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Okay, so as I mentioned in the "What Did You Do In KSP Today" thread, I started a new career recently after the 1.1 patch dropped. However, I find myself in a bit of a conundrum, and I hope I can get some advice from other experienced players. So, like you do in a new career, I took some contracts to rescue stranded Kerbals in Low Kerbin Orbit, both for the funds and to build my roster. I designed a small craft big enough for a pilot and two passengers, sent up Jeb to rescue one, and he brought the stranded Kerbal back with no trouble. Craft worked great. So I got two more contracts for rescuing Kerbals, both also in LKO. I sent up the same craft with Valentina at the helm this time, because Jeb already had one star in his piloting skill and I felt that Val could use the experience, and since I knew the craft was solid, I figured this was an easy run. So Val went up and performed two separate rendezvous in the same flight, successfully getting Nana and Katly onboard. Yay! Okay, time to return to the surface. ... and that is where things got complicated. You see, the craft is built with low-tech parts and no heat shielding. Now, if it can keep its engine pointed retrograde during the descent, it will be fine. The engine can take the heat, and if it starts overheating I can burn fuel to transfer heat outside and slow down further at the same time. But my last flight had two advantages over this one: Jeb had one star and could keep the craft pointed retrograde through SAS, and since it only made one rendezvous it had more fuel left to burn during descent. While Val can keep a craft relatively steady, she cannot keep it pointed retrograde, introducing the possibility that incidental forces might push it into an unrecoverable turn (which leads to rapid and fatal overheating at the airspeeds involved) given the relatively weak electric torque forces provided by the command capsule. While I had to burn some fuel on the descent previously to help give the pilot more ability to fight those incidental forces and slow the craft at the same time, I have much less of it now, not enough to burn willy-nilly and finding just the right moment to light the engines and with just what amount of throttle has been troubling to me. Here is a picture of my craft. It has two radial drogue chutes, two radial regular chutes, and one nosecone chute, set in stages to activate the drogues then the other chutes. Can anyone advise me about how best to deal with this?