Auto-Recover Stages (Not Based On Parachutes)

[Captain_Brian]

Currently with 0.24 you will be able to get cash back for recovered parts attached to your ship when you land, however you won't get any cash for boosters or stages that may or may not have landed successfully.

So I'm suggesting the following:

1. Have any parts that were properly shed and undamaged from staging on Kerbol just be automatically recovered with a random chance of success.

2. The chance of success would be based on:

• Part Count - More complex stages would be much harder to land without damage.
  
• Biome - Mountains would have an extremely low chance of success, but oceans would have a much higher chance.
  

3. The calculation would still be done to see how close the landing pad is from where you're staging to adjust the recovery cost %.

4. All parts recovered this way should still have a % deduction in recovery amount received since recovery in this way is likely to do more wear and tear to the parts than if they returned home attached to the command module. Also this would reward players who are doing difficult builds where they return with most\all of their craft.

[EDIT] The idea is that the parachutes are abstracted and assumed to already be on the parts being staged, rather than forcing players to put parachutes all over their designs. All that adding parachutes into the mix does is add parts and labor for no benefit other than already abstracted calculations.

Edited July 16, 2014 by Captain_Brian

[cpast]

So...dropping a solid rocket booster from 30 km up with no form of parachute or anything would give it a recovery chance? Adding parachutes makes it *less* likely to be recovered?

[Captain_Brian]

Technically due to part count, yes very slightly. The idea is that there *ARE* parachutes on each of your stages to allow for recovery, rather than forcing everyone to plaster parachutes on all of their designs.

[DSKY]

Whether related to the recovery system or not, more parachute options would be nice. For example, a Kerbomax sized ring that has say four or six cutes built in. You get the chutes without messing up the nice clean fuselage lines.

[Nuke]

its probibly not beyond the game's capabilities to run the physics on those parts on their way to the ground, especially if you use simplified physics on those bits. for example disable ship-ship collisions for those stages (after a certain distance) and do simplified terrain collision. you might flag stages with a recovery beacon part module (this can be a stand alone part or something added to some chutes), so that they follow special physics rules. anything that lands intact will be cashed in and removed from the game (though i like the idea of using biome and complexity rules to determine the percentage).

[r4pt0r]

didnt we just find some of the old Apollo engines within the past 2 years? dropping things into the ocean from a high altitude makes them hard to find.

[cpast]

didnt we just find some of the old Apollo engines within the past 2 years? dropping things into the ocean from a high altitude makes them hard to find.

That's in part because they weren't recovered right away, but were instead allowed to hit and sink. Finding them would have been easier if there had been ships on hand to recover.

[technicalfool]

I'm thinking some kind of cheaty way of doing it. Have the game do a back-of-a-notepad calculation based on the total mass of what's dropping, the number of parachutes attached and their size. If the result is that the jetissoned stage would hit the deck at <10m/s, then it gets recovered. Between 10 and 20m/s means an increasing percentage gets destroyed on impact, and >20m/s means the part goes pop.

Basically, the part disappears as normal once it's outside 2.5km from the current vessel and deep in atmosphere, but next time you go to the KSC, you get a parts-recovered pop up.

[edit] And not a couple of hours later, look what thread bubbles up from page 2, 3 or whatever it was on?

Sigh.

Edited July 17, 2014 by technicalfool