Re-entry heat damage

[Crusher48]

Re-entry damage seems like a significant change in the game that might ruin it for some players. After all, many rockets may be relying on the fact that they would not be blown up when re-entering an atmosphere despite the fact that that would totally happen in real life. However, a common counter-argument is that many people are expecting re-entry damage and are confused when it does not happen. There are 3 approaches to go about with re-entry heat:

No damage: current method. allows crazy kerbal contraptions for landing, but is very unrealistic.

Big damage: the most realistic method. Anything not behind a heatshield would get destroyed on re-entry fairly easily. However, this would cause a significant difficulty spike.

Some damage: in my opinion, the best method. landing/aerobraking with a heat shield is recommended, but not required: a lander on a shallow trajectory without a heatshield will suffer quite high amounts of heat for a few tense minutes, but in the end has a good chance to escape with most of the important parts intact. Also what I seem to experience using standard settings in DRE.

[GreenWolf]

A "realistic" implementation of reentry heating (using real-world values for calculating heating) would already be mild, since orbital velocity in LKO is a quarter of Earth's. (This is also why default DRE is the way you describe.)

Also, "it would ruin people's playstyles/ships." is not a valid argument, in my opinion, since 1.0 is probably going to be a save-breaking update anyways.

[tseitsei]

Re-entry damage seems like a significant change in the game that might ruin it for some players. After all, many rockets may be relying on the fact that they would not be blown up when re-entering an atmosphere despite the fact that that would totally happen in real life. However, a common counter-argument is that many people are expecting re-entry damage and are confused when it does not happen. There are 3 approaches to go about with re-entry heat:

No damage: current method. allows crazy kerbal contraptions for landing, but is very unrealistic.

Big damage: the most realistic method. Anything not behind a heatshield would get destroyed on re-entry fairly easily. However, this would cause a significant difficulty spike.

Some damage: in my opinion, the best method. landing/aerobraking with a heat shield is recommended, but not required: a lander on a shallow trajectory without a heatshield will suffer quite high amounts of heat for a few tense minutes, but in the end has a good chance to escape with most of the important parts intact. Also what I seem to experience using standard settings in DRE.

Best method would be difficulty settings.

Easy=no re-entry effects

Normal=some re-entry effects but quite easily manageable still

Hard=most realistic re-entry effects that actually need extensive planning to get along with

[Eric S]

It really depends. The last time I heard the devs say anything official about how they were handling it was over a year ago. At that time, they weren't planning on having dedicated heat shield parts, at which point I'd probably go for moderate, maybe even a little lighter.

But really, the best option is to leave it up to the player. Maxmaps has already said it will be optional, at least, and personally, I'd want a checkbox and a slider (checkbox is optional if the reentry heat code is smart enough to simply not run if the slider is turned all the way down) with the slider going from none or practically none all the way up to full DRE or maybe a bit beyond.

[lajoswinkler]

I'm inclined towards the hardcore damage so I'd say medium-hardcore.

[NWM]

At first: DRE is realistic. The re-entry to Kerbin is possible due to miniature size of the Kerbal world. The Kerbin's reentry speed is only ~2,4km/s in contradistinction of Earth's 7km/s. Using heat shield at Eve is inevitable for falling, but it is possible to glide off the overheating (using lifting areas) - as it is possible even at Earth.

do you mean increased heat damage as hardcore?

[klgraham1013]

I chose "Hardcore" re-entry damage since any difficulty involved has been highly exaggerated, much the same as life support.

For a more eloquent explanation:

A "realistic" implementation of reentry heating (using real-world values for calculating heating) would already be mild, since orbital velocity in LKO is a quarter of Earth's. (This is also why default DRE is the way you describe.)

[Fel]

I chose "Hardcore" re-entry damage since any difficulty involved has been highly exaggerated, much the same as life support.

For a more eloquent explanation:

Which is pretty much always the case. Besides, making something "harder" (a.k.a. feature incomplete) is generally more difficult than making something easier (a.k.a. my mod simply gives all parts a threshhold temperature of 1000000000 effectively removing all re-entry damage)

[Guest]

How do you planning to hit 3 degree wide reentry corridor without any mods?

To give players methods to avoid "hardcore" reentry damage, SQUAD needs to give players a big set of analysis and planning tools (not gonna happen) AND an automation tools (not gonna happen either).

If I understand SQUAD's intentions right, they gonna continue to push a play-style like tried; { crashed; reloaded; retried; }:repeat; without any R&D tools available.

Reentry heat will only add more heat to the system

Edited April 1, 2015 by Guest

[GreenWolf]

How do you planning to hit 3 degree wide reentry corridor without any mods?

To give players methods to avoid "hardcore" reentry damage, SQUAD needs to give players a big set of analysis and planning tools (not gonna happen) AND an automation tools (not gonna happen either).

If I understand SQUAD's intentions right, they gonna continue to push a play-style like tried; { crashed; reloaded; retried; }:repeat; without any R&D tools available.

Reentry heat will only add more heat to the system

You don't need a three degree wide corridor, if the heating system is anything like DRE. In real life, when you're returning at eight kilometers per second or more, yeah, your margins are pretty tight. But when you're coming back at only two kilometers per second, like in KSP, you really don't have to worry that much. In my experience with DRE, you have to actively try to burn up your ship on reentry from LKO.

[Guest]

You don't need a three degree wide corridor, if the heating system is anything like DRE. In real life, when you're returning at eight kilometers per second or more, yeah, your margins are pretty tight. But when you're coming back at only two kilometers per second, like in KSP, you really don't have to worry that much. In my experience with DRE, you have to actively try to burn up your ship on reentry from LKO.

Some players use RSS. Not me - I'm don't want to restart playthrough, and I got to know about RSS way too late. And some players return from the Mun and beyond Apollo style - without intermediate LKO. I did it early in the game. That means pretty tight reentry corridors with realistic reentry.

Now, I have luxury of using the NFT(P,E,C,S), so I can dock the interplanetary ship on LKO and use shuttle or capsule to ride down, but it's "Future style" playthrough, and not everyone accepts it.

As I understand, after 1.0 everyone will have to restart their career, so it's my chance to start using RSS.

But I afraid, that what I will have to do is to remove mods, not install new ones, at least if current trend of memory issues persists, or even get worse. I got 12 GB RAM and 64bit W7, but...

[tater]

With stock kerbin and DRE, even a direct munar reentry requires work to burn up your craft. If you send your craft from the moon on the shortest possible path to kerbin surface? You'd probably impact before burning up. I haven't had any issues reentering with DRE in 6.4X Kerbin, frankly. Not once so far… Not saying stock will be anything like DRE, but it's really not a big deal.

[Superfluous J]

How do you planning to hit 3 degree wide reentry corridor without any mods?

You don't need a three degree wide corridor... when you're coming back at only two kilometers per second, like in KSP

Some players use RSS.

You can't do something "without mods" with a mod installed.

[longbyte1]

Why are we bringing up old topics back from the dead? Squad is due to implement a moderate degree of re-entry damage by 1.0. Anything more than that, [thread=54954]Deadly Reentry[/thread].

[Crusher48]

And if you do have problems with re-entering, remember squad is going to implement heat shields as well.

[NathanKell]

Oh? Where was that said?