Less overheating during aerobraking in time warp

[noname_hero]

I was trying to aerobrake a probe around Eve and because I intend to land it, it needs lots of aerobraking (or to spend the fuel it lacks to slow down). Much of the ship is hidden by a wide fairing at this point, and it aerobrakes fairing-first, so the only part that really heats up is the fairing.

And I was getting bored by repeated passes and put the ship into time warp in Eve's atmosphere while the overheating gauge was half filled, and it went down, even though I was still descending. Curious, I tried to to into/out of time warp a few more times.

Yes, 2x time warp makes my ship overheat less, or at least the indicators show it overheats less. I don't know whether the ship receives less heat, or the radiators remove more of it, or what else might be at play there, but it sure looks like a bug.

 

I'm a bit hesitant to report this as a bug, given the fun some KSP tinkerers could have if this is a way to mitigate aerodynamic heating, but nobody is forcing them to update, eh?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Radiators don't tend to help all that much for re-entry heat. Parts have two heat values- skin and core; re-entry heats the skin temperatures quickly and the core temperatures slowly, and skin overheating is usually the cause of heat-related explosions. Radiators can only pull core heat out of parts, they don't affect skin temperatures.

Regarding time warp, things can get a little bit weird when you're using physics warp (x2-x4 speed), so it's entirely possible that the heat is being generated and dissipated at different rates with different time warp speeds which would explain why it heats up less at x2 speed.

[noname_hero]

Thanks for the reply. However,  I already know about things sometimes getting weird in time warp, and I'll hope somebody else will take notice of this. My experience so far has been that 2x warp is pretty safe, and if weird things happen, they tend to make matters worse. So I guess most of my surprise stems from this effect helping me, instead of invoking Kraken powers. But I'd still like somebody take a more technical/programming look into this, because it feels like a bug, and one that might be easy to fix. It might bite somebody into their @r$3, even though it seems to be helping me now.

Okay, not exactly helping as such, the probe was okay in normal time, but it increased the safety margin.

On a side note, the radiators aren't *intended* for aerobraking heat dissipation, I mentioned them because they're on the probe and might be a factor here. Radiators in atmosphere behave differently than in space, their cooling percentage goes rapidly up the second the probe goes above 90km near Eve, my guess is their skin heating like you've mentioned is the reason behind that, but I've never delved into any KSP code and have no idea how radiators might interact with time warp.