Gas Giant Atmospheres - Limit Bug?

[MaxL_1023]

Hello Everyone,

I just tried to skim the upper atmosphere of Neptune from a somewhat eccentric orbit (700km x 1.25M km). I figured with an atmosphere height of 700km I would be safe with a Perapsis of 691km. Instead, my probe instantly exploded. Literally - it blew up at 699,992m. Should the atmospheres really be set up as a brick wall? Granted I was traveling at 22 km/s (3 times orbital speed for earth) but still - 8 meters??

Is there some kind of rounding taking place right at 700km? I figured there would be a curve function with a root at the atmosphere edge, do you guys instead decay the exponential from 0 ASL and then chop off whatever is left?

It seems strange to me - using Neptunes scale height of ~20km, the atmospheric pressure at 691km would be 10^-15 times the ASL pressure (34.55 factors of E is about 15 factors of 10). Even with a 3000 atmosphere surface pressure (which is also wierd - isn't the surface considered the 10 bar level for diameter purposes?), you would have only 3.33*10^-11 atmospheres at that height. That would be the equivalent of Earth at 215km, assuming a scale height of 8.5 km.

Does the game take earth's 130km pressure (2.283 * 10^-7 atmospheres) and interpolate that to the atmosphere top for everywhere? I could understand getting re-entry heat at 22 km/s with 10^-7 atmospheres, but 3.33 * 10^-11?

Anyone know what is going on here?

Thanks,

Max