PSA: Eve (re)entry is impossible - CONFIRMED.

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

Can somebody explain to me why we have two threads for the same issue?

[KerikBalm]

"In my head, the total amount of energy should be the same. So when you spend more time in higher layers, you brake the same amount, but spread out over a longer period of time. This gives the ship more time to radiate the heat and should lead to safer reentry.
As mentioned by people, this is wrong. But why???

How can I bleed off more speed in the lower atmosphere with less heating?"

This is also a bit confusing to me.
I wonder about a few things, particularly since they just overhauled the atmosphere and temperatures and such... its not a constant exponential decay like you implied: "completely uniform with the pressure following an exponential function"

Do planets have a thermosphere? [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosphere[/url]
"The thermosphere is the layer of the Earth's atmosphere directly above the mesosphere and directly below the exosphere. ... Thermospheric temperatures increase with altitude due to absorption of highly energetic solar radiation. Temperatures are highly dependent on solar activity, and can rise to 2,000 °C ... The highly diluted gas in this layer can reach 2,500 °C (4,530 °F) during the day. Even though the temperature is so high, one would not feel warm in the thermosphere, because it is so near vacuum that there is not enough contact with the few atoms of gas to transfer much heat. A normal thermometer would be significantly below 0 °C (32 °F), because the energy lost by thermal radiation would exceed the energy acquired from the atmospheric gas by direct contact"

While being stationary in a thermosphere would have you cool more due to thermal radiation, because even though the gas is really hot... it is really really really thin.
But if you plow through it at multiple km/s, you encounter much more of these hot gas particles than if you were stationary.
Does it make a difference if you plow through hot gas or denser but cooler gas? does this matter in KSP?

In KSP does the coefficient of lift change based on pressure/density, or only mach? If only mach, KSP does model that mach 1 changes with altitude, I think/
2,000 m/s is a higher mach high in the atmosphere than low in the atmosphere... just as in real life the speed of sound at sea level is much faster than at 100km.
At lower machs, air has time to "get out of the way" and you don't get compression heating, while heat transfer to the atmosphere is higher.
After all... subsonic planes don't have problems with drag causing heating. Standing in front of a fan doesn't heat you up.
Its not air friction, its air compression (the opposite of how adiabatically expanding gas cools).

I'm not entirely sure, but I wonder if its one or both of the above... your mach number being higher at high altitude than the same velocity at low altitude, or the presence (?) of a thermosphere... or something else.

I just know that slapping a bunch of heat shields on my craft worked.

[Elthy]

Is it also true in real life that a to shallow reentry is bad? I know you can have problems when you leave the atmosphere again due to not slowing down enough but i thought staying as high as possible as long as possible was important, e.g. for the spaceshuttle.

[diomedea]

As somebody correctly noted, there was already another thread about this very subject ([URL="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/139815"]here[/URL]) before this one started. And, as somebody correctly noted, the title of this one is misleading (instead of confirmed, the truth is it was proven false). Can see no better fate than closure for this.