't matter if it has a pod or probe core. It's anything at all that goes out of range and below a certain height (approx 25km altitude on Kerbin). Even a manned pod will be deleted if it's not the active craft and out of range of the active craft.