Enceos

So with RealHeat all the thermal problems I had are gone. How could I forget about this mod, I use it in my main install. As for the drag, I found the drag modifier of 1.35 is the margin which allows to aerobrake from 6.5km/s to 3.3 km/s on Kerbin and EVE at safe altitudes of 50km and 80km respectively. Peak deceleration is 11g, in real life we would have 1.1g deceleration, but since we have 10 times less time to do it 11g seems pinpoint for the task. MODULE { name = ModuleDragModifier dragCubeName = SEMIDEPLOYED dragModifier = 1.35 } MODULE { name = ModuleDragModifier dragCubeName = DEPLOYED dragModifier = 1.35 } The change in these attributes does not work until PartDatabase.cfg file is deleted. After deleting, the game will regenerate the drag cubes and Ballutes will behave as they should. I advice to cut the ballute when the velocity drops below Mach 5. Ballutes have Helium in them, a lighter than air gas for airships, so it's realistic that your vessel will descend very slowly into the atmosphere. In real life they have hours to spare at NASA so descent with a deployed ballute is always a good option for them but not for us. Still this drag won't allow to land without extra chutes: UPDATE: Stock is good on my paper. Time to see what the RealChute config brings to the table.

There was introduced a new heat mechanic with KSP 1.0 which makes hot parts glow. And I have several questions about this mechanic: 1) Can we turn off this option for a particular part? 2) Is there a way to make only specific meshes/textures emit light when hot? 3) Can it be done without adding an emissive animation? I noticed stock Circular intakes have an extra texture for heat in their folder and a new ModuleAnimateHeat in their config...

I probably should start testing with RealHeat installed. Cause current thermodynamics give me headaches. EDIT: I must say RealHeat is awesome! We probably should make it a prerequisite for Ballutes before 1.1 comes out.

Yeah, that's the problem I'm trying to solve if you need a heatshield then ballute doesn't do its job. 800m/s an average result. We usually encounter Jool at around 8.5 km/s. To reduce the speed to a good aerocapture we gotta loose 1.5km/s and not heat up.

I've been testing EVE aerocapture and I don't really know what to do. Since atmosphere in KSP starts immediately there's so little time to aerobrake. Everything is fine at 4.7 km/s (Return from Eve). But at 6.5 km/s (EVE encounter and return from Jool) everything starts exploding below 65km Kerbin and 86km EVE. Time to reduce the speed to aerocapture is 25 seconds which is 10 times less than what we have in real life. During this time the vessel should loose around 3.5km/s speed which means the drag should be very significant.

I'm still playing with numbers and I think I got a very favorable balance. Testing currently on different vehicles. Thanks to Nathankell I now understand the meaning the stock modules I'm tweaking. My current results allow me to aerocapture vehicles from 4.5-6km/s with periapsis 55km near Kerbin. Atmospheric pressure there is 150 higher than what Mars aerobrake simulations use around 100km altitude. So we're not cheating here.

I'm tweaking the configs posted on the previous page. I deleted the emissive line there.

Yeah, I probably messed up the formula. Talking about the ballute drag, this is the aerocapture interface of a probe at Mars. So a good ballute should be able to slow a spacecraft down to aerocapture before a substantial heat kicks in on the first attempt. If at lowest point ballute is cut the probe will skip off into space, if not cut, the probe should decelerate to suborbital trajectory. I'm tweaking current values to at least get an aerocapture orbit with high Apoapsis. The target velocities are 6.5km/s Eve encounter and 4.7km/s Kerbin return. There's a good document with ballute simulations for Mars: https://engineering.purdue.edu/~alexeenk/papers/AAS2007_Mars_ballute.pdf - I'm still chewing it. Meanwhile I found that chuteMaxTemp from the ModuleParachute doesn't do much at all. I lowered it to 50K and still no impact on ballute temps.

You're just in time ABZB, thank you very much. I was just starting to write this config myself.

The problem is KSP does a very very poor job simulating chute thermals. You will get around 2200-2400K skin temperature both during 2km/s reentry and during 7km/s reentry. Temperature kicks in immediately after ballute is deployed at 68km Kerbin altitude and persists until your vertical speed goes positive again, be it at 60 km or 45km altitude. The other big problem is viability of the ballutes with close to real life stats. In real life celestial bodies are much bigger and a probe with a ballute would have like 10-20x more time aerobraking in upper atmosphere than a similar probe in KSP. This means if you didn't get yourself an aerocapture on the first try, you're out. The configs I pushed you on Github are trying to bring close to real life result to the end user. Stock KSP ModuleParachute wasn't really designed with temperatures in mind but rather velocities. The best solution lies not in the thermals tweaking field. There's another crucial characteristic ballutes have, they can sustain only about 3.5 - 4G deceleration, high G deceleration also assumes temperature. I don't know if we can do this with RealChute, but if we could somehow force the ballutes tear/burn when the deceleration reaches above 4G, then we'll have a true 100% accurate behavior. Wrong and bad idea. Current ballute configs have very low themal values, until the next mod update replace them temporarily with these: DOWNLOAD NEW BALLUTE THERMAL CONFIGS

Actually I'm not sure this chuteEmissivity line did anything at all. There's no such variable in the ModuleParachute that I can find. Inline ballutes is not actually a mod, but two part models and one texture which use all the stock modules. So it's only a 3Mb addition to your GameData. You can delete some unnecessary normals or resize the stock texture of the stock Ladder Telescopic Bays, for example, (6Mb waste) to squeeze in the ballutes. I'm running 136 mods currently on Windows By resizing Squad textures I've reduced my GameData folder by 50 Mb. By resizing unnecessarily big textures of other mods I won another 400Mb, so whenever I happen to encounter a rare game crash - it's not because of RAM issues.

You guys ever tried the Anomaly Surveyor contract pack?

When you play with the Kerbal Construction Time mod, you are limited in time between rocket launches. Sometimes there's an urgent need to get something to orbit but your launchpad is under reconditioning. Spaceplanes come to aid in these situations. And you can have several in your hangar ready for launch anytime. Upon landing they can be recovered to hangar for refueling and payload refitting. KCT is awesome. Without KCT flying spaceplanes is a gameplay preference. There's a famous youtuber Bob Fitch, who is a rocket guy down to his bones. There's a famous streamer EJ_SA who's a Shuttle guy more than anyone out there.

@Starwaster I've been doing some extensive tests today, spent almost 5 hours tweaking values up and down and testing. On reentry ballute skin temperature spikes to a number around 2450K so I changed the skinMaxTemp value to 2600, the case itself doesn't heat up much if occluded from below so the best value is 1600K for the maxTemp. I felt that part didn't heat up fast enough, so these values changed the picture for the better: skinSkinConductionMult = 0.003 skinInternalConductionMult = 0.003 In the ModuleParachute I changed the chuteMaxTemp to match the skinMaxTemp = 2600. The drag of the ballute is good enough currently. I noticed that drag is affected only by semiDeployedDrag and fullyDeployedDrag from the ModuleParachute. The values in ModuleDragModifier are probably for the case itself, they didn't affect the drag of the deployed ballute at all, even with some drastic numbers. In real life Ballutes are designed to withstand even 7km/s reentries, but not more than 4G deceleration load. My current config currently allows high velocity reentry but doesn't punish for G overload. Is there any way to change that? Below is the code of the most successful config so far. PART { name = InlineBallute250 module = Part author = Riocrokite, Enceos scale = 1 MODEL { model = KermangeddonIndustries/InlineBallutes/Ballute250 scale = 1.25,1.25,1.25 } scale = 1.25 rescaleFactor = 1 node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.71, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 2 node_stack_top = 0.0, 0.71, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 2 sound_parachute_open = activate TechRequired = landing entryCost = 17000 cost = 2000 category = Utility subcategory = 0 title = Inline 'big lunch' Ballute (2.5m) description = When it was first launched it gathered policemen from the area. Bill wonders to this day - why. Big Lunch is a 2.5m inline toroidal ballute version. Good for slowing down rockets in upper atmosphere and as a source for squeeky voice (lots of helium inside). Rating: good for vessels up to 30 tons. attachRules = 1,0,1,0,0 mass = 2 dragModelType = default angularDrag = 1 crashTolerance = 12 maxTemp = 1600 // = 3100 emissiveConstant = 0.7 breakingForce = 200 breakingTorque = 100 bodyLiftMultiplier = 0 stageOffset = -1 fuelCrossFeed = True skinSkinConductionMult = 0.003 // = 1 skinInternalConductionMult = 0.003 // = 1 skinMaxTemp = 2600 // = -1 bulkheadProfiles = size2 MODULE { name = ModuleParachute invertCanopy = true autoCutSpeed = 1 capName = cap canopyName = canopy semiDeployedAnimation = semiDeploy fullyDeployedAnimation = fullDeploy stowedDrag = 0.22 semiDeployedDrag = 500 fullyDeployedDrag = 500 minAirPressureToOpen = 0.000001 clampMinAirPressure = 0.000001 deployAltitude = 10000 deploymentSpeed = 0.12 semiDeploymentSpeed = 0.5 chuteMaxTemp = 2600 chuteThermalMassPerArea = 0.2 chuteEmissivity = 2.4 } MODULE { name = ModuleDragModifier dragCubeName = SEMIDEPLOYED dragModifier = 0.6 } MODULE { name = ModuleDragModifier dragCubeName = DEPLOYED dragModifier = 0.6 } MODULE { name = ModuleConductionMultiplier modifiedConductionFactor = 0.001 convectionFluxThreshold = 3000 } } Also I'm having a strange NRE spam in the VAB when taking ballutes from the catalog: NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object at ModuleParachute.SetConvectiveStats () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at ModuleParachute.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 It stops after a vessel was launched or reverted back to VAB.

I'll do some testing today to see what skin temp values are good for DeadlyReentry. Looks like we'll need another config for DRE support. Haven't tested in stock yet, what is the optimal altitude range for ballute operation during Kerbin reentry without DRE before they start to burn?

@Starwaster, does DRE tweak stock aerodynamics or engines in any way? My SSTOs with Ramjets and Rapiers lost 50% of their thrusting power in airbreathing mode with DRE... consequently not being able to reach Mach 3. Another thing, the Inline Ballutes I made with Riocokite when deployed are starting to overheat and explode above 60km on Kerbin. Do you happen to know what might be causing this behavior in DRE patches?

Interestingly enough, with Deadly Reentry installed ballutes start to overheat above 60km in Kerbin's atmosphere. I couldn't find the source of the issue.

I noticed that after installing DRE all of the pats became unstackable in KIS containers. What list of modules DRE adds to parts?

I have a theory that if you make a detailed texture with a specular map and less shininess in the material, you won't see your artifacts anymore. When there's not much detail about shadows in the texture, the game tries to calculate them on its own from the model.

I have a theory that game cuts the chutes when there's no atmosphere. But you can repack them and reuse as many times as you like. nop, just sitting on my desktop.

Nice work! But probably an overkill. Too many alcor props make cockpits laggy. Why would you need chute buttons in a rover cabin? same for 'cabin overheat', 'engine overheat' and 'ground proximity'. Stability controls are nice buttons to have if one would want to make a space truck.

Rudimentary sign I decided to cast off while working on textures:

Downloading! Finally an answer to aerocapturing with DRE installed.

Looks awesome, already want to build a sand storm shelter on it

Have you tried disabling the alpha channel like I told you?