I’m trying to re-enter from orbit after ferrying 4 tourists. My general strategy has been to burn retrograde from my periapsis (which is at ~71 km) until the new periapsis is about 35 km. But no matter how I steer, I haven’t been able to get it low enough to even deploy drogue chutes
I also tried a strategy where I put antennae on both of the tourist pods, and separate parachutes on each, and decouplers between the two of them and before the command pod, with the intention of all 3 landing down separately. A week ago, this worked for me on a flight where the tourists only wanted to enter space. But right now, coming down from orbit, every time I try this they seem to crash…but only if I’m not observing them. They come down at a safe speed and the parachutes clearly do deploy, but then upon touching down…they’re not available to collect, and the mission is failed. I even tried switching to one of them, and then the command pod disappeared instead.
I suppose there are two questions in this: (1) how can I slow down a 3 tonne vehicle enough with fairly early tech to safely deploy the parachutes? (2) What do I need to do to make sure I can properly track separate craft after they land down?
Are you actually deploying them via staging? They should be staged before your main chutes. You still need to press spacebar for them to deploy.
If the icon is red, you are going too fast and they will simply rip off when you press spacebar. But from your scenario, i would guess you lose enough speed for the icon to turn yellow and then grey, when it is completely safe to deploy.
I thought that a red icon will cause them to wait and not deploy until it is safe? That’s how I’ve usually done it in previous successful flights, anyway.
This is what it looked like shortly before crashing on my latest attempt (where I set periapsis to 46 km from an apoapsis of 71 km). It didn’t slow enough to deploy before I crash landed.
Are you sure those are drogue chutes? Perhaps they need to be staged separately. I just cheated a similar vessel into orbit and had no issues on re-entry to 45k periapsis. They turned yellow at about 700 m/s and I pressed spacebar to deploy. They were staged separately and before my main chutes.
Yup. I’ve got two radially-mounted Mk2-R Radial-Mount Parachutes, two radially mounted Mk12-R Radial-Mount Drogue Chutes, and the Mk16 Parachute as the nosecone.
I tried again with a 48 km periapsis (71 km apoapsis, IIRC) and still crash landed. I tried the separate staging idea and no luck. It stayed red the whole way down.
Well I am confused. You’re under 600 m/s which should be safe. I literally tried it last night and deployed fine at 700 m/s. Maybe just try to deploy the drogues anyway when you get under 700 m/s and see what happens? Did you change any of the parameters of the drogues? I don’t remember what the defaults are.
I actually just managed to get it to work, after adding radially-mounted radiator panels to help add some drag. I think the drogues only deployed at 500 m/s, which I reached at about 3,000 m above ground, so really the last moment before a crash. You can see the parameters I was using in the screenshot above, which I think was intended to allow it to deploy earlier than the defaults.
Out of interest, were you using orbit speed or surface speed? A difference of about 200 could be explained by you using orbit speed when I’m using surface.