I Hope My Parachutes Deploy Soon...

[Torquemadus]

When re-entering Kerbin's atmosphere, by default, the parachutes partially deploy while the ship is still undergoing rapid deceleration in the upper atmosphere. The ship is surrounded by glowing superheated air and subjecting the pilot(s) to noticeable g forces as it decelerates. I don't like the idea of watching flames engulf my parachutes!

I usually re-enter with a periapsis of 31-35km, so that my pilots can experience a smooth ride down, experiencing no more than 3 g of deceleration as they do so. I know I can't actually burn up my ship in the stock game (yet), but plunging into the atmosphere at steep angles produces some scary looking fireballs! Therefore, for roleplaying purposes I go easy on my ships and their pilots during re-entry.

The ship makes an initial aerobraking pass through the upper atmosphere, taking care not to dip below 30km altitude as the ship passes periapsis. The ship is still technically in orbit at this point, but atmospheric drag continues to decay the ship's orbit, preventing it from climbing back out of the atmosphere. As the ship climbs back up to 40-50km, it finally bleeds off enough speed to drop the ship's apoapsis into the atmosphere. The ship then slowly descends, gently decelerating, until it gets to around 10km altitude. At this point, the ship has bled off almost all of it's speed and is falling almost vertically.

As the ship falls further, it quickly slows to terminal velocity. Just as it does this, the parachutes partially deploy and take over the job of decelerating the ship to a safe speed for landing. To do this, I set the parachutes to partially deploy at 0.4 atmospheric pressure, which equates to approximately 5km altitude.

Some of the mountains on Kerbin are higher than 5km...

The expert medical staff at KSC have assured me that Bob Kerman's injuries are serious, but not life threatening, and that he is expected to make a full recovery in time. Get well soon Bob!

[Torquemadus]

While I'm at it. I may as well post a test image from my new imgur account.

This is a picture of my early career game ship, the reusable Kercury spacecraft.

[Torquemadus]

Yay! My test picture seems to work! (Can people see this?)

Here are some more test pictures from my album.

[Specialist290]

Welcome to the forums!

Heh, we've all had that one mission where everything seems to be going alright right up until the very end (For the record, the default parachute semi-deployment pressure is 0.01atm, which is ~22km or so by my recollection.)

Those look like some pretty nifty craft, especially the spaceplane on Minmus. That must have been a rather tricky landing!

At any rate, feel free to make yourself at home here on the forums!

[Taki117]

Since you already RP this way, Might I point you to Deadly ReentrySo now your parachutes will burn up if deployed too early. On that note Let me point you to RealChutes which totally changes how your parachutes work (for the better) so you can set them to deploy at an altitude instead of a pressure.

[AmpsterMan]

Welcome to the forums!

Cause no trouble, glory to Kerbin.

[Torquemadus]

Thank you for the replies everyone! Here are some more pics of my very early career mode ship: the Kercury spacecraft: