Landing Legs are extremely fragile

[Space_Can]

Game Version​

2026.9.7.5402

Operating System​

Windows 11

What Happened​

Landing legs are destroyed / detach from the vehicle at extremely low (<5m/s) landing speeds. Due to their small contact area and lack of suspension, landing legs are actually worse for landing than engine bells right now.

What Was Expected​

Landing legs should help, not hinder, landing survivability.

Reproduction Steps​

1. Build a craft with an engine and landing legs.
2. Fire engine briefly
3. Allow craft to land on landing legs
4. Observe as everything's destroyed

Reproduction Rate​

Always

Additional Info​

• Video/Screenshots:
• Save File: Attached (Mars Landed.zip)
• Other Notes: Presumably this issue will be properly solved once landing gear have suspension implemented. For the short term, could they just be made very strong, or would that just transfer the shock forces into anything they're attached to?

 

[Herbal Space Program]

I commented on this issue in the another bug report thread, titled "rescale bug". In my investigations of it, I found that the legs only get broken if you rescale them and then save/reload the vessel, either in the VAB or on the pad, before launching it. If I used non-rescaled legs or didn't save/reload before launching with rescaled ones, everything seemed to work as expected. Flying a vessel where I had done that however, resulted in legs that would pop off during a <1m/s touchdown on Mars or even just trying to stand the vessel up on the ground by deploying retracted ones. Totally useless, as you said above. I would be quite interested to know if this bug behaves the same way in your hands, in which case perhaps the two bug report threads should be merged.

 

[Space_Can]

I'm getting this issue without rescaling parts, only saving and loading. I first encountered this issue with a simple moon landing mission, then encountered it again during this Mars mission. During both missions I saved and loaded several times to correct mistakes before getting to the surface. I suspect that it is just the saving and loading that causes this issue.

I did attach my save file to this report. Load it up see if you get the same behavior from my lander.

 

[Herbal Space Program]

Nevermind, I take back what I said. It's not even about save-reload. Lander legs are just straight-up broken. I build the simplest lander I could, consisting of a capsule, a tank, 4 legs and an engine, with nothing rescaled and no save or load before launch, and it still couldn't handle a drop of 1 foot on the pad. I guess my sit-down-stand-up test was not quite stringent enough, so I drew the wrong conclusions from it. That's too bad for my Io mission that is currently in the Jovian SOI! This is definitely a new issue with this build, because I made some fairly hard Moon landings in the last one without any issues, but I guess since they just just implemented individual part physics for the first time, It should come as no surprise that some things aren't going to work right. And I see your point about elasticity. If nothing has any built into its code and you are using g forces as your threshold, even the tiniest impact will break everything.