Looking for advice on reusable ships in JNSQ

[bacontornado]

Loooooong time lurker first time poster here looking for some advice. I've had KSP since 2014 but hadn't played it much for the past couple of years. Recently I ran across Galileo's excellent JNSQ mod and it has really reinvigorated the game for me... I find that you get most of the challenges of real life without going quite as extreme as RSS with RO.

Anyways, I'm to the point in my career where I'm planning my first Duna mission/ regular trips to the Mun and Minmus and I've designed a Starship like reusable ship. The problem is, in past careers I would basically ignore the need for a heat shield and renter engines first with a small deceleration burn in the worst of the atmosphere (heck, most of the time you could even get by with no burn). In JNSQ though, this doesn't even come close to working. A longer deceleration burn would probably do the trick, but due to increased Delta V requirements that isn't practical. For my smaller Dragon-like capsule I used radial engines with a heat shield, but my Starshipesque design relies on larger nuclear engines that need to be rear mounted...

Does anyone have any ideas on how I might get around this? I know JNSQ might be new, but I figured Deadly Reentry vets out there might have run into the same deign challenge.

 

[vossiewulf]

You have to use heat shields and atmospheric braking. In JNSQ, aim for a default periapsis height of about 45k, you will decelerate enough in the atmosphere to land, and the deceleration won't be too extreme for the passengers. For non-crewed items with no Kerbal G-limits, you can aim for 30k periapsis, you'll slow down much faster and use less ablator overall. Basically you'll slow to 1000m/s or so and the heating will stop, and at that point the pod will pitch over into a near vertical drop at its terminal velocity, which is generally low enough to open any parachute.

Here is a pic of me recovering a 77-person 300 or so ton orbital bus in my JNSQ game. Dragon and all pods are much easier than this to recover.

Edited August 9, 2019 by vossiewulf

[bacontornado]

14 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

You have to use heat shields and atmospheric breaking. In JNSQ, aim for a default periapsis height of about 45k, you will decelerate enough in the atmosphere to land, and the deceleration won't be too extreme for the passengers. For non-crewed items with no Kerbal G-limits, you can aim for 30k periapsis, you'll slow down much faster and use less ablator overall. Basically you'll slow to 1000m/s or so and the heating will stop, and at that point the pod will pitch over into a near vertical drop at its terminal velocity, which is generally low enough to open any parachute.

Here is a pic of me recovering a 77-person 300 or so ton orbital bus in my JNSQ game. Dragon and all pods are much easier than this to recover.

 

 

 

Thank you! That is one impressive heatshield! What mod is it from?

Edited August 9, 2019 by bacontornado

[vossiewulf]

2 hours ago, bacontornado said:

 

Thank you! That is one impressive heatshield! What mod is it from?

Most of the parts you see there are from Wild Blue something, I thought it was DSEV but I'm not sure, since I have several Wild Blue mods. I recommend them all:

 

 

[vossiewulf]

On 8/8/2019 at 11:58 AM, bacontornado said:

Does anyone have any ideas on how I might get around this? I know JNSQ might be new, but I figured Deadly Reentry vets out there might have run into the same deign challenge.

 

One more tip, install SSTU. His heat shield can be dynamically sized and also has a choice (at any size) of light, medium or heavy ablator. For a 3100m/s reentry from KEO you can use light ablator. For a nearly 6k reentry from Minmus, you'll need at least medium and maybe heavy. Ablator is very heavy, so for efficient design you want to take only what you need.

Don't worry about SSTU being in the dev area for addons, it's been out for years and Shadowmage just prefers to keep it there for some reason.

There are also a large number of very useful parts, for example, play with the just the basic fuel tank and see how many possible iterations it has.