Water Kraken

[Vasilisa]

No sure whether to put this here or under technical support, but anyhow. Been recently getting back into KSP, decided to complete a tourism contract, when landing back on Kerbin, I made it so that the craft decouples itself into individual segments so it can make a safe landing. Everything was fine with every segment having deployed their chute above water, my main command pod landed just fine, but the two passenger segments (each containing a MK1 Crew Cabin and two Mk2-R Radial-Mount Parachutes) got flung out at impossible speeds the moment they contacted water. Naturally the four tourists died from the sudden, extreme, and anomalous acceleration, but the contract did not seem to register them as dead despite all the debris of the flung out crew cabin containing no tourists. Any idea why this is happening and how to prevent it?

[Vasilisa]

Rolled back a save and found that somehow, the tourists just got returned to the astronaut complex.

[Vanamonde]

Problem solved! \o/ 

Kidding aside, welcome to the forum and I have not encountered that odd bug. Did you get credit for the mission eventually? If the passengers survived, maybe you can try again. 

[Vasilisa]

Unfortunately, it seems that it didn't count for the mission, and I am not particularly inclined to try again until I figure out what's causing it, as in a previous save with the same "passenger section decoupling and having their own parachute" thing, the main command pod landed first into water, so I recovered it and then switched to the passenger segment via the tracking station, only for the craft to crash down at an impossible speed, killing the passenger that time.

[Vanamonde]

Better luck next time. 

[Vasilisa]

So I decided to do some experimenting to nail down what was the problem:

This video should show what went wrong, and the impossible speed the passenger segment accelerated to.

From some forum threads that I've taken a peep at, it seems that sometimes, the physics engine dislikes it when saving and loading, so I decided to test that hypothesis, where I would not recover either craft until both have safely landed, after my command pod landed, I zoomed out to look at the passenger segment, which has its chute deployed, and is moving at such a snail's crawl that it could not have exceeded the Mk1 Crew Cabin's 40 m/s tolerance, yet that craft somehow exploded upon touching water, but even strangely, even though it contained four tourists, only one was considered dead by the contract tracker, with the other three being presumably pushed back into the astronaut complex like before.

So I loaded back and decided to adjust the parachutes so that the crew cabins would splash down first (deploying at an even lower altitude), and somehow that made them splash down fine, and was recovered just fine via the tracking station, completing the contract. I did not dare to load into the craft to then recover it in fear of the sudden acceleration happening again.

[Vasilisa]

Things are going quite smoothly now, but I decided to take a look at the tracking station and found some debris unaccounted for, finding out that the four parachutes on the passenger segment have all decided to eject themselves out of the solar system near the speed of light.

I don't know why it happened to these parachutes specifically, but at this point I'm just happy that my passenger segment isn't just randomly flung like them.

https://imgur.com/a/8gWH8kj  

[Vanamonde]

Oh, that thing. It has to do with the ground level being set when you load a save and sometimes applying a violent upward force.  Unfortunately, I do not know of a fix. It doesn't happen every time, though. 

[Vasilisa]

Ah, I see, no wonder this only happens close to ground now.