How to Land Things?

[SpaceplaneGuy]

I always thought it was a little derpy that we could click the abort button and 'end' the mission without having to land, which seems to be rectified with the newest release of KSP! Yay! Now I can have fun launching and recovering starships!

...Except I sort of suck at the recovery & landing part.

I have two ships I am working on at the moment, both fully recoverable and reusable SSTO's. One is a rather stubby, vertical-launched rocket with jet engines acting as boosters and descent thrusters. The other is a simple and unremarkable spaceplane.

Even with the refueler rocket, flying up a few kilometers, cutting the thrusters, and coming in for a test landing is extremely problematic. No matter how many fins I put on it, it seems to tumble way too easily as soon as it begins falling. Adding drogue chutes seems to fix this problem somewhat - but as soon as they go from partially deployed to fully deployed, the sudden deceleration force usually rips the rocket apart. Struts do not seem to help.

The spaceplane is a pretty simple design. Getting into orbit is snooze-mode easy, as it has good TWR, low mass, and is very stable. However, whenever I do a deorbit burn and come in for a landing, the spaceplane usually begins tumbling uncontrollably if the nose and the prograde marker move more than a couple degrees apart. Sometimes this results in hilarious and catastrophic structural failure, with wings getting torn off and such, but more often than not, it just tumbles the whole way down and crashes.

Does an option exist to point the ship directly toward a prograde or retrograde marker? Pointing a spaceplane along its prograde vector (or a lander along its retrograde vector) during landing will make atmospheric insertion about a thousand times easier.

[jebster]

There isn't a way to point it directly retrograde or prograde without mods or manual steering, but you should look at the design of your plane. Is your center of mass at the same spot as your center of lift? Do you have control surfaces on your wings?

[SpaceplaneGuy]

I do use Mechjeb and FAR, and it surprises me that Mechjeb doesn't have an option to do this (or does it, and I haven't found it yet?)

[Spyritdragon]

That's odd, because that's generally what drogue chutes are for: slowing you down a bit so you don't get ripped apart when the big chutes open.

Try burning all your remaining fuel pointing retrograde on the spaceship. You'll lose some orbital velocity, and your tanks weigh alot less when empty so you shouldn't be jerked as much. Also, try adding more drogue chutes, and putting them on the lower parts of your ship. Ships are easier to pull apart than they are to crush together, so that should help you already. Also, the more velocity you lose before full opening, the better.

You can also modify your drogue parachutes to have less drag when fully deployed. It's a very easy modification, and it stays realistic because IRL you could acomplish the same by putting a few holes in your chute.

So, in short:

- burn off any remaining fuel

- put your chutes lower on the ship

- add more chutes for more slowing down pre-deployment

[Amoun]

If speed is a problem, I highly recommend B9 mod, it has air breaks (i frigging love those things and they look sleek and fit great with the design of the stock parts and are not cheaty at all).

Also try angling your wings back. I remember reading a tutorial which said that it helps at speeds and you don't have to angle too much to stay in control.