You know, I thought I'd do some testing before posting, but I don't know if the results make sense. Like others, I noticed I had to manually keep the pod pointed retrograde during reentry, which is not what I expected having played with DRE, so to sandbox I went to test. I launched into a 100 km orbit and reentered to a about 12km periapsis, I pointed the reentry vehicle retrograde at 70 km and the turned SAS off. With pod, parachute and stock heatshield, the craft soon turned to about 40 degrees off the retrograde, and exploded at 15 km. With pod, parachute and a heatshield with physics turned on, it stayed on the retrograde, used up less than half of the shield and while coming in quite fast over some mountains, performed pretty much as expected. Then, pod, parachute and no heatshield at all, fully expecting this to blow up high in the atmosphere, but no, it survived all way down. What the...