One way stock 1.0 heat shielding is a bit unfair versus old DRE mod's heat sheilding.

[Arran]

How do you get the thermometers to show heatwarning? or is that a separate part from the science thermometers?

Its the Heatwarning mod, not certain if the creator of it has released it yet.

It prolly will show up on the mods page soon

[Blue_J]

So, I manually changed the PhysicsSignificance flag for all the heatshield parts as mentioned earlier in the thread, and as mentioned, that seemed to work great. (I actually read this thread before I fired up 1.0 for the first time, so I didn't get any disheartening deaths.) Moreover, in order to bring a science bay back underneath your pod, I've had pretty good luck with draining the monopropellant from the MkI command pod and adding a second heat shield under the science pod. As long as you've tweaked the PhysicsSignificance flag so that heatshields have mass again, that should be enough to ensure that your center of mass is decidedly inside the science bay. As long as you use SAS to get the re-entry correct as you start to come in, it should actually be pretty stable.

(Yes, adding extra ballast kind of sucks, and you really should be draining the monoprop already, but still, those are two simple things that it's easy to overlook.)

[Kerano]

+1 for the reentry orientation needing a fix. I've tried all sorts of different craft designs over several hours of playing, and all from the lightest to the most bottom-heavy always struggle desperately to flip around in the 25-30 km region. Adding more torque doesn't help much. Only solution I've found is to stack up parachutes on the narrow end and deploy them high in the atmosphere, since chutes are apparently impervious to heat effects unlike everything else in the game.

[X-SR71]

+1 for parachutes exploiting on high atmosphere.

I simply stage before entering atmosphere and let them deploy at default. They usually deploy a little after the ship starts burning up. After the scary 20G spike everything goes smooth. Actually, I haven't even used heat shields like that.

[Tinyboss]

Capsules in RL purposely have an offset CG so that the capsule flies with an angle of attack greater than zero. Due to body lift, a capsule can steer aerodynamically. If you roll the capsule, you can steer right, left, more shallow, or more steep.

How do you get two dimensions of output (right/left, shallow/steep) out of one dimension of control input (roll)? Genuinely curious.

[smjjames]

Now that the official word is that Squad has accepted that it is in fact wrong and a bug that massless heat shields act like "wind anchors" and try to rotate you around nose first, and that they plan to make heat shields actually have proper mass, I feel better about applying the modulemanager fix for now.

Source? Not that I don't believe you.

[Jovus]

How do you get two dimensions of output (right/left, shallow/steep) out of one dimension of control input (roll)? Genuinely curious.

The simple answer is that rolling changes the exact position of the CoM offset, which changes the angle of the pod.

The more complicated answer is that roll is your +- theta coordinate, which when you transform back into Cartesian coordinates, contains both an X and a Y term.

[Tinyboss]

The simple answer is that rolling changes the exact position of the CoM offset, which changes the angle of the pod.

The more complicated answer is that roll is your +- theta coordinate, which when you transform back into Cartesian coordinates, contains both an X and a Y term.

Ahh, so you can't control right/left and shallow/steep independently. That makes sense.

[r_rolo1]

Well, this whole issue of the capsules turning around nose first already happened once in KSP history, and for the same reasons: for one reason or another the (real ) center of drag of the capsules gets in the front of the ( real ) center of mass ( in the first time it happened in KSP , it was because they had made the capsules on propose to be less draggy than the rest of the rocket parts, to stabilize launches. This time it was because a mandatory (sort of) adding a massless very draggy part below the capsules made this happen ). Anyone that dabbles with planes in this game ( or any other that has any kind of minimally realistic atmo ) knows that this is a very unstable proposition and will get your ship flipped as soon as you get too much out of prograde/retrograde alignment ...

Now , if you have multi parts payloads, you can actually make that the center of drag goes to it's natural place by juggling parts around. But as we can't change the CoM of individual parts, this becomes quite a issue ...

[Jarin]

Source? Not that I don't believe you.

Post from RoverDude that it was his mistake and is already in for a fix in the next update. Not sure if that's going to be a hotfix or 1.1 though.

[EtherDragon]

I bet that kind of thing will be a hotfix - 1.1 is to introduce new features (or add significantly to existing features). The industry generally doesn't do a 1.x without a lot of stuff to put in. A 1.0.x, however that would be a maintenance patch, I would expect it pretty soon, actually! I bet these guys slept for 24 hours strait to get caught up on some sleep dep (let the Tequila settle) and to let version 1.0 steep for a bit to get a batch of feedback for them to sift through.

I started a career play on my channel, and found that you really don't need to bother with the heat-shield at all if you're just doing orbital stuff with the command pod. They survive reentry just fine.

AND you can get around the whole issue of trying to bring your Science Jr and Goo Canisters back in one piece by unlocking EVAs. The unlock costs 75k (normal difficulty) and you get a ton of science by doing EVAs around Kerbin while in Orbit. EVA to the Science Jr. and you Goo Cans and pick up the experiments. Stow them all in the command pod - decouple all the useless weight, and voila - reentry with the command pod and a single chute - easy peasy.

Edited April 28, 2015 by EtherDragon

[michaelsteele3]

Yeah, the whole point of capsules is that they are stable with the shield down, 1.0 requires constant control input. How could testers not see this?

In real life, letting go of the controls during re-entry is suicide.

This game is meant for realism.

For a fix, why don't you use RCS?

[tater]

In real life, letting go of the controls during re-entry is suicide.

This game is meant for realism.

For a fix, why don't you use RCS?

Not true at all.

While attitude correction was possible (even briefly used) there was not the constant input required in KSP right now to maintain attitude, just small corrections. Another method used was a rolling reentry (spinning the capsule around the long axis, which was coincident with the velocity vector). This also doesn't work with the broken KSP heat shield, all it does is precess the offset.

The US capsules, and Soyuz were all capable of ballistic reentry (vehicle shape is ~axissymmetric with respect to the velocity vector). Apollo could have the CM offset from the axis of symmetry, so that the craft would enter slightly tilted. Roll (RCS)would then point the tilt such that a maneuvering (via lifting) reentry was possible.

A dumb, ballistic trajectory should be possible. Note that this is confirmed to be a bug (by Roverdude, who made the shields), so I don't know what you are arguing about.

[Columbia]

Well, the airbrakes worked really well for me during reentry - slowed me down a lot.

[smjjames]

I decided to try doing a reentry using an engine and a bunch of tanks in front actually makes for a pretty good heatshield. I started from an orbit at 300km, made the periapsis to 30km and descended. Made it through the fire, only casualties were the communitrons (an internal or shielded antenna would be great, I tried to stick them in the utility bay and it couldn't extend in there). The capsule did get pretty hot near the end, 700 something kelvin and I wasn't sure whether the science bays would survive or not, but got right through it.