People have a lot of trouble with shipped eggs. To postal service is not the most gentle and if something is marked fragile, it seems the more they see if they can destroy it. So I would say that it was probably more the way the eggs were handled in shipping than during incubating.
If you are using an LG you would be much better off using a turner. The temp in an LG does not hold right to begin with and so if you had to keep opening it to turn eggs then the temp would really be unstable.
We have an LG with turner and have very good luck with it. Here in Florida it is humid enough that we can do dry incubation, which a lot of people frown upon, but it works very well for us. Our hatches are in the 90% to 95% range every time. We have a hatcher that I built that the eggs go into on the 19th day. Yes, I know that eggs are supposed to quit turning on the 18th day. But we let ours go to the 19th day and then to the hatcher where the are still until hatch. We also run our bator at 100 degrees which is lower than should be but this is just what we have found works the best for us. We have hatched over 600 chicks in the last year this way and have very few problems. Out of all those chicks we might have had a total of a dozen that had problems but nothing that wasn't fixable.
You just want to make sure that the temp does not go too high. It is better to let it go cooler than hotter. Hotter will kill a chick, cooler will slow it's growth rate in the egg.
I would suggest getting a good quality thermometer/hygrometer to use. We use a digital weather station for ours. It comes with a remote wireless outdoor ther/hygro pickup that we place in the incubator. The digital readout is in our livingroom so we can see what the temp is at any time. Just really handy as our incubator is in a spare bedroom. Keeps us from having to go check all the time. Plus it is acurate to +/- 1 degree.
Just a few suggestions for you.
Good luck with the hatch.
