Mobile Processing lab question

[Beatz0121]

How do you guys use this and re-enter?

just throw a heat shield on it and you are good to go?

does it spin in reentry?

I am playing hardcore and have no reload enabled.

[Tex_NL]

A small question. Have you tried it in a separate sandbox game yet?

Figuring things like this out is really not as hard as you might think.

[Taki117]

Why return the MPL at all? If it's part of a ship that has a docking port you can send up a drone rescue ship and return that, if it doesn't have a docking port it doesn't really matter since I'm sure your crew will be safe in their command pods, that get decoupled anyway.

[Snark]

What Taki said. There's no real reason to return the MPL itself-- don't even need to dock with it. Just send a rescue ship that parks nearby. The scientists in the MPL go EVA, pause a moment to collect any science from it so they can take the science home with them, then they go to the rescue ship.

[Laie]

First, what the others said: usually it's not necessary to return the lab. but if you insist (or have to, because contractual obligations):

just throw a heat shield on it and you are good to go?

Basically, yes.

The more demanding part is landing: the lab isn't very resilient, you have to touch down much more gently than with a pod. Common solutions involve *lots* of parachutes or retrorockets.

[OSUNightfall]

How do you guys use this and re-enter?

just throw a heat shield on it and you are good to go?

does it spin in reentry?

I am playing hardcore and have no reload enabled.

The important question to ask is why you want to return it. In the old days this could be useful, but now the MPL is a lab that just kind of sits in one place and beams data back to Kerbin occasionally. If there are people trapped in it, just send up a ship and have them EVA over.