Can you still land on your head and survive?

[JstuffJr]

Disclaimer - I apologize if this has been answered recently, I did do a quick search but I am an imperfect human being

So I've always heard that if worst comes to worst, you can always land on your head with a kerbal and still survive. So there I was, with Jeb in a perma-orbit around Kerbin, when I had the genius (to me) idea of using my jetpack to degrade my orbit. It worked wonderfully.... until i realized I had no parachute. No fear, I looked up on the internet how to rotate your kerbal around (click drag over your kerbal if you didn't know), put Jeb's big squishy head right between the rest of him and the ground and then..... splat right into the ocean ;.;

Does this wonderful property of a Kerbal's head simply not apply in water somehow maybe? Or did they just remove this bug coughcoughawesomefeaturecough?

[RocketPilot573]

It's still there, Kerbals will only sometimes land and be fine. Unless your Danny2462 of course.

[turkwinif]

I'm pretty sure that you can still bounce Kerbals off of the ground using their heads - keyword, ground.

[Fendleton]

It depends on the angle and speed of the impact. But it definitely still works at a pinch to save a kerbal. Kerbals have somewhat buggy collision detection/ragdolling, which can either fully absorb an insane amount of velocity (like landing on your head and surviving stuff), or generate a large amount of velocity (try jumping out of a plane just as it crashes. Every so often you'll be flung a few kilometres away by glitch physics).

[Killerdude8]

Impacting Water at a certain speed, will instadeath everything that touches it, Regardless of the Impact Tolerance, It will just sploosh and die.

Head bouncing only works on solid land.

[cpast]

I have personally used head-bouncing in an abort mode. It can definitely work on solid ground.

[Werwolf]

I can also attest head shots still work on land... water kills pretty much everything at a certain velocity.

[Javster]

I have the texturereplacer mod installed, so they don't even have helmets on when I crash them into the ground head-first.

[thescientist]

Landing on the jetpack looks to work very well on the ground

[xtremespino]

It could work if you hit land, but water will just go splash, leaving no trace of your brave astronaut.

[MarvinKitFox]

....you can always land on your head with a kerbal and still survive.

Nope.

Here, I corrected it for you:

....you can always sometimes land on your head on the ground with a kerbal and still survive, if you are lucky

In my experience..

I have survived "landing" a parachuteless craft at 142m/s, by jumping off 2 sec before impact + engaging jetpack + hitting the exploding debris at an angle. (my minimum-mass eeloo craft cannot afford 'chutes)

I have survived "landing" on Mun from orbit, naked. Well, Eva-suited. Landing on a downslope at 95m/s, upright. Many tumbles ensue.

I have survived "landing" in water at no more than 25m/s

I have NOT survived climbing out of my rocket, after a glorious Jool trip soft-landing back on KSP grounds, and tripping because I forgot to extend the ladder. The drop was about 8 meters!

So... Kerbal survivability under falling conditions is a bit of a crap shoot. But possible.

That 142m/s vertical speed is the best I managed, even after *many* tries.

I find no difference in survivability head or feet, only head impact seems to result in less spinning rotation after the first bounce.

[Tex]

I've used the trick many a time, but it NEVER works in water. Only land.