Just how durable is the fairing?

[Sharpy]

This setup.

The impactor just bounces off. At full thrust.

How durable is that thing?

[Crocket]

Well, to help on your quest, I strapped a fairing to a Kickback and hit the spacebar. It survived speeds upwards of 2,300 m/s in atmosphere without batting an eye while it soared up to a periapsis of 1 million meters, but bit the dust on re-entry somewhere around 40k meters up. 'Twas a brave little fairing...

[Randox]

I've overheated mine more than once getting into orbit. Something like 1,600 m/s around I guess 30-40km seems to do the trick. Can't say I ever thought to note the speed and altitude (so I am totally guessing), I just know that if my rocket lights the air on fire and keeps accelerating for long enough, I'll get a heat warning on the fairing about 10 seconds before it explodes. I now refrain from hitting 'air on fire speeds' on ascent, since I figure that wasn' great for fuel economy anyway, so it's not happened to me in a while.

Edited August 19, 2016 by Randox

[Sharpy]

Oh, of course overheating them can kill them. But I'm talking about impact durability.

[Shadowmage]

I believe the indestructible fairings is caused by a stock design choice; only a single collider per part will trigger explosions.  For fairings that is the fairing base,  while the colliders for the panels will not trigger explosions, period.

This is a part of http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/9695#change-48805

Edit: I should note that this applies to the -fairing- parts and panels exploding.  Any fairing panels that collide with other objects -can- make the other parts explode, but the panel will remain intact.

Edited August 19, 2016 by Shadowmage

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

I believe the indestructible fairings is caused by a stock design choice; only a single collider per part will trigger explosions.  For fairings that is the fairing base,  while the colliders for the panels will not trigger explosions, period.

This is a part of http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/9695#change-48805

Edit: I should note that this applies to the -fairing- parts and panels exploding.  Any fairing panels that collide with other objects -can- make the other parts explode, but the panel will remain intact.

This is interesting for litobraking, either using fairing as landing legs, simply put payload into fairing the normal way and land on the nose. 
How fast could you land like this? 

[Shadowmage]

6 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

This is interesting for litobraking, either using fairing as landing legs, simply put payload into fairing the normal way and land on the nose. 
How fast could you land like this? 

Fairly fast.  It really depends on how tall the fairing is and how much air space is between the top of the payload (or fairing base) and the tip of the fairing panels.

Note that due to how physics are calculated (in discreet time-steps) that at a certain velocity the fairing panels would clip through the ground between frames and the -payload- (or fairing base) would begin to register the collisions.  I haven't done too much testing on it, but I would imagine that up to 100m/s would be doable with large/tall fairings... at that speed it is 2m per frame (at default physics rate), so as long as you had your fairing extend at least 2m above your payload the panels would still register the collision with the terrain (but not explode) before the payload/fairing-base would hit the terrain.

I'm interested to see/hear some results from actual testing though.

[numerobis]

Even if the fairing survives, the rest of the spacecraft might be destroyed by the impact. But that's still an interesting discovery!

[HardlS]

I made deep space 2 penetrator.Fairing really very good protects payload, i impacted with speed 130 m/s, and fairing and payload survived!It very cool