Aero and Thermo in 1.0.X

[rotisserie919]

Observation:

I've noticed that KSP has payload fairings. This is great though it seems that adding one causes the Center of Lift to shift out of position, deep towards the fairing on top of the rocket where it's not needed. This imbalances the ship needlessly seeing as fairings dont make appreciable lift so much as it affect the magnitude of drag(like a nose cone).

Recommendation:

Revisit the physics settings for the fairings so that it mainly affects drag reduction (like in real life) instead of acting like an overgrown wing.

[RailgunSpoon]

Observation:

I've noticed that KSP has payload fairings. This is great though it seems that adding one causes the Center of Lift to shift out of position, deep towards the fairing on top of the rocket where it's not needed. This imbalances the ship needlessly seeing as fairings dont make appreciable lift so much as it affect the magnitude of drag(like a nose cone).

Recommendation:

Revisit the physics settings for the fairings so that it mainly affects drag reduction (like in real life) instead of acting like an overgrown wing.

Center of lift and center of drag are the same in KSP. Add fins to the base of your launch vehicle to keep it flying straight and true o7

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I've been playing since 0.16 when the terminal velocity of any object at sea level was ~160m/s, so I'll start by saying that I love how far it's come.

However, I think the re-entry heating behaves very strangely at high altitudes. While I was trying to use Eve to aerobrake, I found it near impossible not to burn up, even in the 60km altitude range. The reduction in speed I was seeing was almost nothing, and yet I was already seeing huge Visual FX and parts were beginning to explode. I realize that Eve's atm is ~4x denser than Kerbin's at sea level. It just seems like shock-heating and drag are not using the same parameters.

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Another issue I encountered several weeks ago:

I, for the fun of it, made a craft meant to go very close to the sun. I gave it tons of radiators to keep it from asploding, but when I would go into time-warp, it would sometimes randomly asplode but it was thermodynamically stable at normal time.

[MAFman]

I've found that no matter how fast I reenter, my craft never experiences issues with heat - a little unrealistic, if you ask me. I wish the difficulty slider went to something like 1000% for heat. Heatshields are way too OP - coming back from the Mun at 3 km/s only burns like 5 ablator units. Also, reentry should cause the texture on the heatshield to darken as if it's burning - hint hint devs?

[Tweak]

I feel like the aerodynamic fairings are a bit OP. I made an Eve rover delivery system that consisted of a short 2.5m tank with a 2.5m heatshield under it, the rover on top of the fuel tank surrounded by a fairing. Upon entry the plan was to fly heat shield first, but on a few entry's the craft flipped just as I was getting into the really thick stuff. It was decelerating very nicely flying heat shield first, but now that it was inverted it accelerated to its doom.