Dropping a Rover to Eve - Heatshield Question

[AcidSludge]

So, I'm preparing a Rover drop to Eve, and I'm unsure about the heat mechanics at the moment.

Until now I strapped a heat shield onto my builds, made sure that everything above it is decently covered, and it worked. But I never strapped more than one shield to my builds, so here are the screenshots, and my question is:

Will it work, maybe? Will any of the heat "slip" through the cracks between the shields?

Note: The struts at the rover itself messed up while importing through subassemblies, work in progress

edit: one more screen

Edited May 13, 2015 by AcidSludge

[Hydrazine_Soup]

How do you even carry that to orbit? lol

And I dont even think It will have issues even without shields, heck even no chutes, you could do a few shallow dips in the atmosphere before doing the final descent to slow it down.

[magnemoe]

How do you even carry that to orbit? lol

And I dont even think It will have issues even without shields, heck even no chutes, you could do a few shallow dips in the atmosphere before doing the final descent to slow it down.

The small octagonal struts, solar panels, battery and parachutes looks like the most vulnerable parts. not done any Eve landing yet but guess they are worse than kerbin.

Would recomend 3.75 meter shields then you should be able to get away with two. One problem for you would be stability, good chance this will flip over on reentry. having the transfer stage atatched will probably help for stability.

[Geschosskopf]

You know, the airbrakes we now have are WONDERFUL for minimizing reentry heat. Quite often, at least on Kerbin and Laythe, they keep you from getting any reentry flaming at all. They'd probably work even better on Eve due to the thicker air having them make more drag. So I recommend putting a ring of airbrakes radially attached around the top of the lander, points down. Open them when you do your deorbit burn and leave them open all the way down.

Of course, this will steepen your descent so if you're trying to land on a specific spot on the ground, you'll have to change where you are relative to that when you do the deorbit burn. F5, give it a try, F9, adjust where you burn, repeat until you get what you want.

[AcidSludge]

How do you even carry that to orbit? lol

Like this:

And once you're up there... planned 2 starts, one for the rover itself, and one for the transfer ship, docking, zoom to Eve, drop, ???, profit!

Okay, that whole boltsalad survived drops from 85km and 100km orbits onto Kerbin, not even one burn mark on anything, and the 4x Mk12-R and the 4x Mk2-R Chutes slowed the 2,7t-Rover (without the shields, of course) to around 5m/s at sea level, which is, I assume, more than suitable for Eve.

Had no fliparounds before and after seperation from the heatshields, the rover itself is freaking carefully balanced, even if it doesn't look like that on the first glance

AH, airbrakes, I always forget about those, will consider these for my next rover build.

Okay, seems it could work, heading off to Eve tomorrow, then

[KatzOhki]

Another approach would be to fit it inside a fairing with the heatshield on bottom and dump it from orbit that way. Did that on one rover at Duna and worked pretty well.

[AcidSludge]

It worked - kind of.

Seperation at lowest possible orbit, veeeery shallow entry into Eve's soup, and the heat leaked through, the hell leaked through. It was on the verge to exploding - to specify - all of it. Literally moments before I would've said "okay, nope, let's try again" the worst of the reentry heat was overcome and all started to cool off.

Conclusion: somehow managable, but not practicable, I'll try the "Rover inside a faring"-approach next time.

http://imgur.com/a/sfZeE

Funny thing: 2,1km away from my landing site I found remains of the "Transfer/Decending into Eve"-Vehicle.

[KatzOhki]

I was thinking it wouldn't really work that way because I think the heatshields only occlude (shield) parts that are placed in-line with them. It's not 100% physics accurate the way they have it, but the calculations are easier on your PC. I think besides fairing you could also try a cargo bay.

[Randazzo]

The "heat capsule" idea is how I put my surface probe on Eve in One point Oh. Granted it wasn't a rover, but the concept should be the same.

I used the 2.5m heatshield and built the probe around 1.25m parts, then put a fairing around it and put the whole mess atop a satellite. Once in orbit I set up a suborbital flight path, jettisoned the probe capsule, then took the satellite back up into orbit.

Worked like a charm. Just remember that you're going to spend a looong time floating down if you open your parachutes too high (unless you really open them too high.. then I imagine the trip will be much shorter). heh