How can I recover the pre-orbital stages of a spaceship in Kerbal Space Program? I'm trying to reduce my per-launch costs in the beginning of career mode.
I tried building my spaceship with radial stages each topped with a stayputnik and a pair of radial parachutes. I set the parachutes to deploy at the same time as the decouplers, and could see them deploy in the staging view during flight. I expected to see these pieces as either probes or debris in the tracking station, but they were never listed. The stacks are small enough (an LV-T45 and about an FL-T800s's worth of fuel) that 2 radial 'chutes should have been enough to bring them down safely. Is there a way to recover these pre-orbital stages?
or i-beams
instead of lander legs
. Modular girders and i-beams have 6x higher impact tolerance (80m/s) than the strongest lander legs (12m/s). You can land a 1000 ton ship on Kerbin with a single chute if it can survive a 80m/s landing.
Best Answer
The problem with this is that any on-rails object below 25km in Kerbin's atmosphere will be deleted, as it is assumed it burnt up/impacted. In order to recover stages, you will need a mod. The two major mods for this are StageRecovery and DebRefund. They both do the same thing, but StageRecovery has an in-game settings panel.