Different types of protection for defined parts. thermal tiles ect ect

[Dooz]

so KSP Is lacking types of protection for spacecraft like thermal tiles ect, for example Concorde used a highly reflective white paint to prevent it from overheating, I Immediately thought this should be a feature In KSP,

it could be a tab in the VAB SPH,

and the types of protection can be.

Default protection

Just the Protection that shipped with the part.

Reflective white paint

Protects the spacecraft from some heat

Thermal tiles

not as good as a heat shield but provides large amounts of protection for a part

this could be good for large craft that need to aerobrake without burning up.

Light cheap paint.

makes the craft lighter but it but makes the craft more vulnerable to heat.

insulation foam.

Makes the part receive less heat from other parts but still gets heat from engines or reentry.

also you can select what parts should have the protection

as for textures this could be theoretically solved a crude way by having another transparent texture mapped over the part texture.

Edited May 27, 2015 by Dooz

[michaelsteele3]

Light cheap paint.

Removes mass from the craft

What?

[Dooz]

What?

I meant lighter I fixed it to make more sense

[Tankman101]

Paint isn't THAT heavy...

[Dooz]

Paint isn't THAT heavy...

NASA stopped painting the external tank on the space shuttle because the paint was to heavy. yes paint can be heavy.

[Tankman101]

Wouldn't that be no paint instead of light paint then? Requiring an entirely separate texture for the tanks.

Also pretty sure black paint isn't magical heat resistant material, or that any engineer in their right mind would cover spacecraft with heavy foam to protect against crashing. Mainly because the solution is to simply not crash. And don't even say "micrometeorite shields" because that's not what we're talking about here.

[KrazyKrl]

The paint on a 747 weighs about 550kg (1200Lb). The max takeoff weight of a 747 is around 440,000kg (970,000Lb), which is only 0.1% of the weight of a fully loaded aircraft.

I was writing a post of how several coatings could be used to assist in the thermal and structural performance of parts; but I was failing at finding a problem that would justify their inclusion. Unless some other feature is included as a substantial problem to be worked around, I doubt that adding coatings and configurable reinforcement of parts would add much to the game.

[sumghai]

Thermal protection comes from slabs of ablative materials, ceramic/metal tiles, or actively cooled structures. A mere coating of paint is essentially worthless for such applications.

As for foam insulation, that's only used to reduce boiloff of cyrogenically-cooled fuel from the tanks, and given the typical impact velocities of falling/discarded parts, foam insulation offers next-to-no additional crash protection.

[Dooz]

I changed somethings around to make much more sense, Now 'black paint' called thermal tiles and added a new type of foam and removed the protection foam. now called Different types of protection for defined Parts