Heat protect = roll ship ?

[Warzouz]

I've noticed that with parts of your ship are overheating, there is a solution : roll your ship over and over and overheat will very quickly disappear.

This work nicely on retrograde trajectory

Have you noticed that ? Does that make sense ?

[Evanitis]

Well, it makes sense to me, but I know that common sense have a tendency to be wrong in unusual circumstances (such as a high-speed reentry).

But indeed, 1.0.5 got me to save on the heatshield costs by carefully placed reaction wheels.

[Snark]

Rolling doesn't help the central stack, right?  i.e. if you have, say, a Mk1 passenger fuselage, rolling won't help it because it's exposed from any orientation, and the game doesn't (I think) model different parts of it being different temperatures, beyond the skin/internal/core thing.

I would think that the main case where rolling would help you would be if you have radially attached components that have a lower heat tolerance than the central stack, like science instruments.

But if that's the case... since those parts tend to be physicsless and therefore symmetry isn't an issue, couldn't you accomplish the same thing by putting them all on the same side of the ship and having that be the "up" side during reentry?

Just trying to understand what sort of situation or ship design would be helped by rolling, since I haven't come across such in my own missions & ships.

[Warzouz]

I should give an example

I've a reentry vehicle with radial chutes in 4 way symetry. I reenter at high speed (4000 to 5000m/s). The stack is shielded, but not the chutes. They overheat (all 4 of them).

Then I start rolling and the overheat vanishes (on 4 of them) until I stop rolling.

Yes this impacts radial parts and not stack ones.

[ForScience6686]

I used to use rolling to protect the landing legs.  It also would induce a wobble ( SAS off)  that exposed more area to the air flow for increased breaking.

[MagicFireCaster]

I rolled for a eve entry that otherwise would've destroyed my wheels and shutes of some rovers i send, since heatshield wasn't able to cover all of them, also like in real life rolling helps with your trayectory, making harder for your ship to flip and expose delicate parts 

[Evanitis]

It helped me with inline stuff too - I could deorbit 3 mk1 crew cabins spun by a reaction wheel. This was the only trick I found to save those 6 tourists that got stuck on LKO - they burned up on any other way I could think of. This way they just had to use all available sickness bags - seriously, even I as a player got nauseous if I looked at the manuver for a few seconds.

Edited January 16, 2016 by Evanitis

[Warzouz]

I use a lot of recoverable SSTO rocket. As in 1.0.5, reentry heating is more a issue than before, I was wondering to add elevons on my lover fins (wings).

On ascent, the elevons would help to pilot the rocket and on reentry, as they goes backward, they would induce a permanent roll : as the SAS would try to correct a roll, it would increase it, as commands are backward on reentry.

I'll give it a try if I've time.