Aero/drag changes have made landing Mk. 1 capsule with early career parts way too hard

[herbal space program]

As it it had been a few years since I last tried playing Career, I decided to give it a whirl to see what was new. While in prior attempts several versions ago I found the first few missions to be a fairly perfunctory exercise, to my consternation I have discovered that in the current version, re-entering with the Mk. 1 command pod is unreasonably difficult. Specifically, atmospheric drag seems to have been nerfed so much that if you make the mistake of getting off a totally prograde  retrograde heading by more than 2-3 degrees during mid re-entry, you are irrevocably dead! And not because you will blow up with the wrong end pointed towards the ground, but because your nose will lock to prograde so hard from the aerodynamic forces that you can never change your attitude again. That in itself wouldn't be so bad, but now the air is so thin you can never even slow down enough to safely deploy a parachute before you drill a hole in the ground. It definitely wasn't like that before. Do they really want it this way? I think they either need to increase the drag numbers on the Mk. 1 capsule or strengthen its reaction wheels, because the way it is now I think it is going to turn a lot of players off, even if they have the benefit of F5/F9. Besides, "career" games in general ought to start off relatively easy and then get harder as you go. Under this regime, hard career starts off nearly impossible and then becomes trivial and boring as you finally get the parts that actually let you fly missions effectively. I've always had that complaint about it, but in the current state of affairs it seems worse than ever. Anyway, just my $0.02, but  I'd be interested to know if others have had the same experience.

Edited March 12, 2019 by herbal space program

[Chel]

I just abuse parachutes and high speeds. I remember how I was re-entering in the Mk1, and I was about 400 meters from the ground, still travelling at over 1,000m/s. If your issue is about not slowing down, just use the parachutes immediately. Taking a risk and saving your ship is better than obeying the rules and ending up at the flight log screen. 

Yes, my design also just wants to flip and just go head first into the fires (to the horror of me as I watch my science parts blow up), but you can just tune the re-entry heating for your ship to do this and not blow up. 

I do agree with you that you can't really land without proper parts, but it adds a sense of challenge. After all, you've just started out as a space program, and need to test things, seeing what works and what doesn't. 

- Cat

[OHara]

40 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

I'd be interested to know if others have had the same experience.

I have not, and I've been trying to pay attention. 
The last relevant change I can think of, was pointing things getting less draggy in version 1.2.

[herbal space program]

7 minutes ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

I just abuse parachutes and high speeds. I remember how I was re-entering in the Mk1, and I was about 400 meters from the ground, still travelling at over 1,000m/s. If your issue is about not slowing down, just use the parachutes immediately. Taking a risk and saving your ship is better than obeying the rules and ending up at the flight log screen. 

Yes, my design also just wants to flip and just go head first into the fires (to the horror of me as I watch my science parts blow up), but you can just tune the re-entry heating for your ship to do this and not blow up. 

I do agree with you that you can't really land without proper parts, but it adds a sense of challenge. After all, you've just started out as a space program, and need to test things, seeing what works and what doesn't. 

- Cat

What I'm mainly talking about is  that in those first few missions, where there's no way to mount more than 1 chute on your craft and no attitude control besides the reaction wheels in the Mk. 1 pod, safely re-entering from orbit is currently really, really tough. Maybe that's by design, to force you to scrounge science from a bunch of ultra-boring early-game missions so you can buy the tech to not die coming back from orbit. It doesn't take much -- just some higher-speed drogue chutes or radial-mount chutes. And it's not like I can't turn the corner on even that game -- I just can't currently do it without killing multiple pilots and losing a lot of rep along the way. It definitely does make foregoing F5/F9 a recipe for frustration. 

4 minutes ago, OHara said:

I have not, and I've been trying to pay attention. 
The last relevant change I can think of, was pointing things getting less draggy in version 1.2.

It's probably been at least that long since I played a Career game. In Sandbox, with all the parts available, the advantages of less drag have always outweighed the drawbacks for me, so I never noticed this. Anyway, it just seems excessively hard to me now until you get more parts.

[OHara]

1 hour ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

I remember how I was re-entering in the Mk1, and I was about 400 meters from the ground, still travelling at over 1,000m/s.

In my PC version of the game, the Mk1 pod with the fitting MK16 parachute is weighted bottom heavy so that it turns retrograde (fat side forward) in the atmosphere. I can rotate quite far from retrograde, 120°, and it naturally rotates back to retrograde.   

I have not yet found any way to reenter the Mk1 pod alone from low orbit and keep 1000m/s below 10,000m altitude.

[herbal space program]

11 hours ago, OHara said:

In my PC version of the game, the Mk1 pod with the fitting MK16 parachute is weighted bottom heavy so that it turns retrograde (fat side forward) in the atmosphere. I can rotate quite far from retrograde, 120°, and it naturally rotates back to retrograde.   

I have not yet found any way to reenter the Mk1 pod alone from low orbit and keep 1000m/s below 10,000m altitude.

I'm playing a PC game too, and higher up during re-entry, I guess that's about how it was. But down around 25km, where the deceleration really kicks in, it seemed like there was much less margin of error than that. Once flipped, it seemed like the capsule had a TV of at least 900 m/s, accelerating or holding steady almost all the way to the ground, even though it was coming in at a pretty low angle. Pointed the other way, it rapidly slows down to a safe chute deployment speed on the same trajectory. For my (re-started) hard career game, I dealt with it by just doing more silly missions at the start and getting the drogue chutes before I even attempted to go to orbit.  Those seem to deploy successfully even at 800 m/s, so they greatly shorten the time spent in that zone of instant death. Still, the pointy-end-forward drag of the Mk. 1 capsule + chute seems implausibly low to me, out of step with the other front-end parts. I'm going to do some drop-testing in a sandbox game on the side and see what it shows me...

[Mr. Peabody]

39 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

<snip>

The capsule shouldn't "flip" on its own. Are there any parts attached to the capsule that are affecting the center of mass in relation to the center of drag?

[herbal space program]

34 minutes ago, The Dunatian said:

The capsule shouldn't "flip" on its own. Are there any parts attached to the capsule that are affecting the center of mass in relation to the center of drag?

It was just the capsule and the chute, and maybe a heat shield I was testing (can't remember now).  The capsule doesn't flip by itself, but that early in the game you can't lock to retrograde, so you have to try to keep following it manually all the way down, which is kind of challenging because with just the capsule it's very easy to overcorrect. Anyway, I'm finding that with a little too much deviation in the 25-25 km range it flips, never to be righted again, and then more or less accelerates all the way to the ground. I dunno, maybe all I needed to do was turn off SAS and stop trying to control the capsule at all once it was pointed retrograde. I'll give that a try later in the sandbox, to see if that works and the problem was all of my own making. Either way, I don't think I've ever seen any other part defy atmospheric drag quite like that Mk1 capsule pointed prograde.

[Mr. Peabody]

40 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

<snip>

You aren't timewarping are you?

[herbal space program]

Just now, The Dunatian said:

You aren't timewarping are you?

Not while it happened to my knowledge, but I guess I might have still been at 2X and not realized it. It did happen kind of shockingly fast. I will include that in my tests later.

[pincushionman]

I haven’t had any such problems with the pods; only when I try to get fancy and return stuff that can carry passengers. Are you on a fresh install?

[Fraktal]

He's not the only one. I've been having trouble myself ever since the 1.4 update. In particular, back in 1.3 I was able to make use of the service bay's high heat resistance to forego a heat shield at LKO. Starting from 1.4, however, that's no longer possible: the service bay has such excessive drag that if my orientation deviates more than 2-3 degrees away from perfectly retrograde, the drag overpowers SAS and flips the craft prograde, resulting in a nosedive into the ground beyond parachute release speed. According to the aero readouts, the service bay has more than twice the drag of the Mk1 pod while flying sideways with both pointed into the airstream. Adding a zero-ablator heatshield helps noticeably, but it does not make the problem fully go away. It only decreases slightly the rate at which the drag torque ramps up when deviating from retrograde, allowing a slightly higher deviation before SAS loses it.

[RizzoTheRat]

I've found the opposite to be honest, started a new 1.6.1 career recently and early sub-orbital shots are much easier as there seems to be more drag than in earlier versions so a pretty much straight up shot is survivable whereas before you'd hit the ground before slowing enough  for the parachutes.

Sounds like you over corrected trying to manually control it in re-entry.  Once the pod starts to hit atmosphere I turn SAS off and let aerodynamics keeps it pointing the right way,.  The only trouble I've has is my triple stack Mk1 pods I use for early game tourists shots do need to be pointing retrograde when they start to bite the atmosphere as the stability angle seems wider upside down than the right way up, but again not a problem once you start to get plenty of drag  

[Fraktal]

That's the thing: without SAS, it flips immediately because the service bay's drag pulls it off retrograde harder than the Mk1 pod's drag pulls it back to retrograde.

[Laie]

@herbal space program I just made a few quick tests with such a vessel (parachute-pod-heatshield) and find that it is naturally stable in a heatshield-down position.

When I remove all ablator (remove ballast) and give it a whirl so it's spinnign end-over-end during entry, it eventually settles in the right attitude.

If I want to bring it down nose-first, I have to use SAS to prograde. After deactivating SAS, it only takes a few moments for the craft to turn around and lock into heatshield-first position. The pod's torque is not strong enough to return it to nose-first ever again.

So, I'm getting quite the opposite of your experience.

Edited March 17, 2019 by Laie

[herbal space program]

7 hours ago, Laie said:

@herbal space program I just made a few quick tests with such a vessel (parachute-pod-heatshield) and find that it is naturally stable in a heatshield-down position.

When I remove all ablator (remove ballast) and give it a whirl so it's spinnign end-over-end during entry, it eventually settles in the right attitude.

If I want to bring it down nose-first, I have to use SAS to prograde. After deactivating SAS, it only takes a few moments for the craft to turn around and lock into heatshield-first position. The pod's torque is not strong enough to return it to nose-first ever again.

So, I'm getting quite the opposite of your experience.

I don't know what to think now. I just set up the same test using a capsule and a chute in a sandbox game, and it behaved just as you described above. But I am not making this up either. I was quite annoyed after it happened, because it seemed like such unreasonable behavior. Maybe something got corrupted in that saved vessel, which I kept using again and again. I abandoned that game, so maybe I'll never know.  I'll try to reproduce it some more later, but I want to use what play time I have left today to finish this 8.5t Duna return mission....

Edited March 18, 2019 by herbal space program

[Star-Eagle]

@herbal space program

I don't play ksp as much as you guys and I don't have much time for scientific testing but I have noticed the mk1 capsule behaving as you described though it seems to need to deliberately set up in my case. 

As the others have said the aero forces seem to be enough to keep the capsule aligned but when I've tried any maneuvers it will lock into a nose first/ prograde attitude. 

[Pds314]

I don't remember this being a problem with a low reentry angle to be honest. If you have something fairly heavy at the nose of your craft them it might be unstable but the last time I reentered the basic capsule I could steer it in retrograde by like 20-30 degrees without any possibility of it getting stuck pointing nosefirst.

Edited March 29, 2019 by Pds314

[farmerben]

I have not had this problem.  Is it possible you were out of electrical power, and the reaction wheels where not working at all?

[Chel]

I've been getting this problem where I now make a rocket, I deploy parachutes and they are ripped off because of aerodynamic stuff and heat. What I did was just spam parachutes and drogue chutes and it worked