Heat shield going away

[Patayyyyyto]

So I'm on the moon, I have a heat shield. But when I speed up time, my heat shield decays. I'm really concerned that my ship is not going to come back. Can anyone help me?

[Snark]

26 minutes ago, Patayyyyyto said:

So I'm on the moon, I have a heat shield. But when I speed up time, my heat shield decays. I'm really concerned that my ship is not going to come back. Can anyone help me?

That seems... wrong.  By "the moon", specifically you mean the Mun, yes?  i.e. Kerbin's moon?

Certainly a heatshield can decay over time if it's in a place that's hot enough-- Moho is an example.  But out at Kerbin, there shouldn't be enough solar heating to start bleeding off ablator.  Do you have something on the ship that generates lots of heat?  If you hit F11 to bring up the thermal overlay, what do you see?  Is anything hot?

[Patayyyyyto]

Sorry for not being specific.

So I'm on Kerbins Mun and my ablator only starts decaying on the dark side of the Mun. Also when I pressed F11, indeed everything is in red. But I do have four drills on my ship. If the drills where the problem, would the ablator be decaying on the light side of the Mun?

[Snark]

That's really strange. Mun dark side should be nice and cool, and in any case, F11 red means not hot. You shouldn't be losing ablator unless it's at least orange. If you turn on the thermal debug menus, what does it say? Anything interesting? What temperature is the leaky shield? Do you have any active radiators on the ship?

[nobodyhasthis2]

Also worth asking what parts mods your have. If you have something written for 1.0.4. It is possible to have run away heating glitches. Thermal effects are different in 1.0.5.

Edited February 8, 2016 by nobodyhasthis2

[Laie]

Ablator starts to sizzle at surprisingly low temperatures, about 500K or so. Watch the resource panel: if the consumption rate is 0.0 with a decimal dot (rather than just a plain zero), you are using the resource.

I had some fun with slowly vaporizing ablator during the milkrun challenge (small vessel, nuclear engines, loooong burn). No amount of radiators would keep my heatshield safe. Adding more would lower the temperature of the hottest parts, but there was still enough heat to permeate the whole vessel and I found no way of stopping it. I could delay it so that the first loss would occur 15 minutes into the burn rather than 5, I could also reduce the rate of ablator loss, but I couldn't stop it completely. Even stacking several heatshields would not protect the last one in the queue.

What saved my mission was that I had an opportunity to briefly enter 1000x timewarp which would reset the temperatures of the whole vessel, giving me another 15 minutes. That, and the fact that I didn't need all ablator -- in the end, 60% turned out to be wholly sufficient.

However, that was in 1.0.4 -- I hear that heatsinks now work differently, but I haven't toyed around with it yet.

[Patayyyyyto]

Ok, something very weird happened. When I loaded the ship, the ship just evaporated into thin air. And every time I loaded the ship, it exploded. D:

9 hours ago, nobodyhasthis2 said:

Also worth asking what parts mods your have. If you have something for written for 1.0.4. It is possible to have run away heating glitches. Thermal effects are different in 1.0.5.

I have only have MechJeb.

 

[Vanamonde]

This does not sound like something that's supposed to be happening, and so your question has been moved from Gameplay to Support.