Matt516

Going above Mach speeds with a finless rocket low in the atmosphere might not be the best idea anymore...

Doesn't this present a problem in which it's actually better to store fuel as ore than in fuel tanks? Since the ore tanks have a better mass ratio than the fuel tanks?

Well hopefully they'll be updating the occlusion model in future patches - the whole aero model is still new and I imagine they've still got some stuff on their wishlist, feature-wise.

Fair enough. As far as I know though, the jury is still out as to how the heat shields protect - I could've sworn I'd seen example vehicles similar to your probes that did just fine. Haven't tested it personally though, so I'm not sure.

Yeah, "flux" generally refers to flow normalized by area. So their usage is technically wrong. But not really a huge deal.

Of the non-physics parts that I'm aware of, the only ones I can think of that would make sense to re-enable physics are landing gears maybe? Since they're usually either symmetric (on a rocket) or all on the bottom and symmetric (on a plane). Seems odd to me that those don't affect the CoM. Other than those and the heat shields, I'm pretty cool with the non-physics parts. Makes placing small sensors and batteries and such a lot less tedious than it would otherwise be. And struts, ofc.

So here's the thing: what was often called a "gravity turn" in old KSP isn't actually a gravity turn at all. In real life (and now KSP 1.0), rockets don't point off of prograde more than a few degrees while in atmo. Or they explode. A true gravity turn is simply pointing your rocket prograde the whole time (with a slight nudge off of vertical in the beginning to get things started) - as you follow your ballistic trajectory, the rocket will naturally turn as gravity brings it around. Hence "gravity turn". Scott Manley has a nice tutorial video here: So to summarize - you don't turn a rocket more than 10 degrees off of prograde in real life, and now the Kerbals can't either. Gotta keep the rocket pointing prograde if you don't want to tumble. Makes sense?

Absolutely. Parachutes should be susceptible to heating and snap off if deployed at too high a speed.

I'm fine with this, to be honest. Clipping isn't something that's physically possible, so it makes perfect sense that the games physics doesn't bother figuring out what happens when you do it. Less realistic physics is the price to be paid for mucking about with that sort of thing IMO. Not that there's anything wrong with doing that, of course. I'm just neither surprised nor bothered that they made a simplification in the occlusion code that only works when you don't clip stuff inside other stuff. As for the heat shield - I wouldn't be surprised if that works slightly differently. Haven't people reported seeing radially attached goo cans be protected by the shield during reentry?

Is there any way to see the centre of drag as well? Seems kind of odd that there would be a realistic aerodynamic model but no way to tell how the craft will behave. Maybe that's part of the upcoming skill overhauls (in which we'll get stock dV readouts as well )?

Yeah, I'd have to agree here. It's really unintuitive for parts to be used in physics calculations in some ways but not others. Obviously this needs to be fixed for the heatshield as it has a profound impact on gameplay. But honestly it should probably be fixed with batteries/landing gear/etc as well - or we might see more unintended derpy behavior from the drag and mass models being out-of-sync.

Well in this case the aerodynamics model is working just fine. It's the craft that's broken - more specifically the heatshield. The CoM isn't where it should be, so the (realistic) aerodynamics are causing it to flip around. Don't blame the poor aerodynamics for the incredible massless heat shields. While there are some people engaging in histrionics, I'd say this thread isn't really participating in that. As FlowerChild pointed out, this particular bug wasn't even recognized as a bug until enough people complained about it. KSP is great, and constructive feedback only makes it better.

Manually turning 45 degrees at any point =/= gravity turn. More realistic aerodynamics forces you to do an ACTUAL gravity turn, which is to keep your rocket pointed prograde and let your trajectory change naturally due to.. y'know... gravity. Real rockets don't point off of prograde while in atmo, or they are ripped apart and explode.

So has the problem been pretty well confirmed to be that the heat shield increases mass and applies drag, but doesn't actually move the CoM? Therefore putting the CoM too far back and causing the capsule to not want to point retrograde? If so, this should be fairly easy for Squad to fix in a hotfix, no?

Re: Thrust varies with ISP - you're partially right, but it's more than just having the engine thrust multiplied by the Atm multiplier. In stock, every engine always has the same max thrust, and the fuel consumption varies with ISP (so as you go out into vacuum, fuel consumption generally goes down because ISP is increasing). Having that option turned on causes the fuel consumption to stay constant, and the thrust to vary with ISP instead. This is mainly a realism setting, as it shouldn't affect gameplay a huge deal because ISP is the same and therefore delta-V of any given stage is the same. And re: extended curve, there's certainly no harm in leaving it on when you're roundabout Kerbin. But if you plan on going anywhere with a denser atmosphere than Kerbin, it's gonna hurt you pretty bad.