Zeo

As a video game, KSP is definitely designed for casuals. The game is, on purpose, kept so shallow and simple that even 10y old kids can easily play and have fun in it. KSP is not a hardcore space simulator. Stock also already has autopilot features; SAS, aka space unicorns inside your ship farting and providing torque. There is no challenge whatsoever in flying manually in KSP. In stock, there is hardly any challenge in designing ships either, just add more boosters, struts and space unicorns. "I'm a hardcore gamer, I play KSP." said noone ever, all aspects of the game are extremely dumbed down by default.

Short list of things that are "cheating": - Stock aero. - Stock heating. - Stock electricity. - Stock reaction wheels. - Stock engines. - Stock fuels. - Stock payload fractions. - Stock ... MJ? No, not really.

I'd just increase physics warp to someverybignumber. I want to finish this burn before the end of summer.

If you like classic RPGs, how about Lords of Xulima? It is not very well known but definitely worth checking out.

At least in my game there is a visual plasma trail when air gets hot upon entering atmosphere. It doesn't look very realistic at the moment but it is there. Add a tiny bit of imagination to fill the gaps and you even get com blackouts while landing just like in real life (jeb is too cool for tdrss!). I don't understand what you mean by 9km/s, referring to Mach ~25 re-entry speeds in real life perhaps? Afaik there's more factors than just orbital velocity when determing how much particular gas ionizes during re-entry, who knows what the air in Kerbin is made off? I think the important thing is, like I said, that things in KSP aren't scaled to match real world exactly. There is more re-entry heat compared to Earth for gameplay reasons, Squad even turned the whole system into a difficulty setting. That is why we need heatshields even though we are moving at barely hypersonic velocities when entering tiny Kerbin.

You want the rocket to be top heavy. Like a dart. As you burn fuel your CoM moves towards the bottom and the rocket becomes less stable. Transfer fuel from the bottom to the top to maintain stability. Scott Manley made a very helpful video about this recently.

Didn't rain pretty much disintegrate those tiles and the shuttle could only fly when it was clear? Damn we need weather simulation in KSP!

Hello! Re-entry heating actually happens mostly because of pressure, not friction. Because of the very high velocity when entering atmosphere, the air in front of the ship gets compressed so much that it turns to super-heated plasma (high pressure -> high heat). Blunt shaped ships (surprise high friction!) work so well because the air can't escape from the front fast enough and it pushes this hot stuff away from the ship. Similarly, ablative heatshields block the heat by expelling gases and pushing the hot stuff away, no friction. I'm sure someone with proper education can explain this a whole lot better than me. So yeah you can totally cook through the heatshield while it still has protective material left. Go too fast and the shield can't keep up. Or go too slow and you won't get enough heat for the reactions in the shield to happen and it becomes useless and your ship blows up (not in ksp thankfully). In KSP universe things are of course scaled differently and work differently. tl;dr It is pressure, not drag!