[1.4] StageRecovery - Recover Funds+ from Dropped Stages - v1.8.0 (March 11, 2018)

[magico13]

My update checker and thing gives me a message saying it wont work...but your right it might be wrong...damn im stupid... right? ill try it to see if everything works

That's just because the .version file says it only works for 1.0.2. I can't change that after a release. Actually. If I change the one on my server it might actually realize it works on your end as well... aaaaannnndd DONE. Changed on my end, which might make it not say it's incompatible, but I don't know for sure.

[Hades]

A minor feature request: Could you add the ability to disable StageRecovery in the stock toolbar completely, or at least during flight? The stock toolbar can get quite cluttered if you install a lot of mods, and the StageRecovery menu isn't really required during flight.

[magico13]

A minor feature request: Could you add the ability to disable StageRecovery in the stock toolbar completely, or at least during flight? The stock toolbar can get quite cluttered if you install a lot of mods, and the StageRecovery menu isn't really required during flight.

If you're having trouble with having lots of toolbar buttons, I suggest Blizzy's toolbar mod (the original toolbar). You can enable and disable any mod buttons that display and can make folders. StageRecovery has supported it since creation.

If you still want to disable the button in flight/other scenes, let me know. I actually prefer the flight GUI over the messages, but I can see how some might not.

[UAL002]

Just poppin' in to report that recovering kerbals via this mod, IE off screen recovery.. resets kerbal experience back to nothing. Heads Up. Additionally rescue kerbal missions fail too.

[Gryphon]

Just poppin' in to report that recovering kerbals via this mod, IE off screen recovery.. resets kerbal experience back to nothing. Heads Up. Additionally rescue kerbal missions fail too.

IIRC, there's been discussion in the past that using SR to recover kerbals is a Bad Thing.

Personally, I think it's pretty rude to the Kerbals.

[UAL002]

Rgr. Will personally recover from now on. Those little green bastards are needy.

[magico13]

Just poppin' in to report that recovering kerbals via this mod, IE off screen recovery.. resets kerbal experience back to nothing. Heads Up. Additionally rescue kerbal missions fail too.

I had fixed this in the past, but something must have changed with how flights are logged There's also an issue with RSS to fix (it looks for Kerbin, but RSS doesn't have a Kerbin anymore), so I'll probably get those two things into a bug fix update sometime this week. Not sure it will count for recovery of Kerbals for contracts, btw, since the stock recovery events aren't fired.

[Elvaron]

I'm running into a small problem, more logic-wise than technical.

Let me give you a simple example:

- Eject stage when Apoapsis is say 130.000m and Periapsis is 40.000m. My rocket/ship/whatever goes it's merry way.

- The debris doesn't get killed off, KSP simply doesn't care about it's unstable orbit unless you fly it. You can watch it go around Kerbin a billion times in the tracking station, the orbit won't get updated.

- When I do fly it, there is no way to go back to KSC without resetting the save (since the orbit doesn't properly decay until I'm in the atmosphere, and then it's too late to jump back to tracking station).

- I don't have a probe core on every piece of debris so I can't open parachutes.

- The only way to get rid of the debris is to either terminate that flight or fly it into the ground, sad that my parachutes have mere decorative value.

Would it be able for StageRecovery to handle these sort of cases in some way? Any solution would be fine, from having a button I can press in the tracking station to consider re-entry recovery for debris on unstable orbits to being able to tell StageRecovery to do it's magic during flight of the debris, below altitude X...

Or should I look into hacking some parachute to also be a probe core with no electricity needs so I can manually open chutes when it's time to do so?

[CatastrophicFailure]

I'm running into a small problem, more logic-wise than technical.

Let me give you a simple example:

- Eject stage when Apoapsis is say 130.000m and Periapsis is 40.000m. My rocket/ship/whatever goes it's merry way.

- The debris doesn't get killed off, KSP simply doesn't care about it's unstable orbit unless you fly it. You can watch it go around Kerbin a billion times in the tracking station, the orbit won't get updated.

- When I do fly it, there is no way to go back to KSC without resetting the save (since the orbit doesn't properly decay until I'm in the atmosphere, and then it's too late to jump back to tracking station).

- I don't have a probe core on every piece of debris so I can't open parachutes.

- The only way to get rid of the debris is to either terminate that flight or fly it into the ground, sad that my parachutes have mere decorative value.

Would it be able for StageRecovery to handle these sort of cases in some way? Any solution would be fine, from having a button I can press in the tracking station to consider re-entry recovery for debris on unstable orbits to being able to tell StageRecovery to do it's magic during flight of the debris, below altitude X...

Or should I look into hacking some parachute to also be a probe core with no electricity needs so I can manually open chutes when it's time to do so?

Solution now: set your parachutes to deploy when this stage is dropped, and set their opening altitude to the highest pressure (lowest altitude). You'll still have to ride the stage down but it should land safely, and the chutes won't deploy until it's slow enuf.

[Elvaron]

Solution now: set your parachutes to deploy when this stage is dropped, and set their opening altitude to the highest pressure (lowest altitude). You'll still have to ride the stage down but it should land safely, and the chutes won't deploy until it's slow enuf.

They won't deploy until it's slow enough? What's the threshold, will it attempt "risky" or wait for "safe"?

[CatastrophicFailure]

IIRC they'll predeploy around 5000 meters that way. Your stage should be below transsonic at this point. If you can follow your stage all the way down and it's hitting the ground (not burning up), staging the chutes this way should work unless/until magico can produce a more elegant solution.

[The Beaver]

IIRC they'll predeploy around 5000 meters that way. Your stage should be below transsonic at this point. If you can follow your stage all the way down and it's hitting the ground (not burning up), staging the chutes this way should work unless/until magico can produce a more elegant solution.

A parachute with a probe core in it could be an interesting solution. I wonder if it would stop working if the parachute breaks lol.

[BlackHat]

The other option is to make sure the Pe of the dropped stages is below 23K. Below 23k the game will remove it as landed. (And Stage Recovery will go to work) Above 23k and the game will let it orbit forever.

[John Nowak]

I'm running into a small problem, more logic-wise than technical.

It seems to me that the right answer is for KSP to load a vessel if it is in an atmosphere and not landed.

That is likely out of scope for Stage Recovery, though.

[Puch]

Hi there,

I truly enjoy career mode, and was more than glad to find this mod (Stage recovery). However, i'm facing quite a problem, since can't make it work. I would appreciate if anyone could help me.

So, i do see the mod buttons (main screen, construction site, during the flight), but there's no recovery. What bothers me - there's no info about "destroyed" or "recovered" stages in the StageRecovery window during the flight.

I have tried to launch vessels in different modes (Sandbox, Career, Science), with or without parachutes on different stages, tried to test it on different altitude and away from launch site, but the result is the same - nothing. All the tests were performed on clean KSP 1.0.4. The only installed mod is StageRecovery. It was installed using latest CKAN.

Once again, I would be truly grateful for your help.

Just in case - Windows 7, x64

Thanks

[Gryphon]

- Eject stage when Apoapsis is say 130.000m and Periapsis is 40.000m. My rocket/ship/whatever goes it's merry way.

Stage Recovery doesn't grab the ship until KSP deletes it. That only happens under about 20km altitude. If you just make sure that the periapsis is under 20km, you'll be a happy camper.

For a stage that is already in an unstable orbit (but not low enough to get deleted), perhaps you might switch to it when it's already most of the way back OUT of the atmosphere? If you do it late enough, you'll get enough drag to drop the periapsis below 20km, while still having an apoapsis above 70km, so you'll be able to switch out and let KSP delete it (and SR recover it) next time around.

Caveat: I haven't actually tried this myself.

[magico13]

It seems to me that the right answer is for KSP to load a vessel if it is in an atmosphere and not landed.

That is likely out of scope for Stage Recovery, though.

I've been considering doing this for a while actually. I'd have to switch from reacting after deletion to reacting after stage separation (or when the vessel is about to be unloaded, which would be preferable), calculate if it would be recovered properly, then keep it loaded if it would or just let it get destroyed if it wouldn't (so as to not keep a bunch of vessels loaded for absolutely no reason). Powered recovery wouldn't work anymore, because StageRecovery isn't going to have an actual autopilot built into it, but I could still have that work the way it does now.

I've played around a little bit with trying to detect stage separation but couldn't find an easy hook to tie in to. I think PartModules can get it easily, but MonoBehaviours can't.

The alternative, which I meant to do before 1.0 came out, is to have SR automatically deploy chutes (on unfocused vessels) when the vessel gets low enough and slow enough. That doesn't take care of the issue with vessels above 23km that have to be followed down manually, but does fix the issue of people deploying chutes while going up at 1km/s.

For things above 23km, I could provide a way to trigger SR calculations on the stage in the Tracking Station maybe? Powered recovery doesn't work in the tracking station and chute based recovery doesn't work as well (basically, the vessel doesn't exist in a form that I can get all the module data from), but I might be able to find work arounds.

Hi there,

I truly enjoy career mode, and was more than glad to find this mod (Stage recovery). However, i'm facing quite a problem, since can't make it work. I would appreciate if anyone could help me.

So, i do see the mod buttons (main screen, construction site, during the flight), but there's no recovery. What bothers me - there's no info about "destroyed" or "recovered" stages in the StageRecovery window during the flight.

I have tried to launch vessels in different modes (Sandbox, Career, Science), with or without parachutes on different stages, tried to test it on different altitude and away from launch site, but the result is the same - nothing. All the tests were performed on clean KSP 1.0.4. The only installed mod is StageRecovery. It was installed using latest CKAN.

Once again, I would be truly grateful for your help.

Just in case - Windows 7, x64

Thanks

I assume you're running the 32 bit KSP version and that your Windows is just 64 bit (you would know if you were running 64 bit KSP because you'd have to do a bunch of steps, including downloading Unity separately, for it to work).

If you're seeing nothing reported then it's possible you're too low when you drop them. What altitudes did you test at? The physics range is 22.5km now, so you need to go pretty high up to ensure parts don't hit the ground (I usually give 10km as a rough estimate, assuming you're still going to be burning for orbit after decoupling the stage).

You could try sending me the output_log.txt file from the KSP_Data folder, or the KSP.log from the main KSP folder. It might be logging a related error.

I'll be taking a look at things more closely this week/weekend, so I might end up fixing whatever is causing this issue during that time.

Stage Recovery doesn't grab the ship until KSP deletes it. That only happens under about 20km altitude. If you just make sure that the periapsis is under 20km, you'll be a happy camper.

For a stage that is already in an unstable orbit (but not low enough to get deleted), perhaps you might switch to it when it's already most of the way back OUT of the atmosphere? If you do it late enough, you'll get enough drag to drop the periapsis below 20km, while still having an apoapsis above 70km, so you'll be able to switch out and let KSP delete it (and SR recover it) next time around.

Caveat: I haven't actually tried this myself.

This should work actually. Once it's out of the atmosphere you can switch away from it, and the periapsis should drop from the aerobraking. It might not work if the apoapsis is too low though.

It's really looking like I need to spend some more dev time on SR, so I'll probably spend a good part of this weekend trying to make sure everything is working as intended, fixing bugs, and maybe adding a new feature or two.

[Vorg]

I've been setting pressure to ~.45-.5 and Alt to ~500-750 for SRB's. And ~.40-.45 and alt 1k for all other sections. SRB's that have been thrust limited can be going well past the "safe" speed when dropped, but with a pressure of .5, they slow down plenty before popping the chute. And when they are just light weight empty SRB's, 500 is plenty high enough.

[John Nowak]

I've been considering doing this for a while actually. I'd have to switch from reacting after deletion to reacting after stage separation (or when the vessel is about to be unloaded, which would be preferable)...

It almost sounds like a different mod.

[Elvaron]

For things above 23km, I could provide a way to trigger SR calculations on the stage in the Tracking Station maybe? Powered recovery doesn't work in the tracking station and chute based recovery doesn't work as well (basically, the vessel doesn't exist in a form that I can get all the module data from), but I might be able to find work arounds.

Can you hook into the terminate flight functionality? Could just run a calculation on flights getting terminated from the tracking station and see if they can be recovered?

[magico13]

Can you hook into the terminate flight functionality? Could just run a calculation on flights getting terminated from the tracking station and see if they can be recovered?

Most likely. That actually should fire the same vessel deletion event, so I'd just have to add an alternative check to catch it while not accidentally catching any other time that the event is fired (it gets fired on every scene change, for instance, which sometimes causes problems). The lack of information about vessels in the Tracking Station still is an issue, unfortunately, but that's something for me to figure out, not for you all to worry about.

[magico13]

Good news! I figured out why Kerbals were suddenly losing their experience again, despite the fact that I fixed that in 0.90. They're being killed TWICE now by the stock game (and you lose the reputation twice as well). So StageRecovery was removing only one of the "Die" events and not the other. Additionally, in the Tracking Station, if you terminate a flight their flight log doesn't include a "Die" event and isn't archived, so StageRecovery fixes that as well in the next version.

Additionally, the next version of StageRecovery should work in the Tracking Station as well. Powered recovery probably won't, I'm taking a look at it to see if I can make it work. You have to terminate the flights in the atmosphere for it to work at all though.

Additionally, I've added a PSA in the first post reminding everyone to set their Min Pressure to 0.5 and activating their parachutes when they stage. My tests show they deploy around 4.5km, which should be low and slow enough for them to deploy properly. You might need a higher value, do some testing to find out. If you drop the stage above ~10km and are still on your way to space, you're probably ok not to activate the chutes at all.

I should have a new version out either today or tomorrow with all of these changes (depending on how much else I want to put in it).

Edit:

New version released, 1.5.7 for KSP 1.0.4

Mostly bug fixes and a few quality of life things. Powered recovery should work properly in scenes other than flight now. I don't trust TweakScaled engines to work properly except in flight, though, so be aware of that if you use TweakScale. It should also be working properly in RSS now (but recovery rates for distance might be a bit messed up).

If you've got something in a >70km by <70km "orbit" and you terminate it in the Tracking Station WHILE IT IS IN THE ATMOSPHERE, then StageRecovery will try to recover it. The orbital speeds mean it might burn up though, so be wary of that.

Recovering Kerbals with SR shouldn't cause them to lose their levels anymore. That's related to a new Stock bug with 1.0 where Kerbals are killed TWICE during Flight and not at all when terminated in the Tracking Station.

Changelog:

1.5.7 - (07/11/2015)

- Fixed issues with kerbal recovery causing lost levels

- Fixed compatibility issue with RSS (checking only for Kerbin)

- Added info for when a stage is lost because no pilot or probe with SAS

- Fixed up Tracking Station related things a bit. Powered recovery should work now and you can terminate a flight and get things recovered as long as its in the atmosphere at the time (including "orbiting" vessels)

Edited July 11, 2015 by magico13
1.5.7 Release

[Gryphon]

They're being killed TWICE now by the stock game (and you lose the reputation twice as well).

Many Kerbals died twice to bring us this information.

[Brut]

So how to save stages which being apart at height ~ 60-70 km? I've put 3 radial chutes on each (stage is 3x400l tanks + LV-T45 engine+nose cone) and set min.pressure to 0.7 but it does not deploy. If i set it to 0.5-0.6 it destroyed by speed =\

[magico13]

So how to save stages which being apart at height ~ 60-70 km? I've put 3 radial chutes on each (stage is 3x400l tanks + LV-T45 engine+nose cone) and set min.pressure to 0.7 but it does not deploy. If i set it to 0.5-0.6 it destroyed by speed =\

You're dropping them from 60-70km? Then you don't need to even deploy them, just drop the stages without activating the parachutes and keep going on with your mission. You may find that SR says they have burned up due to going too fast since you are dropping them at nearly orbital speeds at that height, so either drop them earlier, add heat shield, or change the DR Max Velocity setting in the SR settings.

Don't switch to the stage and follow it down, otherwise KSP won't delete it. If you do that, you can recover it manually, but you'll need to ensure you've armed the parachutes.

If the periapsis is 60-70km you'll have to terminate the flight from the Tracking Station, but make sure you do it near periapsis.