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Ocean recovery $$$?


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Do parts that have fallen into the water add $$ when a craft (flight) is recovered?  Obviously they would have parachutes. If not, does it help (or matter) if they have flotation added to them?

TB2

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There are some complicated details inside that question, actually, now that I think about it. In general, the answer is yes, but not quite the way you ask it. You are implying that the parts fell into the water separately from their craft.

If the parts are separate from the main craft, then they follow the rules of debris. Either you have to watch them fall all of the way down and stop moving, or they have to be within your physics radius -- or else they may get auto deleted as "burned up in the atmosphere during reentry". Once they come to rest, they will remain there forever until you specifically recover them -- they will definitely not be recovered automatically with the main craft. When you recover them, you will get kerbucks for their recovery depending exclusively on their total distance from KSC (being underwater makes no difference).

If you land a craft in the water and some pieces fall off and sink, then the same thing happens. The sunken pieces are debris and must be recovered separately, once they finish moving. However, the autodeletion concept probably still applies. If you recover the ship before the pieces finish sinking (moving), I suspect they will get autodeleted. If you care to find out for certain, you can test it. Engines sink -- so if you ditch a plane, decouple the engine over deep water, and recover the craft while it is sinking ... you will know by whether there is debris remaining afterward for you to recover separately.

But if non-floating parts can get autodeleted after they hit the water, then yes -- adding flotation to them might make all the difference.

Edited by bewing
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18 hours ago, bewing said:

or else they may get auto deleted

 

I learned this the hard way several months ago;

 

I built this super-sweet cargo plane with pods behind the tail so that I could fly over and stage a chute and decoupler to land a kerbal at a specific point.

I dropped off three kerbals that day, but the lands were greedy and swallowed them all whole - for, when I went back to pick up some science with them, they were no where to be found.

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55 minutes ago, Mahnarch said:

I learned this the hard way several months ago;

I had two tourists get autodeleted (maybe just one, but it killed the contract).  They were in separate capsules that all separated and pulled parachutes together, but the one on top was carrying a sputnik and fell faster.  Somehow the tourists were deleted in the process.

I suspect it was a bug, I just reverted and adjusted things so they all could land together.

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Thanks all for the informative feedback!  I was wondering why my booster rockets were not being recovered even with parachutes. Now I can build even more economical rockets knowing this. 

TB2

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It is very hard to beat the autodeleter from 1.0 (and I think that was the last time it expanded).  When I tried to build a "stock recoverable" first stage it involved firing retrorocket (flea) and carefully tuning the parachutes to open (I think it was changing the pressure, one of the settings) after the velocity was slow enough to not to burn up the rocket and low enough that it would be deleted as it slowly wafted down.

If you really want to recover bits of you rocket I suggest the following mods:

http://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/223119-stagerecovery   (straightforwardly does what you expected.  Put parachutes on rockets and they are recovered)

This one is for more fancy (spacex-style) recovery and will take more time.  Basically it lets you take control of each stage as it is ditched.  But if you want to create fancy air-launched systems or do vertical landing (on rockets), this is a must.

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6 hours ago, TBryson2 said:

Thanks for the feedback,  stagerecovery is what I was looking for. 

 

TB2

Yeah, it works like a charm.  One thing to watch, though--your first stage might be in physics range at landing.  If so you have to make sure it's chutes actually work--deploy at a proper speed to avoid destruction.  Stages that will be outside physics range get simulated landings, the chute controls don't matter--they simply touch down at the velocity the attached chutes would slow them to.  In theory you are also allowed to include some fuel and a probe core but I have never experimented with this.  It might be worthwhile when landing big stages.

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