Atmospheric Braking

[Markus Reese]

This video shows it working, since then I have been able to make it more efficient.

Clip between 35 and 40 km, then when you hit your new periapsis, burn towards kerbin to keep your speed from going solely to gaining altitude. Other orbital tweaks to skill, it saves alot of fuel. If atmospheric temperatures on re-entry become a factor, this can become very important for limited fuel return flights.

http://youtu.be/jiEzHHClUfk

[Nomer]

I don\'t know,

I might be going to fast,

4 of my munar missions -

3 landings

1 crash landing

On all I\'ve taken off and returned safetly,

though, on 3/4 the parachute failed and i ended up crashing at 20 meters per second,

is their some type of huge parachute?

[Vanamonde]

When I\'m ready to come home, I set my initial periapsis to 50,000m. That way I know that even if I run out of fuel or have some kind of mishap, my little guys will eventually de-orbit. On a couple of occasions when I botched my trajectory and ran out of gas, it\'s the only thing that saved their (simulated) lives, though they had to do 2-4 loops before finally coming down in a random spot. If I get to that first periapsis and still have fuel, I\'m not commited to landing because my speed will take me back up again at least once, so I\'ll use the remaining fuel to try to bring my capsule down as close to KSC as possible. There\'s really no reason not to use aerobraking.

[Markus Reese]

Nomer, it could simply be because you have too much mass on the rocket for the parachute to function properly. It is possible to fit more than one parachute to a lander if you choose. there are many different mods out there for extra chutes such as the novapunch pack I believe has radial mount parachutes. The part about them breaking off, it simply could be you are deploying too soon, the load causing a structural failure and the mount to break off. Try deploying it at a lower altitude, you don\'t need to until you are a couple of km off the surface really.

[vexx32]

*ahem*. The stock parachutes are able to be radially mounted if you so choose, as of the latest version.

And yeah, if you deploy a chute above around 500m/s, you\'re about guaranteed to get it torn off. Safest below 300m/s. Even if you reenter at 2000m/s, by about 1km up, you\'re already down to around 200m/s.

[Nomer]

dang, I knew I was failling to fast so I fired my RSC tanks,

I simply just have the MEM(Munar Escape/Excursion module) which is just the command pod, 9 RSC tanks, and the parachute cannister...

Is that to heavy?

[Markus Reese]

It being too heavy would really depend on when you get down to the surface. 9 empty rcs tanks could add up to some serious weight, but I am not sure of the dry weight of the tanks you have fitted. If on successful deployment, you are falling fast on a successful deployment, you probably are and will need the bottom most landerleg stage decouple and add your rcs tanks onto that.

[Tarmenius]

When I\'m ready to come home, I set my initial periapsis to 50,000m.

My first time aerobraking, I was returning from the Mun and I also set my initial Pe to 50,000m. But even after using my remaining fuel to reduce Ap to 1.1 million meters, it took another 10 orbits to finally reach the surface of Kerbin. It was days of simulated time. Since then, I have found that it is much faster to set Pe to just under 30,000m. Even starting from the Mun\'s altitude and using the full lander, the crew experienced only slightly more than 2 G\'s of deceleration. This should be well under any heat generation limits added in the future. As an added bonus, no additional orbits were necessary to reach the surface.

If you wanted to return to Kerbin orbit rather than the surface, make your initial Pe closer to 35,000m and that should do the trick.

[Vanamonde]

I do it as a failsafe rather than a descent plan. At 50km, if I get there and have fuel remaining I can do additional braking and land where I want, but if I run out of fuel or something else goes wrong, aerobraking will eventually bring the boys home anyway.