Tweaks for a challenging re-entry effect

[DJK]

So.. since at the moment command pods manage heat more efficiently than heat shields (they hit lower peak temperatures & it takes longer for them to heat up to said temperatures) and since there are some people around that want a more challenging re-entry & a real purpose for heat shields, but never fiddled with the physics values, i figured this might help.

After tweaking some stuff.. i managed to make re-entry a bit more of a challenge. Following the settings below, a single command pod (without heat shield) will be able to re-enter from LKO using a proper re-entry trajectory - but just barely. Do it wrong and your kerbals will be pretty much toasted.

Heat shields work roughly as in default 1.0.2 - meaning that a LKO re-entry will use up ~1/3 of the ablator. Doing a Mun re-entry will use up ~2/3 of the ablator - again, this depends on your re-entry trajectory.

With the following settings, my SSTO tests did not burn up during ascent or re-entry. They do heat up pretty good though, but that is to be expected since there is no dedicated heat shielding for space planes.

I should also mention that parts with low maximum temperature will be glowing red hot (and possibly explode) during ascent if you go too fast in the lower atmosphere. No problem if you follow a proper gravity turn with a sensible speed to altitude ratio.

Disclaimer: Everything i did was by my own initiative & to suit my own liking & designs. All tests were done using 120% re-entry setting & generic ship designs - nothing fancy. These settings might not work for you, but at least give you some insight of how to tweak re-entry thermal effects. I take no responsibility of whatever happens during tweaking and/or using these settings.

Now, what i did was the following:

1. Set re-entry thermal effects in the options to 120%

2. In the "Physics.cfg" file, located in the main "...\Kerbal Space Program" directory, i changed the "convectionVelocityExponent" value from 3 to 3.35 - Note that this number is extremely sensitive. This basically means that the more speed you have during atmospheric re-entry, the more heat is transferred to the ship by convection.

3. At this point the default heat shields are extremely useless, so i had to balance them out. To do so, i changed the "hsp" value of the ablator resource definition from 100 to 1000. The resource file is located in "...\Kerbal Space Program\GameData\Squad\Resources" directory and it is named "ResourcesGeneric.cfg"

Aaaand thats about it. Feel free to expand or correct anything if needed. And ff you do decide to apply these changes, make sure you backup the files and quicksave before doing any changes. Let me know how it works for you if you've tried.

Cheers,

DJK

Edited May 3, 2015 by DJK