I tried messing around with launching and landing on all planets in the sandbox mode, and landing on Venus (‘Smenus’ in the game) seems peculiar. Thanks to the dense atmosphere, the terminal velocity of just your pod alone is low enough to land without any parachute. But things get weird if you add a parachute anyway. Even if you deploy the parachute at negligible velocity, the pod quickly begins to wobble violently and within seconds, the parachute snaps off the pod.
I can’t see a possible cause of this phenomenon. Even if the atmosphere is dense, at terminal velocity the drag on the parachute and the tension in its cords will be equal to the weight of the pod, right? Is there any reason for the parachute to fail? Or is this a glitch in the game physics?
The game ignores the harsh sulphuric acid and heat in the atmosphere BTW.
Simple rockets does not even use the correct equations for orbital mechanics. (it doesn’t even model orbital mechanics at all, it just cheats). So why do you expect it to model the stress on parachute cord correctly?
So much for the euphoria I got thinking I’d experienced a taste of the physics of space flight :smack:
So there’s no explanation for the parachutes failing then? Just poor simulation of physics?
The game is interesting enough though. I’ve never played Kerbal Space Program, I guess it’s time to give it a shot…
I’m fairly certain that the parachute should do one of three things:
Open correctly, then fail structurally because you’ve got too much momentum combined with too much drag.
Open incorrectly, get tangled with itself and not produce enough drag.
Open correctly, not fail structurally and slow your descent properly.
If what you described happened in real life, I’d blame it on strong gusts of wind.
KSP uses simplified versions of the real equations for orbital mechanics. (so, for example, an orbit at a different altitude over the planet has a different orbital period)
However, it also uses a lot of cheats and simplifications that frequently disrupt gameplay. Among other things, it *also *has a bug where parachute cord will snap when it shouldn’t.
If you’re referring to the problem where the parachute opens so quickly that it jolts the spacecraft hard enough to break the parachute, they fixed that about a month ago - now parachutes open more gradually and don’t produce that jolt.
I know this. However, that “bug” as you put it is not really a bug, it’s a fundamental fault in their physics model. The game has a lot of faults like that.
Some craft configurations will cause vibrations and resonations which can and do break things.
I would think that Venus’ atmosphere would be dense enough to damp that out, however air currents have been known to cause things to fail. Not out of the question that such a vibration could happen.
And as you learned you don’t need a chute for Venus, but some heavier craft do benefit from a last minute rocket engine fire to slow landings.