What would happen if...

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

What would happen if you had a long truss, that slightly dips into the atmosphere? So the COM is above the atmosphere, but it slightly hits the atmosphere

[HoloYolo]

COM? If your orbit was 70kmx70km, and the truss went down the physics range (22.5km), You might be ripped apart. The drag at 47.5km would rip the truss away and you would lose your orbit.

[Snark]

Are you talking about in real life, or in the game?

If you mean in-game: I don't know how the game is coded... but I would be really surprised if they actually model the idea that "different parts of the ship are experiencing different layers of atmosphere". I would guess that they almost certainly take the simplifying approach of assuming that the entire ship is experiencing whatever atmosphere (or not) the CoM is experiencing. Anything else would add a lot of complexity for almost zero gain, since even very large ships are tiny compared to the size of a planetary atmosphere.

If you mean in real life: it's been done.

[Alshain]

Are you talking about in real life, or in the game?

If you mean in-game: I don't know how the game is coded... but I would be really surprised if they actually model the idea that "different parts of the ship are experiencing different layers of atmosphere". I would guess that they almost certainly take the simplifying approach of assuming that the entire ship is experiencing whatever atmosphere (or not) the CoM is experiencing. Anything else would add a lot of complexity for almost zero gain, since even very large ships are tiny compared to the size of a planetary atmosphere.

If you mean in real life: it's been done.

Well in real life 'atmosphere' is a very fluid term. Earth's atmosphere doesn't come to a hard stop like Kerbin's does at 70km.

[Snark]

Well in real life 'atmosphere' is a very fluid term. Earth's atmosphere doesn't come to a hard stop like Kerbin's does at 70km.

Well, yes, but they've lowered things on tethers far enough to have a very different atmospheric experience, including deorbiting a satellite by lowering it over 30 km on a tether.