Best way to land on kerbin?

[Firemetal]

Ok I'll try that later

 

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Just now, Firemetal said:

Ok I'll try that later

To be frank this makes your method of turning SAS off for re-entry technically better, as it is entirely hands free and you can time warp through the whole thing.

I'm just a "nervous nelly" and I always have SAS on because it makes me feel better. Lol.

In reality I'm just making more work for myself, I should probably be turning it off like you do and just letting the command pod do it's thing.

[Snark]

4 hours ago, Firemetal said:

Ok I come from the moon and I lower PE to 30km. I hit the atmosphere at 3200 m/s and turn off SAS. My critical thermal percentage peaks at around 70%.

If I don't turn off SAS, my CTP rises like an elevator and I blow up around 30-40 km.

*Shrugs*

I was really scratching my head with "why on earth would SAS make a difference to your temperature, it's just torque, you're still facing the same way that you would be with it off", and then I saw this:

3 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

with SAS on it'll want to keep you going the way you are going instead of letting the pod naturally rotate

...which lit a light bulb.

When you say "SAS on", you do mean "SAS on and set to 'hold retrograde'", right?  Not "hold orientation"?

Because "hold orientation" would be bad.  You need to keep the ship pointed retrograde.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

43 minutes ago, Snark said:

I was really scratching my head with "why on earth would SAS make a difference to your temperature, it's just torque, you're still facing the same way that you would be with it off", and then I saw this:

...which lit a light bulb.

When you say "SAS on", you do mean "SAS on and set to 'hold retrograde'", right?  Not "hold orientation"?

Because "hold orientation" would be bad.  You need to keep the ship pointed retrograde.

Unfortunately setting SAS to retrograde tends to make the pod wobble uncontrollably and waste oodles upon oodles of electrical power. (Especially when time warping.)

Setting it to hold orientation just means you have to tap the W key once in a while to keep up with the retrograde marker.

As I said before, I tend to not use time warp on re entry because I like to "take in the sights" so baby sitting the command pod was never a problem for me. Anyone who wants to x4 warp or not touch the keyboard during descent would be better served by just leaving the SAS turned off and letting the pod do it's thing, as I stated above.

Edited July 7, 2016 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Firemetal]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

I was really scratching my head with "why on earth would SAS make a difference to your temperature, it's just torque, you're still facing the same way that you would be with it off", and then I saw this:

...which lit a light bulb.

When you say "SAS on", you do mean "SAS on and set to 'hold retrograde'", right?  Not "hold orientation"?

Because "hold orientation" would be bad.  You need to keep the ship pointed retrograde.

I have been doing SCIENCE since then and I now see that it works both ways. Tapping w or just turning off sas. It all has the same effect but in 1.1.2, I was experiencing problems where I did this but instead of the heat shield heating up, the cockpit heated up and blew up fast. Maybe it was a bug that got fixed or maybe I was simply doing something wrong. Anyway thanks.

[Warzouz]

Basic SAS uses less electricity than hold retrograde. To economically hold retrograde you have to use SAS and orient yourself to retrograde. But when you're around 45km, SAS is not needed anymore, the pod will keep itself to (surface) retrograde.