Why did my Kerbal die?

I made a tug with the Klaw to rescue Valentina Kerman, who I had stranded in an orbit of the Mun, and bring her back to Kerbin. During reentry, I set the tug's parachutes to fire at a high pressure, and separated from the mun lander craft, as the tug was expendable but Valentina was not.
After watching Valentina splashdown gently into the ocean, I pressed ] to switch through active ships and observe the tug successfully splashdown as well. After the tug had splashed down, I pressed ] again and was aghast when the message "No nearby objects to focus. Use the Map View to select distant ones." appeared on screen.
I recovered the tug, checked the Tracking Station, and Mun Lander had disappeared. In the Astronaut Complex, Valentina was listed as KIA.
How did she die?
Best Answer
The thing that I can think of is this:
KSP will automatically remove some debris. In the menu, you can set the number of pieces of persistent debris. If you switched to another craft it may have removed the "debris" of the Valentina and the klaw.
Only vessels with a controlable part (capsules or probe bodies) won't be treated as debris. Did you have a probe body attached to the klaw that held Valentina?
This is from the Kerbal Space Program Wiki:
Any debris not within 2.5 km (the physics range) of the active vessel, will be removed if it is in an atmosphere with atmospheric density of greater than 0.1 atm
Pictures about "Why did my Kerbal die?"



How do I recover a dead Kerbal?
If you want them back to life immediately rather than waiting, you can open your KSP game folder/saves/username/persistent. sfs with your favorite text editor, find ROSTER and change the crew members' statuses from state = 3 to state = 0 . This will instantly revive your Kerbals.Can Kerbal die?
Kerbals can't die for any other reason than lithobraking (just like aerobraking, only difference is that you replace the atmosphere with the ground) and a collision with an object.Can Kerbals die from falling?
And yet I had a Kerbal fall off a spaceplane - on the gorund - and die in a puff of smoke. Yeah - I had one die from a tiny Mun lander - the slope of the mk1 pod accelerated him downwards at a violent speed, and poof, gone. The fall was all of maybe three meters in Munar gravity.Why are Kerbals green?
Kerbals' awkward, sprawling walk may indicate that their species only recently evolved to the point of bipedal movement. They may have the green skin due to the fact that they may have to sneak up on their prey.11 Ways to Die - Kerbal Space Program
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Images: Ann H, Brett Sayles, Karolina Grabowska, Nick Collins