Help required: recover 5m fairing from low orbit around kerbin

[Guest]

Hello,

 

So I had a mission to recover a module, I had no idea what it was as it just showed as 'Unknown' - so I made a small-ish recovery probe but when I managed to catch up to it, I've found it's a 5m fairing; https://ibb.co/iw7ufT

 

Uhhhhhh?? Anyone got any ideas on how exactly I'm supposed to safely bring this back to Kerbin? The grabbing arm won't grab it, so I'm not sure how I'm expected to return it?

 

Also you might notice I have a single twich engine on my probe - well I fired them up and the heatshield, that's no longer present, blew up taking one of the twich engines with it (facepalm).

 

Thanks in advance,

R

Edited June 26, 2018 by Guest

[Vanamonde]

Have you tried grabbing both at the edge and perpendicular to the faces? It might be tricky, but I'll bet you can get a grip on it if you come at it just right. As for the damaged ship, just land it and sent up an improved design? 

[Guest]

I didn't think of trying the edge, good shout - I'll give that a go. Have spent all night trying to design something, I initially tried 2 mk3 100 cargo bays, I used 3 bicouplers to join them together in a kinda pyramid fashion but it was soo heavy and difficult to control, so I didn't manage to capture the module - in hindsight, I probably should've tried RCs.

 

After that I built this; https://postimg.cc/image/422w3vqvf/

 

It had an identical section that was supposed to dock to the top, to hold the module in place but after capturing the module and switching to the other half to dock them together - I saw the module and ship were violently shaking, when I switched back the module was clipped half through the ship, it then managed to shake itself free and flew off at an alarming pace, so I loaded the quick save and abandoned the idea of docking. 

I managed to get it to 23,000m or so with the picture but then I ran out of fuel, as soon as the engines stopped (even with the heatshield inflated) it flew out and eventually blew up

 

I'll try the edge grabbing tomoz - thanks.

[Guest]

Ok, so I tried what you said and the edge grab didn't work, it clipped through, but you were right about the correct angle - I tried a directly centre grab and got it!! https://ibb.co/gF4sLT

 

A slight miscalculation on descent saw me basically loose everything except for the probe core and the arm, oops... Rather than load the quick save though, I let it play out (basically because I'm lazy) and the heatshield absorbed the 30m/s impact, leaving the remaining parts undamaged; https://ibb.co/mKvMEo

 

Contract complete!! Thanks so much, it's been driving me nuts.

[Vanamonde]

Yay. Happy ending. 

Yes, claw parts are finicky.