Parachute beats heat shield?

[goduranus]

I am playing on hard difficulty, it seems heat shields are never needed, because opening the parachute at high altitude always slows you down enough before the parachute can burn up?

[Brotoro]

The thought of opening parachutes in the flames of reentry just makes me cringe.

[Kerbart]

Yeah, that's a balancing bug (sssshh!! mentioning bugs makes you a whiner!). As Brotoro says, you really shouldn't be deploying chutes before re-entry heat. Just wait until the heat is gone and you have a reasonable speed (remember 500m/s is still around mach 2, depending on the air pressure) before deploying them.

Of course you can use the chutes to bypass re-entry heating. You can also use Hyper-edit to bring your ship to the surface. Whether that's fun or not is up to yourself.