How to control two vessels?

[Funeh]

Hi, I am begginer so this may be a stupid question for a lot of you guys.

I want to make a plane that will take my spacecraft to upper atmosphere or even space, and when I decouple it, I dont know how would I be able to control two vessels at once; the plane to safely land and the rocket to make some orbital maneuvres... All that in a very little time I have..

[steve_v]

There's a mod for that

Here ya go

[Funeh]

Okay thanks, I guess I will have to use it, if there is no other way...

Also , is there a way that I would make my SRB with parachutes and make them autodeploy somehow? Or the FMRS is the only way?

[steve_v]

IIRC stock KSP will remove your ship (or the decoupled parts) if in atmosphere and >2.3km from the controlled vessel... I'm hoping this will change someday, but for the moment there's FMRS, or StageRecovery if you want something a bit lighter just for recovering booster stages (my favoured solution, as I haven't found a good use case for the design you're working on... yet) You can stage your parachutes with the decouplers, but the 2.3k thing still applies. Also, opening chutes while moving upward at high velocity can have... unintended consequences.

All my lifters have chutes on the boosters, with stagerecovery. Works nice, more funds

SmartParts has altitude based triggers and other goodness, but hasn't been updated for 0.25 so YMMV.

Edited November 3, 2014 by steve_v

[SRV Ron]

While you can't control two ships at once, you can switch from one to the other. My test turbojet plane stages at burnout to orbit the payload. By careful flying, it can reach a speed of 2,300 m/s at about 40,000 meters at burnout with an apogee in space. At apogee, a small burn places the payload in orbit. I then switch to the turbojet stage which has a control pod needed to guide it to a landing.

The turbojet which launches vertically;

Burnout;

In orbit;

Parachute recovery of booster;

[Claw]

IIRC stock KSP will remove your ship (or the decoupled parts) if in atmosphere and >2.3km from the controlled vessel...

As an extra note, KSP will delete only vessels outside of physics range (around 2.3km) if the atmosphere pressure is greater than 0.1, which on Kerbin means below about 23km altitude.

So if you are making a piggyback space plane carrier, keep your recoverable portion above that long enough to get your orbital object sent spaceward (similar to the post above).

While all that is going on, you can switch craft as you normally would, until something falls below 23km. Then you are stuck watching that piece. It is doable but can be tricky.

For chutes, they can be activated in the same stage as the decouplers. However, their deletion is subject to the same limitations. Deleted objects don't refund funds in stock KSP.

Cheers,

-Claw