How to get parachutes to automatically deploy for separate parts?

[jmr106]

When playing in career mode, of course you save money if you can recover as much as possible. I attach the radial parachutes to the earlier stages, but I have been trying to figure out a way to get them to deploy automatically. On a 2-stage rocket, for instance...the first stage needs to fall away and that separation might not take place until 30,000m or more. Of course, there may still be some vertical speed on the first stage.

Upon separation of the first stage, it falls - but you can't activate the parachutes after the separation, of course. At least, not from the second stage view. I guess you could theoretically keep a battery attached to the first stage and switch views back to the first and manually open each parachute.

Is there a better way to do this?

If you have it eject the parachute upon separation, it usually just tears off either due to high vertical speed while ascending (obviously not a good move) or high vertical speed descending.

How do others deal with this?

[Snark]

Yes, this is something that's hard to do in-game. The only way to make it work would be to let the ejected part have a battery, and a probe core (so that it's controllable)... and even then it's hard, because if you switch back to that part, you'll have to "babysit" it all the way to the ground, which means you've left your primary ship unattended, and therefore fairly unlikely that it will go to space (or, more to the point, stay in space) today.

I've played around in the past and managed to get this to work, kinda-sorta. It went like thisL

1. Make a 2-stage-to-orbit vehicle with a recoverable 1st stage that has its own probe core.

2. 1st stage burns out when the vehicle is already well over 30km altitude and the apoapsis of the suborbital trajectory is above the atmosphere.

3. Separate, and leave the 1st stage coasting on its suborbital trajectory while the 2nd stage completes orbital insertion.

4. By the time orbital insertion is done, the 1st stage is falling back to Kerbin but has not yet fallen low enough in the atmosphere for the game to decide that it's "lost" and delete it.

5. Immediately switch back to the 1st stage and "pilot" it back to ground (really, just wait until it's low enough, pop the chutes, and let it drift to ground).

It was kind of fun, but I only did a few launches before I grew bored with it. The main issue was that it didn't actually recover all that much cash, compared with the amount of my time it took to recover it. In my experience, the real economic bottleneck in the game is not cash, but my own personal playing time: instead of trying to recover a few funds by spending an extra 10 minutes (or whatever) recovering the booster stage of the rocket, I'm better served by just blowing it off, and using those 10 minutes to do another contract. Same play time better payoff (and doing the extra contract is usually more interesting than babysitting a spent booster back to ground, at least for me).

YMMV, it depends a lot on your play style and what you're interested in.

[Phil deCube]

The Smart Parts mod includes parts which will trigger parachutes (or anything else) at a given altitude. That said... I use the Stage Recovery mod and just set the parachutes to semi-deploy when the decouplers fire on a stage, after having raised the opening pressure in the VAB. Right click on a parachute and change the opening pressure from 0.04 (I think is the deafult) to 0.25. Then when you stage, the decoupler goes and the parachute pre-deploys, opening when it is lower down in the atmosphere.