Parachutes always fail.

[Jas1126]

I decided to give the game a go today and couldn't return a single craft. The first and second available parachutes fail 100% of the time. No matter how many I put on the craft I can never seem to get them to remain intact. I tried releasing them at several different altitudes with the same results. What gives?

[Kuu Lightwing]

Wait till your speed is below 250 m/s

Also, you can rightclick on a chute to check if it's safe to deploy.

[Warzouz]

Or set the "Pressure" parameter to 0.65 / 0.75

[Chaos_Klaus]

Be careful with your staging. Put the parachutes into their own stage. Only deploy them when your surface speed has dropped below 250m/s.

KSP puts the chutes in the same stage as the last decoupler by default. That way they are triggered too early. I don't know why Squad does not change this ...

When reentering from orbit, make sure you set your periapse at around 30km. If you set it too low, you run the risk of not slowing down enough. Then you would never be slower then 250m/s and could never delpoy the chutes ... which is bad.

[r4pt0r]

you can right click a parachute while reentering and it will tell you "safe" "risky" or "unsafe". deploy only when it is safe.

[Jas1126]

Thanks for the tips. I'll give them a try.

I used a small tank with a T-45 for a rocket assisted slowing process to 250m/s (just until I get used to things) and it has worked well. Thanks again for the tips.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Jas1126

[Bishop149]

Or set the "Pressure" parameter to 0.65 / 0.75

Really? I find around a value of about half that (0.3) is good for guaranteed safe chute deployment on Kerbin when using a standard shallow re-entry profile, it equates to about 7 -8 km up.

[FancyMouse]

Really? I find around a value of about half that (0.3) is good for guaranteed safe chute deployment on Kerbin when using a standard shallow re-entry profile, it equates to about 7 -8 km up.

It's safe to do that high doesn't mean you have to do it immediately. Setting a higher value allows a faster reentry and a more flexible reentry angle, and it has functional implications to scenarios like unmanned reentry with RemoteTech, where you can't control the ship during reentry (with most common designs).

Of course this comes with a risk of popping chutes too late, and testing will be needed, as always.