Galinette

Actually, I think the real reason why the shuttle has a non vertical start was not cited here. If you fly vertically, for each layer i of the atmosphere, you cross a certain thickness Ti of atmosphere. If you fly with an angle to vertical theta > 0, then you cross a thickness Ti / cos(theta) Since the cosine function is flat around 0, ( no first order term in the taylor series, 1-theta²/2 ), then having a small angle theta does not change a lot the crossed thickness. It's even almost free for the first degrees. For instance, with theta=5°, you cross a thickness of Ti + 0,38% However, the horizontal speed gained is in sin(theta), linearly growing with theta for small angles. This means that the first degrees give a significant advantage as you are already gaining horizontal velocity. For 5°, you give 8.7% of your acceleration to horizontal velocity. That's a lot. This means, that the optimal start angle is greater than zero. The actual one is complex to find, but apparently, for the shuttle, it was something like 20°. Why isn't this used for rockets? Here I'm less sure, but maybe that oblique flight at rather low velocity is not easy to stabilize for a pure rocket with nearly no lift and control surface. For the space shuttle, it's easy.

Square-cube law works well for gas cylinders. It also works well for insulated liquids (hot water, cryogenic liquefied gas). The container structure (surfacic weight) is governed by pressure in the first case, and temperature difference in the second case. However hydrostatic pressure in large liquid containers require to quit the square-cube law, as larger containers will have more pressure to withstand at the bottom, when facing gravity and/or acceleration.

Hi all, Some answers to your questions below As explained (maybe not clearly enough) in the first post, the burn up altitude is slightly below 90km, maybe 85km but not lower. I know the G-Force meter! What I call the barometer is the logarithmic gauge labelled "Atmosphere" just below the altimeter. The burn up happens while it's at the limit between the black range and the dark blue range. I do not know the actual pressure but it's likely very low. The ship mass is about 30t The heatshield is not much consumed. I will check logs to see what explodes first and give you feedback I suspect that parts are slightly outside the heatshield protected volume are in cause. First, the airbrakes are outside, this was on purpose but probably a bad idea (I can retract them though). But the fairing is maybe the biggest problem. It is a 3.75m fairing built cylindrically up to the top 3.75m heatshield (as an interstage fairing). So there is zero margin. It seems also that the fairing end is not really mechanically connected to the heatshield, as they move independently when the ship wobbles. So I suspect that the fairing explodes and causes a reaction chain. Yes, 5000m/s is not optimal, the window was missed by about 20°, but since I am running several ships in parallel in carrier mode I wanted to try it anyway and I'm ready to loose money on this (no kerbal life is threatened, this is an automatic probe). The speed after Eve encounter is 3200m/s, but it accelerates up to 5000m/s when I reach the outer atmosphere layer. Cheers

Dear all, I am passing close to Eve and would like to loose as much speed as possible using aerobraking. My speed at atmosphere edge is 5000m/s and I can adjust the angle to as low as needed. However, as soon as I pass 90km and the barometer is starting to move to the right, I explode in a few seconds. The speed barely decreases, which means that few energy was dissipated. Isn't this a bug / non realistic behavior? My ship has a heat shield (3.5m) and a cylindrical interstage fairing (3.5m too). It has 8 AIRBRAKES at the back for stability. So I can't do much better. Does the shield need to be much larger than the ship beneath? I know 5000m/s is a lot, and I did not expect to loose all speed in one shot without exploding, but here even if I make a very high pass and loose a couple of m/s, I explode... Thanks in advance!