Drop ships?

[EndeavourCmdr]

Been trying to figure out how to make this work in KSP2 for hours now, and not having any luck. Let me explain my set-up, and hopefully one of you veterans will know how to accomplish this:

I have a main carrier (dropship) aircraft that I built, which is piloted by a Kerbal. This is one workspace.
I have a second workspace, which is a small lander communication probe that I want to drop somewhere on the planet, via my carrier aircraft.
I have merged the probe workspace into the dropship workspace, and attached it to the dropship via a decoupler.

Everything seems to go fine, up until I stage away the lander. The lander chutes come out just after decoupling, but a few moments later, the craft is just...  gone, nowhere to be seen, not even in the tracking station.
However, if I change focus to the lander just after I stage, I can follow that ship all the way to touchdown, safe and sound, but then my carrier aircraft is "gone".

Isn't there some way to stage a lander, have it persist, and still fly back my main dropship for landing at a runway or something without losing either vessel?

Just a thought...  would this be better accomplished with docking ports rather than decouplers?
The more I think about this, I wonder if decoupler stages get interpreted as "I want to separate this part and then discard it", where docking ports are "I want to separate this part, but keep it".
I haven't unlocked docking ports in my tech tree, so I haven't tested this yet.... 

[magnemoe]

Its an known issue, mothership will still be there, you find it going to tracking station. Docking ports don't have this issue.  It also don't happen all the time. 

[EndeavourCmdr]

Strange this is, the mothership wasn't on the tracking station either. I did check that right away. Seems like if you use decouplers, the entire ship gets discarded.

[BechMeister]

On 4/8/2024 at 5:04 AM, EndeavourCmdr said:

Everything seems to go fine, up until I stage away the lander. The lander chutes come out just after decoupling, but a few moments later, the craft is just...  gone, nowhere to be seen, not even in the tracking station.
However, if I change focus to the lander just after I stage, I can follow that ship all the way to touchdown, safe and sound, but then my carrier aircraft is "gone".

The problem is you can only land 1 craft at the time - once the vehicle is on a deorbit path and get far enough away from each other they despawn. I had the same issue on my minmus mission where I tried to drop 4 dropships at the same time. You need to land one vehicle perfectly before you can load over to the next and drop that

I dont understand why the carrier would disappear though, as that is still in orbit right? - does both vehicles have a probe core? or command module?

I dont know if this is the issue.. but the game despawns "spend stages"... and if a craft does not have a probe core or pod.. the game interpret the vehicle as "Trash"

Here is an example from my mission report for my Minmus mission.

On 2/14/2024 at 11:22 PM, BechMeister said:

B.

The four dropships has detached the ICV and are performing their deorbit burn to land at one of the flat ice plains of the tiny moon.

To avoid having to perform inclination burns and wait 1 orbital period pr. launch I tried to de-orbit and land all 4 crafts together. Building K.G.02 I have gotten quite the experience juggling multiple vehicles flying in tandem at the same time.

How ever - I did not anticipate the issue of the game despawning the un active vehicles as they get closer to the ground. I had timing the burns to space them out with about 1km between them in altitude, to give me time to give them seperate landing maneuvers. But once they started to get close to the ground. they would just despawn.

A picture of the spaced de orbit burns of the 4 drop ship - notice that the ICV at this point has yet to enter its circular 20km orbit.

So even if it made a lot of sense (especially with how easy it is not to crash into Minmus) I had to do it the "long way." Meaning individual launches.

can you send some screenshots of the craft? It's hard to give propper advice when I can't see the dropship and mothership in question.

Edited April 28 by BechMeister

[EndeavourCmdr]

@BechMeister, well, I kind of gave up on that design anyhow, because I learned that my drop probes were unable to support the power draw of the antennae when used as relays. That said, the drop ship was piloted by a Kerbal, and the pods each had a probe core. On my initial test craft, there was only 1 drop pod, and the mothership. Had it worked out, I would have added more drop pods.

[BechMeister]

its weird that they disappeared when you dropped them one at the time then