So I decided to make an engine cluster with SpaceY parts.

[SciMan]

Eve's problematic, but don't even think about grazing the atmosphere of Jool if your ship doesn't have a (massive) heatshield, or has anything important that's radially attached that can't be heatshielded.

If you do, even with a Pe of 199,500m, your ship gets its face (and everything else) melted off, something like this:

(If image doesn't load, it's the Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark face melting scene).

Needless to say, Jool's not as friendly as it used to be.

Good thing Orion drives are both high thrust and (relatively) high ISP, so it doesn't matter much for anything that I'd be putting around Jool orbit (year-long transits are too long for my patience, so I seek high-power propulsion systems).

Orion drives may have low ISP for a torch drive, but they are far more efficient than any non-torch drive that can put out the required acceleration and delta-v.

[rant]

I'm slightly bitter about this because it's so illogical and un-physical.

They might as well have increased Jool's surface radius by 200km, for all the difference it makes to PRACTICAL rockets built with stock parts.

Hopefully 1.1 fixes it.

Isolating the atmospheric heating values on a per-planet basis would solve the problem very elegantly.

I understand that simple concepts like that can be devilishly hard to implement in code, but this one is pretty important to solve.

I want to be able to aerobrake and/or aerocapture at Jool again. Not aerobake. Certainly not aerobreak.

[/rant]

Edited September 25, 2015 by SciMan