debris tracking & recovering

[n3310]

hi all,

I've been playng this game since at least version 0.18, and started playing it again after a 3-4 month break about two weeks ago. Now that I'm playing career mode, I am in need for recovering debris, things which hadn't been necessary until funds became important. Before this, I never paid much attention to debris, but now I really can't understand how I can keep them tracked. The only things I understood are that:

-when taking off, after a certain distance from own craft debris will disappear

-after a certain altitude, debris will be tracked, wheter they are orbiting or are re-entering

- it is not possible to put parachutes and pre-program them to open, then have the debris landing without having some kind of visual contact with it( i.e. tracking station will consider them to be re-entering without parachutes and make them disappear)

-tracking station will not consider the matter differently even though you put an unmanned command module on the debris , and will not track it/ consider it having it's parachutes opened

-the only way (to the best of my knowledge) of recovering debris is to detach them at the very last moment from the module and land in proximity of them.

so, I have some questions:

am I wrong about anyone of these points?

does someone know anything else?

are there any suggestions on how to recover debris?

are there any mods which allow debris to be tracked futher than the default distance (and be considered with their parachute opened)?

[DeMatt]

n3310 said:

hi all,

I've been playng this game since at least version 0.18, and started playing it again after a 3-4 month break about two weeks ago. Now that I'm playing career mode, I am in need for recovering debris, things which hadn't been necessary until funds became important. Before this, I never paid much attention to debris, but now I really can't understand how I can keep them tracked. The only things I understood are that:

-when taking off, after a certain distance from own craft debris will disappear

-after a certain altitude, debris will be tracked, wheter they are orbiting or are re-entering

- it is not possible to put parachutes and pre-program them to open, then have the debris landing without having some kind of visual contact with it( i.e. tracking station will consider them to be re-entering without parachutes and make them disappear)

-tracking station will not consider the matter differently even though you put an unmanned command module on the debris , and will not track it/ consider it having it's parachutes opened

-the only way (to the best of my knowledge) of recovering debris is to detach them at the very last moment from the module and land in proximity of them.

Mostly correct. You can put parachutes on your boosters and trigger them in the same stage as the decouplers, and then if the booster stays within physics range the parachute will function normally. The "old" physics range was 2.5 km; I believe it's been increased by quite a bit, but I don't know by how much.

If the booster lands before your ship leaves physics range, then it will remain landed when your ship leaves, thus allowing it to be recovered. If the booster is lofted into a suborbital trajectory (> 22 km altitude before leaving physics range), then it won't be considered "crashed" until it returns to the 22 km border; this means that if you put your ship in orbit before this happens, you can then switch the view back to the booster and watch it land, preventing the system from crashing it.

n3310 said:

so, I have some questions:

am I wrong about anyone of these points?

does someone know anything else?

are there any suggestions on how to recover debris?

are there any mods which allow debris to be tracked futher than the default distance (and be considered with their parachute opened)?

I find that boosters tend to be cheap anyways - if they're not, you're overbuilding your spaceships. You can look at the StageRecovery mod if you really truly want the game to "recover" your boosters instead of "crashing" them.

Edited November 30, 2015 by DeMatt
New forum formatting.