Heat shield enable fuel crossfeed

[CaptainTurbomuffin]

It's what it says. Be able to enable fuel crossfeed in heat shields, just like with decouplers. Sometimes your lander is in the middle of your longish craft, and with the engines at the back, and the heat shield in the middle, you have to transfer fuel manually from the tanks at the front.

[Skylar']

i don't think so, kinda unrealistic... no one will make fuel lines in heat shield..

[worir4]

Just now, Skylar' said:

i don't think so, kinda unrealistic... no one will make fuel lines in heat shield..

But this is KSP, Kerbals do as they dare!

@CaptainTurbomuffin

You can sort of have a cross feed by using cubic octagonal struts on each of the fuel tanks that you want to transfer between. They use the yellow fuel line to join up the two struts. 

[CaptainTurbomuffin]

3 minutes ago, worir4 said:

But this is KSP, Kerbals do as they dare!

@CaptainTurbomuffin

You can sort of have a cross feed by using cubic octagonal struts on each of the fuel tanks that you want to transfer between. They use the yellow fuel line to join up the two struts. 

When designing my vesels, efficiency is secondary, aesthetics are primary. Those look ugly. In the end, I solved my problem with some editing, but it hurts not having a so simple option in the game, so it came to my mind to post it as a suggestion.

[worir4]

3 hours ago, CaptainTurbomuffin said:

When designing my vesels, efficiency is secondary, aesthetics are primary. Those look ugly. In the end, I solved my problem with some editing, but it hurts not having a so simple option in the game, so it came to my mind to post it as a suggestion.

Could you use the offset tool to clip them into the rocket?

[magnemoe]

22 hours ago, worir4 said:

But this is KSP, Kerbals do as they dare!

@CaptainTurbomuffin

You can sort of have a cross feed by using cubic octagonal struts on each of the fuel tanks that you want to transfer between. They use the yellow fuel line to join up the two struts. 

This is done on real life pods, 
http://static.origos.hu/s/img/i/1301/20130117-orion-service-module3.jpg
Look at the clamp on pod who is an cable and pipe channel. 

[CanOmer]

Adding two external fuel ducts (one forward, one backward) is my solution.

[Ultimate Steve]

It's not completely unreasonable to have temporary holes in your heat shield. MOL in real life was going to do it (with way bigger holes even).

[Zeiss Ikon]

As I recall, some program or other actually flew a Gemini spacecraft that had the hole in the heat shield (originally for a hatch to allow crew to pass between the Gemini and a crew module that was to be attached in place of the "trunk" adapter seen in Gemini-Titan stacks).  The hole, big enough for a human in a space suit to pass through, apparently caused no problems.

That said, I'm inclined to use fuel ducts as well, in the rare case when I need to bypass a heat shield.

[FleshJeb]

You could modify it with a Module Manager patch.

I couldn't find an existing one here, but you could ask someone to write one for you:

 

[Corona688]

If you punch holes in a heat shield, it stops being a heat shield.  Ask NASA about that.

[Overheal]

I know this thread is quite old but this still comes up as a top result when googling for heat shield crossfeed and 2 possible workarounds occur to me: 

1) Using the new KSP 1.11 Build Mode, if you have an Engineer you can keep an appropriately sized heat shield in a storage module staged basically where you need the heat shield to be. Just have the engineer slap the shield on when the stage is decoupled and ready for the shield to be installed. Drawback is you have to do this before you begin your atmospheric re-entry, if you have a deceleration stage it will have to be spent before hitting atmosphere with enough time to EVA.  This only works for the tiny and small sized shield though I believe, as the others cannot be stowed. 

2) Fuel lines between stages, not as aesthetic but simple to have dumplings/baguette liquid fuel tanks near either side of the heat shield and run your crossflow fuel lines between them. 

[Fraktal]

Or you could always just mount the engines said fuel is needed for radially. That's what I usually do for my landers: engines are mounted radially, heatshield is on ground level, all docking is done at the front, rather than the back, so nothing needs to crossfeed through the heatshield.

[mercurae3]

This is still the first thread that comes up when searching for this issue so I thought I'd add the solution for future explorers. It may not have existed at the time but now you can go to Settings > Difficulty Options > Advanced > "Resource transfer obeys crossfeed rules" and turn it off.