Parachute Always Destroys In Career

[George2004]

How come that when i'm in career mode my parachute always destroys on opening. I only open It on descent. I'm sorry if I sound like I don't know anything! Any answers?

[Kerbart]

You are probably going too fast to open it. If the chute icon is red, don't deploy; it will get destroyed. Wait until it gets yellow or green.

[Plusck]

The "green" is somewhat hard to distinguish from the grey background. Basically, if you are going more than 2/3 the speed of sound then you are going too fast.

Try googling "NASA supersonic parachute" for videos on what happens at high speeds.

[Snark]

As the previous posters have said, your parachute gets ripped to shreds if you open it when you're going "too fast", which in practical terms is typically around 250 m/s.

Before you deploy your chutes, look at their little buttons in the staging UI down at bottom left.  If the buttons have a red background, that means it's unsafe and they'll get ripped off if you deploy.  If they're yellow, it means "risky", i.e. there's a pretty high chance of losing them.  Best to wait until they're neither yellow nor red.

The roughly-250-m/s number is for "regular" parachutes.  There's another kind of parachute, "drogues", which are safe to open at about double that speed... but on the other hand, they're not as good at slowing you down, so it's hard to land with them.

For most spaceships landing on Kerbin, you don't need drogues.  Just wait until your ship naturally slows down to a safe speed before you pop your chutes.  However, if you find that your ship isn't slowing down enough to pop chutes before it hits the ground, you can add drogues so that you pop those first, they slow you down to safe chute speeds, then you pop the regular chutes.

But seriously, you probably don't need drogues.  (Once you start landing on Duna, then drogues will come in handy.) 

 

[George2004]

I know about the chute icon, but that is the thing. It never does turn green! It is red for the whole descent! I've tried different methods of slowing, such as air brakes, but nothing seems to work! Any more answers?

[sal_vager]

It should go white rather than green, and you need to slow below about 250m/s for this to happen, please note however that if you activated your chute early it'll be destroyed and won't turn white.

Don't drop straight down, you need an arcing, ballistic type trajectory more like this.

Also, heatshields are heavy and will cause you to take longer to slow down, so try putting the heatshield on a decoupler and discarding it after the flames go out.

[Snark]

1 hour ago, sal_vager said:

Also, heatshields are heavy and will cause you to take longer to slow down, so try putting the heatshield on a decoupler and discarding it after the flames go out.

...or reduce the ablator load on the heatshield at design time in the VAB.  For suborbital hops or even Kerbin orbit, you really, really don't need a full ablator load.  Even 20% should be ample.  Most of the shield's weight is the ablator, so reducing it is quite a mass savings.

[technion]

12 hours ago, sal_vager said:

 

Also, heatshields are heavy and will cause you to take longer to slow down, so try putting the heatshield on a decoupler and discarding it after the flames go out.

 

Frankly, I like that - it's given drogues a reason to exist.

I just came back from jool at an absurd angle and performed a direct capture to landing. The heat shield did its thing, the drogues turned green at about 8km from sea level, and they pulled the ship up enough to use the regular chutes at 3km from sea level. It's a fun way to land  

[Superfluous J]

12 hours ago, George2004 said:

I know about the chute icon, but that is the thing. It never does turn green! It is red for the whole descent! I've tried different methods of slowing, such as air brakes, but nothing seems to work! Any more answers?

Not until you tell us how fast you're going

If your ship is going less than 250m/s and the chute shears off, you have a problem with your game. If it's going over 250m/s you are not waiting long enough. If you'd smack into the ground at over 250m/s if you didn't pull the chutes, you are not slowing down enough. Until we know which of these is the case, we can't help and any answers you get will be guesses based on problems others have had in the past.

[George2004]

The thing is that I'm playing a career game so I have very limited resources. So basically I have NO drogues and NO air brakes so I don't have time to slow down to 250 m/s! Please Help!

Edited December 21, 2015 by George2004

[sal_vager]

Okay so lets think how you could be in this situation.

When you first start all you have is a Mk1 pod, mk16 chute, basic fins and flea boosters, the goo can and structural girder can actually help slow you as they are draggy.

With these you can go straight up as you won't get high or fast enough for it to matter.

But if you're stacking fleas or using the hammer you need to think about not going straight up, there's a couple of ways you could do this.

One is to steer as you go up, if your basic fins are too far to the back this can be a bit hard though so don't use too many and don't put them at the very bottom of the rocket.

Another way is to put structural girders under the hammer SRB and tilt the rocket (and the girders) with the rotate tool (3 in the editor), this'll let you make a crude launch stand and launch at an angle, and because you will fall through more air on the way down you will slow down sooner.

 

If you have heatshields and aren't reaching obit yet just take the heatshields off, you don't need them for sub-orbital flights, and the lighter pod will lose inertia sooner than a pod with heat shield.

If you're worried about heat, add a decoupler between the pod and heat shield, when you stage the heat shield you'll have drag from the pod and the heatshield together, slowing you down even sooner.

Reducing the ablator also makes them lighter, helping you lose inertia and speed sooner.

 

But you will struggle if you're dropping straight down, about the only other thing you can do if you're insisting on dropping vertically is to stick girders on the pod itself, it'll work but it'll look weird, because you really need to be doing ballistic flights, not vertical.

 

Edit:

 

If you're using a hammer and no decoupler you have build a lawn dart and you won't slow down enough, you need to use a decoupler and the pod needs to be flat end forwards.

[ForScience6686]

Angle your ship on reentry to cause more drag.  Work on slowing down as much ad you can before coming into the thicker atmosphere.  I had a similar ship but only one science Jr and a heat shield below and I would disable SAS to allow the ship to rock and never had issues.  I'm guessing the heat shield helped keep the mass lower.

[wumpus]

If you have an older instalation and recently returned to KSP, check your file integrity!  I had parts of different versions and started a new 1.0.4 game and found it impossible.  Upgraded *everything* [not mods, just got steam to get it right] to 1.0.4 and suddenly surviving a "just into space" became possible (although it still tried to kill poor Jeb, much worse than almost any other mission I'd seen [haven't landed on Eve]).