I'm trying to re-enter from orbit after ferrying 4 tourists. My general strategy has been to burn retrograde from my periapsis (which is at ~71 km) until the new periapsis is about 35 km. But no matter how I steer, I haven't been able to get it low enough to even deploy drogue chutes
I also tried a strategy where I put antennae on both of the tourist pods, and separate parachutes on each, and decouplers between the two of them and before the command pod, with the intention of all 3 landing down separately. A week ago, this worked for me on a flight where the tourists only wanted to enter space. But right now, coming down from orbit, every time I try this they seem to crash...but only if I'm not observing them. They come down at a safe speed and the parachutes clearly do deploy, but then upon touching down...they're not available to collect, and the mission is failed. I even tried switching to one of them, and then the command pod disappeared instead.
I suppose there are two questions in this: (1) how can I slow down a 3 tonne vehicle enough with fairly early tech to safely deploy the parachutes? (2) What do I need to do to make sure I can properly track separate craft after they land down?
The easiest way to do this contract with your tech is probably to take the tourists on two separate flights - use only one crew container per rocket and take half the amount of tourists. You could also replace the command pod with a probe core to save mass, or try increasing the drogue chute deployment altitude to 5000 m if you haven't already.
Any vessels that fly in atmosphere and are out of physics range (used to be 2.5 km, but I can't remember if that's still the case) from the active vessel are destroyed by the game, so the pods were probably deleted before hitting the ground.