Dungas Kerman

Guys thanks for the help but I do think this is a bug so I just cheated myself out of this pickle. Turned the max heat off and tripled the gravity. Even then I didn't get a direct capture, I went into orbit first and landed on the second pass. Edit: It was almost definitely a bug. I had a similar ship in Jool orbit so just to check I tried to return to Kerbin with it. 4600m/s entry velocity, 24km periapsis and 320 ablator. Went like a breeze. The heat warning didn't even get into the red and I got captured instantly.

I tried a lot of things. First I tried the normal, staggered entry. I disconnected the two pods so they would arrive at Kerbin SOI some 2 days apart and had the loose uncontrollable one enter at around 20km periapsis. I burnt and exploded before reaching 30km I think. The ablator on that one was at full 800 (the other pod 320 because I also noticed it barely ever takes over 200 off). The next attempt was with the two pods together, and a higher entry altitude. Same result. Then I tried to just ram the entire ship in the atmosphere to hopefully slow down enough before the heat shields needed to take over. As I said before, in this case I can make one pod survive but it will shoot straight through on an escape trajectory. I'm also puzzled because I have made similar returns from the Joolian system and they weren't nearly this bad.

What you are saying makes total sense but even the 21km periapsis doesn't slow me down enough to get captured. I managed to get one pod survive the explosion and cruise through (heat shield maxed out but held for some reason) but then it flew straight through the atmosphere and went back on an escape trajectory. I think I just stuffed up and should cut my losses at this point. Thanks for the suggestions though. I tried that but the gravity is too weak to make a difference at 4,9km/s. It may work if I planned much earlier as you said.

Well I had a lander and a mothership so I have two mk3 pods. One with just a mk3 pod, heat shield and parachute, and the other the same but with an extra lander can underneath the mk3 pod (oh and 4 radial drogue chutes). In my first attempt I tried staggering the reentry so that I had more than 1 hour in between arrivals. That was easy enough since I've done it many times before without problems. The first pod to arrive was hitting Kerbin with a periapsis of about 21km and burned to a crisp before it even got there. I didn't bother trying the second one since I want all my Kerbonauts to survive and it is coming in at a similar speed anyway. Here is a screenshot of what I'm working with. https://ibb.co/nb3PQGF I would expect that lander can to be the weakness in this but oddly enough it's not. Its heatshield overheats and is detached before the lander can explodes so it really looks like it's just the shield that can't take it.

I'm guessing this is a lost cause but figured I might as well ask. I'm having a wee bit of trouble returning to Kerbin from a Laythe mission. My reentry speed is so ludicrously high that I can't manage to have either of my pods survive. After exhausting all my fuel I'm still hitting the atmosphere at around 4900km/s and my heatshields (2,5m with full ablator) only survive for a couple seconds. I tried not decoupling and using my interplanetary tug as an improvised extra heat shield. It helps a little but as it burns up it starts to pitch and then my pods explode immediately since their heat shields can't do their jobs. I've fiddled around a little and with a periapsis of 41km and staging at the correct time I can make 1 pod survive but it won't slow down enough to be captured so it's hurled back into space. Does anyone know if there is some technique I can use to make this infernal reentry? Or should I just accept that it's a lost cause and use my remaining deltaV for another encounter in a few years? Any advice welcome, think of poor Valentina. Thanks

So I'm doing a double mission to Laythe to rescue some Kerbonauts and halfway through I switch ships for a mid-course correction burn and poof, all the delta V readouts and staging parts are gone, and whatever maneuver node I plan it doesn't show how long the burn takes. The stages all show nothing and 0 m/s, and the burn time is in red but shows no timer. I would paste a screenshot into this but I can only insert URL's and I have no idea how to go about doing that. From the resources tab I can still guess how much fuel I have left (bit hard since it counts both the tug and the lander together) but it's seriously annoying and not knowing the burn time reduces my efficiency by a lot. Does anyone know a fix for this? I have no mods installed.

I can't find that setting in the settings menu or the f12 menu, but what Jimmymcgoochie suggested worked out perfectly. If I start gradually and increase to max timewarp in something like 10 seconds my orbit remains stable. It's a bit annoying to have to think about but if it works it works, I aint complaining Surge seems to be correct that this problems occurs with complicated ships. I've started a second Jool mission and the same problem occurred. The ship's size is simply ludicrous so I suspect that's the culprit.

I did not know that. Thanks for the explanation I'll try the EVA construction thingie and if it doesn't work I'll just crash it all and start anew

Hello, I'm trying to dock my Laythe lander with the mothership on a 100km stable orbit around Kerbin. I've tried 6-7 times (different saves, not docking attempts, those are in the 100s by now) and they just will not connect. I have no idea what is going wrong. The alignment is perfect, The ports are correctly positioned and the same size, I've tried different approach speeds but nothing works, I tried backing off 100m and trying again, I tried rebuilding the docking port (interstage node on a fairing), I tried turning on SAS on one vehicle and both vehicles, I tried saving and starting from either launch, I tried crashing the lander and launching another, Neither vessel was previously docked to anything, ... The most infuriating thing is that when I clicked through the docking port options I saw there was an "undock" option, which is weird because it's not docked to anything but ok. When I clicked it the upper part of the docking port fell off, bounced of my spaceship and then DOCKED ITSELF TO THE LANDER PORT. Anyone got any ideas? I'm all out.

Hey thanks for your reply! I just clicked the green arrow thing on the top right to go at max timewarp. The phase angle for Jool was quite a ways off and those planets move damn slow so I maxed it out. I have no mods installed (wouldn't even know where to find them tbh), but I do have the breaking ground and making history dlcs.

So I launched a Jool misison with the goal of landing on Laythe for the first time. I park in a 105km orbit, dock the mothership and lander, so far so good. I'm not in an ideal spot to launch so I timewarp to the Jool transfer window, but halfway through the warp it stops because I have entered Kerbin's atmosphere. I'm confused but ok, maybe I made a little mistake somewhere. I quickload to the start of the warp and raise my orbit to 130km just to be safe. I double check that my RCS is off and all my engines are manually shut down. OK good to go for timewarp. For extra safety I stop the warp halfway to check my orbital height and what do you know, my orbit has changed from a stable 130 to 85km periapsis and 160km or so apo. I did nothing, and there is no atmospheric drag or anything that could have influenced my orbit. Is this a bug or am I missing something?