Reactordrone

Recently I've been rescuing the stranded kerbal and then pointing my rescue ship to 90° and manoeuvring the ship so the engine is pointed at the target ship while I'm still pointing prograde. A quick blast of the engine at 100% thrust usually drops the periapsis of the pod by 15-20km so that it will deorbit within a couple of orbits. In my newest save I've been able to rescue all of the Kerbins in LKO without leaving any debris.

Since the drag and heating has changed in the latest version I thought I'd do some basic drop tests of the 1 man capsule with a mk16 parachute to check out the differences in the different aero/drag models. Using the 215km maximum safe altitude of 1.0.4 as a baseline drop height I ran comparisons between 0.90, 1.0.4 and 1.0.0 (demo) models. Upper atmosphere is pretty much the same as there's not enough drag to have much effect above 40km so I've recorded the results from 40km downwards as follows, 0.90 216.7km starting height. 1.0.0 216km starting height 1.0.4 216km starting height 40km 1552m/s__ 1550m/s__ 1546m/s 30km 1578m/s__ 1594m/s__ 1581m/s 25km 1568m/s__ 1617m/s__ 1582m/s 20km 1495m/s__ 1626m/s__ 1543m/s 15km 1286m/s__ 1597m/s__ 1401m/s 10km 830m/s ___1458m/s__ 1050m/s 5km _299m/s___ 1085m/s___ 558m/s 3km _172m/s____ 802m/s___ 285m/s 1km _116m/s______________ 226m/s 0km _113m/s____ 534m/s____ 204m/s Impact is a respectable 407km/h in 0.90, 734km/h in 1.0.4 and a blistering 1922km/h in 1.0.0 aero. If anyone still has 1.0.2 I'd be interested in seeing how much difference there between that and 1.0.4

If you're going straight up for a suborbital contract you need to keep the altitude in check, anything over 215km is likely to kill an unshielded pod on reentry 9about 450km if you're using shields). If you're using solids and don't have the ability to throttle you can aim for a long ballistic flightpath so that your entry angle is shallower. ETA- if you have airbrakes unlocked use as many of then as you can instead of shields, they're lighter than a heatshield and going slower is more effective than using high temperature parts.

You might need to have a look at Claw's stock bug fixes. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97285-KSP-v1-0-2-Stock-Bug-Fix-Modules-%28Release-v1-0-2e-3-10-Jun-15%29?highlight=stock+bugfix

If you've adjusted anything on the wheels (Torque, steering, motors) then the brakes will no longer work. It's a bug that wasn't fixed in the latest bug fix.

Thermometer readouts are in Kelvin (despite the ° marking) so just below 15°C.

Heatshields, which have always been marginal in terms of effectiveness for mass, are now useless since the ablator can't withstand the heat spike. Airbrakes give much better survivability for lower mass. Drogue chutes are also now pretty pointless with a 300m/s safe deploy speed compared with a 200m/s speed for the main chutes there's virtually no difference in deployment time and altitude to justify fitting them. I thought the aero in 1.0.2 was pretty well balanced.

If you have a decoupler in between the small landing tanks and the larger transfer tanks the fuel won't automatically cross over the decouplers, you'll have to use fuel lines.

The drag model has been changed as well as the heating so you're going to lose less speed in the upper atmosphere and are more likely to hit the wall where you hit denser air at high speed and heating suddenly skyrockets and destroys your ship. Even heat shields won't save you from that as the ablator cannot carry heat away fast enough. A shallow entry and drag producing parts will help get you slowed down fast enough to avoid catastrophic heating.

Some test flight results. Using an unshielded 3 man pod on straight up and down suborbital tests the maximum survivable height is about 215km. 220km and above is lethal without extra drag producing parts like radiators. Here's a table of the tests showing max altitude and the speed and altitude recorded when the pods are destroyed. Apogee speed altitude 220km 1409m/s 13,699m 230km 1470m/s 14,596m 240km 1526m/s 15,334m 250km 1558m/s 15,551m 260km 1589m/s 15,848m 270km 1623m/s 16,189m So the higher the speed, the higher in the atmosphere you'll be destroyed and for the 2400° parts that works out to about a 1:10 ratio of speed to altitude. The higher temperature resistance of heatshields allows higher apogees and speeds. 450km is survivable, anything higher is lethal for a straight down descent. 450km 1838m/s 14,789m peak heating 460km 1883m/s 14,863m 475km 1906m/s 15,003m 500km 1942m/s 15,489m 550km 2012m/s 15,636m So watch your altitudes when you do suborbital tourist contracts

If you can hit 15km doing 2000m/s you're guaranteed to die.

It's possible to overheat the heatshields now if the heating is too rapid. No idea if this is a feature or a bug.

I ran a few test runs this morning with the 2.5m heatshield and three man capsule and had the heatshield overheat and explode a few times on steep descents well before the ablator is used up.

I brought a three man lander back from Minmus that had three small radiator panels and it barely got hot during reentry. The temperature indicators for the solar panels showed up briefly and then went away as I got into thicker atmosphere. Might have to do more tests to see if very low melt temperature parts like the goo pods will survive.

They're also useful on reentry. Throw a few small radiators on the sides of the ship and the heat indicators will hardly show up. Much lighter than a heat shield as well.

If you right click on the parachute it will tell you whether it is safe to deploy. If you've already accidentally deployed them you can right click and change the opening pressure to about 0.35 or more so that they won't come out until you're lower in the atmosphere and slower.

I like it. It doesn't have the double bump look that it used to have and the textures have more obvious handholds. Added- A quick comparison of the same aircraft with the new cockpit.

Run patcher.exe........just kidding. If you download the installer and install into the same location as your 1.0.2 version it should update the files and maintain your existing saves. probably wise to copy your save folder just in case though.

Although tourists cannot perform EVAs they can transfer through docking ports/claws so you can either do direct ascent mission where they don't leave the ship or you can transfer them to a lander with a probe core or a crew to fly it.

if you follow the docking tutorial you may need to advance your node a few orbits to get a close intercept in one burn. Usually you can just raise your apoapsis to match the target orbit and then orbit until the targets predicted location overshoots and then raise the periapsis until the distance to target winds back to a close approach, you should be able to get it within a few hundred metres. On the next orbit you just have cancel most of your relative velocity and you're into the docking phase.

Thanks to the simulator (F5/F9) no Kerbals have died in their exploration of the Kerbin system. Sure, there's a few stuck on Eve... Even without quickload I think I've only had a couple of dozen fatal accidents all up.

It's generally a good idea to transmit and then run the experiment a second time and bring that back since there's no penalty for transmitting but there is a maximum amount of science that can be gained for each experiment and hitting a biome twice usually gets the majority of it.

That's always been a feature. Sciene from the negative gravioli detector is available from surface, low orbit and high orbit from each biome. The only place it doesn't work is in flight.

It flew ok for me despite the splayed landing gear, dead straight on the takeoff roll and only wobbled on landing with the application of full brakes.