Reentry

[dino1984]

Heeey... is there anything to be said about reentry? I mean, it's easy to drop a command pod... but how about something bigger? How to bring down a science vehicle containing command pod two material bays and and some other, small stuff? 

Playing RSS, in the early stage of the game the only way to get science from far bioms is delivering science stuff there in ICBM-style... aaaaand the problem is to reenter all of that. Whole thing start flipping immediately after hitting top layers of the atmosphere and a moment later things start exploding.... 

 

Any help would be appreciated.

[DrLicor]

Hey, the basic rules for reentry are that your CoM needs to be close to the side where you have the heatshield. 
As a RSS/RO player, I know reentry can get a bit tricky sometimes. Try to add ballast near the side of your heatshield.

Also, when in you do a manned mission, let a astronaut collect all the science from the instrument, can be any type pilot engineer and scientist. 
I put as little as possible amount of parts to the section I want to recover. 

When you recover a material bay, so unmanned, just stick a heatshield at the bottom, don't remove any abliator from the heatshield, its probably the heaviest resource in your craft. Put all your science experiments at the inner top of the bay, all the heavy parts like the control-parts at the inner bottom. 

Also, don't set your Pe under 60km. And try to lower your Ap just before re-entering.

 

Hope this helped you a little bit  

[bewing]

You can have a mini-science container attached to the command pod, and use the "Collect all" function to grab all the science experiments out of the materials bays and other small experiments. Then decouple and reenter just the command pod + science container. It's wasteful to throw away all that equipment, of course -- it's better if you can land and recover it.

So, alternately, you can maybe use the fin trick. You use control surfaces to change the aerodynamic geometry from "low drag" to "high drag" before reentry.

 

[DD_bwest]

I know it doesnt answer the question, but i often put a science container on the decoupler below the command pod + heat shield,  and have it "collect all" throughout the mission,  then just before re-entry, eva and grab them all, hop back into the pod and just bring the data back lol

[dangerhamster]

I think the OP may be asking how to deliver the kit to distant biomes on Earth rather than bringing the data back from orbit.

[DrLicor]

@dangerhamster, in that case, I advice him to install trajectories. With this mod you can see where your science module is going to land. The only thing is that you need  to be beware of the fact when you decouple a stage, your crafts gets lighter, resulting in a shorter reentry. Unless you have a heatshield the retroburn stage. However, even this will cause the same problem because there's less mass 'pushing' trough the atmosphere, so the craft gives less resistance.
A bigger heatshield however, will result in a much more stable reentry, without the risk it's going to flip.  

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't know if you have the available tech for it but I found an ugly but working answer to recovering things that were too long and thus flippy:  I put a heat shield on the nose, backwards, a decoupler and a nose cone on it.  You have to have radial chutes of some type to actually land it.

The best answer I have found is a mod that adds SpaceX-style grid fins.  Enough grid fins keeps anything from lawn darting and when they're deployed they provide quite a bit of drag, also.  I had one without enough fin--it lawn darted but the fins were enough to get it down to drogue chute speed before it ran out of air.  It was in the ocean a few seconds after popping the mains.