Ships blowing up during de-orbit

[EKS89]

I have a multi-hitchiker design with a remote control on each. I want to de-orbit all thee of the hitchiker containers at once. I have a heat shield and parachutes on each of them. After the two that I'm not flying reach about 800m/s (after any flame worries) they blow up in atmosphere. No rhyme or reason. WHY!? I'm so titled right now... I flew this thing all the way to minmus. Landed it on the surface... decoupled the hitchikers and now I have no option but to watch these things blow up repeatedly because I have no save point from before I broke them up....

What did I do wrong here!? The chutes should deploy and the hitchikers land neatly on the surface for collection... I'm so freaking mad right now that I have to lose money and rep after a perfect mission...[

[Stamp20]

The hitchhikers might be overheating despite the heat shield, or aerodynamics are tearing it apart. Try spinning the craft around the reduce heat. A video or screenshots would help figure out the problem.

If you're really desperate, you can turn on Unbreakable Joints and Ignore Max Temperature in the debug menu (Alt+F12).

[Streetwind]

Are the unpiloted ones still inside your physics bubble? That's within ca. 2.5km of your current control point.

If not, the get auto-deleted once they get too deep into the atmosphere.

[king of nowhere]

41 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

Are the unpiloted ones still inside your physics bubble? That's within ca. 2.5km of your current control point.

If not, the get auto-deleted once they get too deep into the atmosphere.

indeed. you cannot deorbit multiple crafts simultaneously, the game can't deal with multiple vehicles in atmosphere

[EKS89]

Thanks for the input guys. I guess they were not still in the physics bubble? ... I figured out that they would survive if I wasn't piloting any of them. Launched a recovery ship with the grapple. Pushed two of them out of atmosphere and then de-orbited one at a time. super annoying. Will be trying to design a ship that can carry lots of passengers and still de-orbit easily.

[Reactordrone]

A hitchhiker with a 2.5m heat shield should survive re entry from Minmus without any problems and the physics bubble within the atmosphere is 25km so that shouldn't be a problem. If multiple objects are under their chutes you can use physics warp but can't time warp without destroying their chutes.

[EKS89]

I'm pretty sure the crafts were not inside the physics bubble per Streetwind's comments. They just went poof. No reason to. They were past the point of having to worry about flames.

[Snark]

On 8/28/2021 at 12:59 PM, Streetwind said:

Are the unpiloted ones still inside your physics bubble? That's within ca. 2.5km of your current control point.

In a vacuum, yes. In atmosphere it's extended a lot, to something on the order of 25 km.

[DeadJohn]

Other have already answered the original question abotu what happened.

If you are interested in using mods, look at the Stage Recovery mod. It will recover rather than delete craft that deorbit while outside the physics bubble (assuming the craft has enough parachutes, or engines+fuel for a powered descent.)