Wintersdark

Reduction in the shield is unrelated to survival or not without a shield. The abalator reduction is a matter of time at extreme temp. If you come in straight with a Mk1 without a shield, the moment the capsule hits it's heat tolerance (and this can happen fast on an energetic reentry) it simply explodes. On the other hand, with a heatshield, the capsule is protected from the heat and you only lose a little abalator because you lose velocity fast. On the other hand, a gentle entry will often shear more off the abalator due to the extended time at high (but not critical) temperature, but the peak temperatures are far lower. You can test this pretty easily. Take an unshielded Mk1 capsule on a gentle reentry. No problem at all. Take one at steep angle, and you pop like a grape. - - - Updated - - - Yeah, you can drop straight into the atmosphere with an early chute pop - they never burn up, and while your Kerbals may not appreciate 10G's of acceleration, it'll work pretty much every time. It's kinda cheaty though, and will likely change so I wouldn't get too used to it. I've had several sketchy re-entries now saved by popping a parachute at 50,000m, and just letting it autodeploy as soon as there's enough atmo to do it (typically around 25,000km)... That's allowed steep Minimus returns with unshielded Mk1+Service Bay+Science Jr crafts. Nothing burning off at all.

IIRC even in 0.90 this was the case. However, in 0.90 the wheels didn't actually have to touch the ground. I got these contracts done by landing a base with an attached mini rover, and was awarded completion even though the rover never touched the surface.

Fuel tank, inline cockpit, circular intake, jet engine, basic wings and rear fins. Flew extremely well, mach effects at end of runway. I'm really early in my career save, however - thing needs brakes, badly. Touched down at the water side of the runway, stopped moving in the hills on the other side of the grasslands. That was touching down at 100m/s, with engine off and brakes on. Clearly, need to experiment with landing gear brake settings. I'm not a good aircraft pilot, mind you, but it was really easy to fly. Definitely a lot easier to build and pilot than in 0.90, particularly at low altitudes. No flipping issues, highly responsive at all speeds, naturally recentered to prograde no matter crudely I abused the controls. Awesome.

lol not a Canadian, eh? I've got pictures here in Calgary, of a bright sunny day, green grass, berries on trees, etc... and it's -18C. If it's green when it freezes, it stays green

Errr, for a rocket under powered ascent, don't you want the CoM aft?

It's not that simple. Perhaps one that doesn't cool 100%, but instead only 80% - It'd cap your burn time, but if you never need to make really long burns, the weight savings may be worthwhile. Or, perhaps you want larger sinks, to handle additional heat load. I dunno. Honestly, I think it's a problem that there's no way to sufficiently cool them as it stands, but I'd rather there be multiple potential solutions that I can experiment with. Solving these problems is a major part of the fun of KSP.

You can pop parachutes early too, which generates some harsh G's but greatly limits heating. I haven't used more than 3 pts of abalator yet of the 200 the heat shield has.

Major update has a couple bugs. News at 11!I probably shouldnt ask, but how is the tech tree/career terrible?

OK. Obviously, I can't drop ascent stages slower.... Would deploying the parachutes at separation help? I didn't us DR before, so I must confess ignorance to how it worked in that case. I'll try heat shields, or failing that just change to DR speed setting, though that isn't ideal as the parts shouldn't hit those speeds in the first place.

I've been having this issue too. Unsure how to save those stages, as no amount of parachute does it... Even though just manually deploying them and keeping focus as the stage falls will preserve it. Now, I get that the whole high altitude parachute deal could be exploitive, I don't know. But if so, how would I save those stages?

Yeah, the early suborbital hops don't have destinations, so all you need is to leave atmo briefly then land again anywhere.

Until we get proper heat sinks, mount solar panels as near to them as you can.

I've had this problem with a multitude of parts Ina variety of situations since the upgrade. Basically, the range you can move parts in is offset from the original location of the part by a substantial amount. Its clearly a bug, because the whole allowable range doesn't include the parts starting location.

KAS covers this, but stock? Dunno really. There's lots of hacky solutions, but I don't have a good way to reliably do it.

I don't use them. High altitude parachute deployment has worked for me so far

i don't understand why heat shields being necessary is an issue? You can just turn off reentry heat if you want to go back to the 0.9 reentry scheme.- - - Updated - - - There's definitely a lot of relearning for those of us who don't know much outside of what the old KSP taught us. Its part of the fun, though, like a whole new game.Its initially harder, but at least its pretty logical when you think things through as opposed to the old way.

Well, this certainly makes early career mode extremely challenging. I've got all these sciency parts, but can't use them in my early flights due to the resultant flip 'n burn. Ah well, I'll figure out something I guess. - - - Updated - - - Ok, as I posted in another thread, I can offer some confirmation that popping a Mk16 parachute basically as soon as you reenter the atmosphere works to keep the craft aligned properly and quickly bleed off speed. I brought along a pair of Radial Mounts Parachutes as well, but didn't need them. This is in a capsule>service bay(2xGoo)>Science Jr>Heat Shield configuration. No SAS used, the chute kept the ship aligned to retrograde nicely. It didn't tear off, and fully deployed at 500m as normal.

Ok. I can confirm that you can deal with this via having a single Mk16 nose parachute open at very high altitude, before reentry effects start (or even just as they do) and the parachute will act as a drogue and keep the capsule+service bay+science jr in line. In fact, in this configuration the heat shield is probably superfluous. I brought 2 Radial Mount chutes(just in case) and the Mk16, but didn't actually need the radials.

I was wondering about making heat sinks out of structural steel panels shrunken with tweakscale (once its available) in a tradition heatsink arrangement - fins, that is. Small winglets should work too, and actually have utility while lifting out of the atmosphere

Just for a bit of clarity as to how asteroids work in KSP: They only actually exist when they appear in the Tracking Center, and only continue to exist if you track them, correct? So, these Dres asteroids (even if one was in an orbit around Dres) would cease to exist somewhat randomly if not tracked?

I will be.

Apparently, asteroids lose mass while being mined, so I'd assume not infinite fuel... But a great deal of fuel, very slowly obtained, and a lot of mass to move around.

This. At least, all the streamers I saw before irritation overrode curiosity fell victim to this. Large, long rockets typically with a narrow (read: weak) section in the middle and a total lack of fins, despite everyone in the chat room screaming FINS FINS FINS. Generally, a very large amount of SAS as well. I suspect this is due to habit more than anything else, in .9 fins where totally unnecessary and SAS was pretty damn OP; simply stacking on more would magically stabilize anything. - - - Updated - - - Some people don't. Some already have a grasp of how this works, others like spending hours on the forums/watching videos. Still some more like to just struggle-till-it-works, Dark Souls style. Those are all perfectly valid and awesome ways to go. Me, I'm a struggle-till-it-works+reading forums guy. But there are a LOT of people out there who learn better by being taught. That's not wrong either. They've been largely excluded from KSP thus far, and I'm sure Squad would like to bring more people into the fold. I know a great many people who dropped the game after several catastrophic failures. In most cases, where they didn't understand why they failed, and thus didn't know how to fix it. Tutorials are a good way to go here. At least for The Basics. Education is a great thing. Except... Please, not like the current crop of mobile games, that insist on telling you every single click to make in unskipable tutorials. Gah.

Honestly, a planet picking up satellites differently from game to game is intriguing for me. I think it's awesome.

Roverdude, can you talk a bit about how that works? Will the drill always overheat, or only in low concentrations? Is that something that can be managed, or just what happens when you're drilling in a bad place? What sort of concentrations result in overheating?