Do parachutes need to be exposed to work?

[EmberStar]

I'm wondering if parachutes need to be facing up with the top surface exposed, or if they can fire from anywhere? (Assuming they have parachutes to use.) I've been trying to salvage an Encounter Corvette.

Part of the upgrades is to make it possible (hopefully) to take it down to a planet. Just in case I'm *wrong* about how much thrust that needs, I'd like to at least not turn the ship into a crater after spending hours figuring out how to repair it. So I'd like to put in some emergency parachutes. The problem is, the only place I can put them without totally changing the way the ship looks is sideways, facing into some armor blocks.

I'm not worried about it looking derpy (and it will, with the lines leading into the hull.) I just want to not completely lose all the resources I've put into the ship. Hopefully I'll never even need them.

[Mollymawk]

At the risk of sounding hostile (I'm not). Just test it yourself. spin up an easy start and throw a parachute on one of the craft. SE is all about experimentation.

[G1izzyGod]

Originally posted by Mollymawk:

At the risk of sounding hostile (I'm not). Just test it yourself. spin up an easy start and throw a parachute on one of the craft. SE is all about experimentation.

I was gonna suggest the same. You might as well start up a new world in creative mode, earthlike starter base world is perfect for testing planetary devices, machines, and ships. Place a parachute block and look at the settings and options. Build a ship that floats with atmos thrusters, put a parachute block on it and cover it on top. Turn off auto dampeners and see how the parachute block behaves compared to being open on top.

[Buzzard]

They'll work covered, but just remember that mass will dangle from the block. The more mass you have over the parachute hatch, the more prone to flipping you'll be.

Also, parachutes will slow descent based on atmospheric density, grid mass, and gravity. The more weight you've got, the more parachute hatches you'll want to slow things down.

[EmberStar]

Originally posted by Mollymawk:

At the risk of sounding hostile (I'm not). Just test it yourself. spin up an easy start and throw a parachute on one of the craft. SE is all about experimentation.

I was hoping someone *already knew* so I didn't have to spend half an hour or more creating a new game, modifying a ship, screwing around with it only to discover something that isn't new and didn't need to be rediscovered. But hey, good for yo, you don't want to sound hostile. (Yet you do.) And you spent a ton of effort NOT answering the question, when it would have been both less effort and less hostile to just NOT answer.

[frag2k4]

Best advice on problems like these is to create a set of prototype save files. Open a new star system world in creative and remove all settings like weather, drones, random encounters, ships, sun rotation ect.

Now change to spectator mode and using mouse wheel scrolls a bit to speed up and find a nice flat area on earthlike, ctrl+space to jump your character there and save the game as something like earth atmo testing. Now jump back into spectator mode and rush into orbit just outside of the gravity well and save as this time space testing.

Save as again now planet entry testing and now you have 2 main saves (remember to make a new save when using these as atmo testing 1 ect so the originals are clean.

Now load up the save needed and paste in your ship from creative and test it in a real environment where the loss isn't a setback, landing on planets can be tested without fear as can launching off planets.

Overall its what I do and I would say to a degree a lot of others test in creative before committing to survival builds. You could this way test your parachutes out and see how many work or are required for your ship.

[Mollymawk]

While testing you may have also learned a few of the other parachute considerations, like having spare canvas is always wise, Center of mass needs to be considered or landing upside down is an option, and how many you will need. too many and you almost don't move at all not enough and well .... so you still need to experiment,

[Mojo]

I downloaded a ship off the workshop once that had a chute block hidden that I was not aware of, and surprised me when I entered the planets atmosphere and it popped off. They had it set to auto deploy pretty high up. (Not sure why someone would want to hide a chute, they blend in well) Anyway it worked.

That was ages ago before the last couple of updates, so unless they changed it, it will work.

[Lord Lorcan]

Hi
Yes it’s possible, trap works facing anyway
Is it without impact, no
The canvas will pull you upward from the attachment point
Your ship may suddenly be upside down