Craft pieces de-spawning / dissapearing

[Dr-Drunk]

Hey everyone!

So with the new 0.9 release and the changes to carreer mode with the contracts and funding and all I've noticed a bit of an annoying bug. Whenever parts of your spacecraft go out of range of your main focus, they simply dissapear. At first I noticed this when I simply attached parachutes to my booster rockets but was unable to actually recover any of the pieces even though they should have survived the landing.

A bit more annoying though: I was doing some contracts involving testing pieces at varying altitudes. So as per usual, I launched a craft with the parts on it and ticket them all off on the way up. Now as I usually have the command pod and the main rocket assembly on a seperate stage, as I always do, I disconnected the command pod from the rocket and deployed the parachutes. Both the rocket and the pod were now safely falling back towards the spaceport. I chose to follow the rocket on the way down, to see if I added enough parachutes to prevent it from blowing up so I could recover it. After falling a few more thousand metres down I noticed the command pod had gone out of view. I didn't think much of it at the time and when the rocket landed recovered it. However when I looked at the tracking station, I saw the command pod was nowhere to be seen. A quick check at the astronaut complex told me that Jebediah had been killed in action....

So yea, parts of rockets dissapear way to easilly. At the games current state it's completely pointless to attach parachutes to booster rockets and the like as there is no way to recover them and a quick slip up like mine can even cost you crew members that are safely on their way down to Kerbin. Please Squad look into this and make it so spaceships and debris don't despawn as quickly! I did in fact have the maximum active debris enabled and at the time didn't even have any other spacecraft active anywhere as this was still early in the carreer mode.

Apologies for any bad spelling or grammar as english isn't my native language.

[sal_vager]

Sorry to say this Dr-Drunk but this is how the game works.

Any vessels or parts of vessels that are not currently being piloted by the player, that are below about 22km on Kerbin and are more than 2.5km away from the active vessel (the physics range) are automatically removed from play and count as destroyed.

[Dr-Drunk]

Thanks for the reply Sal. Shame that this is something that's just part of the game. Especially now that we have a carreer mode focussed on funding, having the option to recover rockets and boosters that you have detached from your main craft would have been great.

Does this apply to debris in space nowadays as well then? As I can recall when I was playing the game much earlier in development, I used to have a big ring of spent rockets and boosters up in space of my previous launches. Would those automatically despawn as well now or does debris like that still stick around?

[Padishar]

No, it is only when in atmosphere and the pressure is above a certain threshold (approx. 22km on Kerbin).

[vexx32]

Objects in orbit will only despawn if they either collide with a planet, or if they pass too deep inside an atmosphere.

[Shrike99]

I do believe there are a few mods that at least allow you to recover funds from debris with parachutes on it

only one i could find was this, but i remember there being a few others.

Either way i think a solution of some sort is needed in stock