Will there be part heatshielding for spaceplanes?

[Columbia]

Hello, forums!

Recently, I was watching the Day 5 preview for 1.0 which was previewing re-entry heat and aerodynamics.. and I was a bit worried that designs will be obsolete because of it.

Will there be any way that spaceplanes and the like that are reentering the atmosphere can be protected from the re-entry heat somehow? It's a bit of a bummer to have spaceplanes be destroyed and be redesigned all over again in 1.0.

Also, is there a certain speed limit until damage starts, or will it always happen?

Thanks in advance!

[Hcube]

I think that there are multiple threads for this already. Here's one !

The general answer/supposition is that there will be no special shielding/tiles, but spaceplane parts will probably be tough enough to withstand a reasonable re-entry

[Capt Snuggler]

This could be solved with a tweakable heat tiles option for wings and fuselages. the tiles would be applied on a per part basis and represented by a texture. if the texture is on the wrong side of the wing, click the reverse option.

heat tiles [yes/no]

reverse [yes/no]

then they would look better as well.

[Whirligig Girl]

I'm not sure how the new ablation system works, but wperhaps it could be expanded upon in such a way that some parts have ablation textures, even if they aren't really ablating. They might have more than one, so if a space shuttle's bottom is exposed, only the bottom would get burn marks and the top would be fine.

Or if we want a black heatshield tiling (I certainly do), but also want to keep the symetry of the Mk2 and Mk3 parts, you could have a system where certain textures are applied to a fuselage or wing depending on its orientation in the editor, with some tool for fine-tuning specific parts.

Or, heck, maybe that neat idea of a spray-on ablative shield painting would be cool.

[Guest]

Spaceplane parts don't need heat-shielding, players need to learn how to re-enter a spaceplane. Also, seriously, what exactly constitutes a "spaceplane part"? Batteries are "spaceplane parts", fcs.

[Red Iron Crown]

Spaceplanes are really popular with much of KSP's playerbase, somehow I doubt that the next version will make reentry from space with one impossible. It might get more difficult or less forgiving, though.

[Whirligig Girl]

Another thought, asteroids should totally be ablative. In fact, after an entry, the scientific value should diminish.