Heat-resistant aerodynamic parts

[KingDominoIII]

I would like to see some heat-resistant aerodynamic parts for the leading edges of shuttles and SSTOs, which tend to overheat. A shuttle nose cone and medium-sized elevons with a resistance of 2600K would be very useful. 

[catloaf]

Yes, particularly the mk1 cockpits, which can't survive a reentry from lko. They should add a heavier and more expensive version with ablator.

[Entropian]

I use both the structural and fueled wings in RSS, so the entry speeds are 7-10 km/s, and the overheating happens on lights and other non-wing components for me.  How do you angle your wings into the airflow?

[JMBuilder]

It would be interesting if parts had an option for ablative coatings. They could add mass depending on how much used (like the current settings on dedicated heat shields). They would wear away as they're used in intense aerobraking, reentry, or just supersonic flight.

In real life, ablative paint coatings were added to the X-15 when it became clear that the fuselage needed shielding of some kind.

[catloaf]

21 hours ago, JMBuilder said:

It would be interesting if parts had an option for ablative coatings. They could add mass depending on how much used (like the current settings on dedicated heat shields). They would wear away as they're used in intense aerobraking, reentry, or just supersonic flight.

In real life, ablative paint coatings were added to the X-15 when it became clear that the fuselage needed shielding of some kind.

This should exist for all parts, not just aerodynamic parts.

[Souptime]

It would be kind of a pain to add ablative coating to ALL parts, i think maybe some sort of official mod like asteroid day so you can add and remove the feature instead of having it forced in your face y'know? And most parts don't even need the coating, like the stayputnik or the cubic octagonal strut

[Entropian]

If you have overheating problems with an SSTO, just add more wing and use a higher AoA to slow down faster before you bite into thicker air.

[catloaf]

4 hours ago, Entropian said:

If you have overheating problems with an SSTO, just add more wing and use a higher AoA to slow down faster before you bite into thicker air.

That is true for most parts, but the plane command pods really need a heat improvement, same thing with the nose cones. Currently fairings have a higher heat tolerance than nose cones so those aren't urgent, but the mk1 and mk2 command pods desperately need a fix. The issue with your strategy is that you have to have such a high apoapsis to not overheat that aerobreaking from even a Mün return can take hours due to the small velocity change and lift from your wings. There is a solution which is to use an inline cockpit shielded by a fairing, or placing a mk1 command pods in a fairing, but the former only works if your pointing exactly prograde and the latter is ugly, so a new part of small rebalance is justified.

Edited September 8, 2020 by catloaf

[Entropian]

8 hours ago, catloaf said:

The issue with your strategy is that you have to have such a high apoapsis to not overheat that aerobreaking from even a Mün return can take hours due to the small velocity change and lift from your wings.

I think you mean periapsis.  You can have a low periapsis to do this, you just have to use a higher AoA in order to slow down enough before you hit thicker air.  If you're using stock scale, airbrakes would help as well.

On the command pods, they have a fine skin temperature, but the internal temperature is the problem I think you're talking about.  As long as you don't expose the cockpit to sustained heating, you should be fine.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Mk1 cockpits aren’t really intended to be used for spaceplanes so it’s hardly surprising they don’t cope well with re-entry speeds. There is a mod for an air brake coated in ablator called ablative air brake, but nothing that I know of to add ablator to wings or other parts. It should be a fairly simple module manager patch to add ablator to whatever parts you want, but they won’t look any different unless you want to start changing the models to add heat shield texturing on one side of the wings; however this could cause weirdness with part mirroring.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

A better solution (In terms of scalability and applicability to as many craft as possible), would be a series of parts to utilize a "Sweating" method. You could attach these to surfaces, and while idle they could also act as radiators. But when activated they would tap onboard propellant stores (Liquid Fuel) at a certain rate. While fed, they'd prevent heating from occurring much like a heat shield.

A much more advanced version (Mod) could tie the consumption of resources to a mathematical function, and have a Maximum heat setting. Thus they would "Soak" if allowed to do so, and heating beyond that would cause parts to heat up once more. This could be changed by the user, but at the cost of using more resources.

For an Aerodynamic solution; they could have parts with shapes more suited to planes.

This does have the potential to become extremely cheaty, so it should definitely be a late-game unlock. Perhaps with the rapier engines (I think there's several hypersonic concepts IRL that had this in mind to prevent the plane from boiling away).

[swjr-swis]

On 9/8/2020 at 6:09 AM, catloaf said:

the mk1 and mk2 command pods desperately need a fix. The issue with your strategy is that you have to have such a high apoapsis to not overheat that aerobreaking from even a Mün return can take hours due to the small velocity change and lift from your wings. There is a solution which is to use an inline cockpit shielded by a fairing, or placing a mk1 command pods in a fairing, but the former only works if your pointing exactly prograde and the latter is ugly, so a new part of small rebalance is justified.

If you balance your spaceplane carefully so it can sustain SAS radial out, it should be able to bleed away enough speed to minimize reentry heat exposure time. Additionaly, you can add a single linear RCS port to the cockpit, offset so it's just in front of the nose, and it'll move the shock cone just off the cockpit skin when you have to pitch down into prograde again. Just these two tricks will make the Mk1 cockpit a lot more viable for spaceplanes.

[DeadJohn]

mk2 and mk3 parts are more than adequate for heat resistance when playing stock, IMO. The mk1 parts could use a heat upgrade somewhere in the tech tree.

For a modded game with a scaled-up Kerbin, then there are several sets of helpful modded parts.

• Mk2 and Mk3 Stockalike Expansion have some new noses and many other parts.
• OPT adds new shuttle profiles, including fuselages with radiators to cool other parts during reentry.
• Kerbal RnD is a different way to approach heat. It lets you spend science parts to improve the statistics of parts. Heat resistance is one of the available upgrades, making mk1 parts viable even in a rescaled system.

[BigFatStupidHead]

If you don't mind using ModuleManager, it shouldn't be too difficult to add some ablator to all aerodynamic parts... default it to empty and it would probably work pretty well.

[Klapaucius]

I actually like things the way they are. Not all parts are equal.  My solution with an SSTO is to have some fuel left over if possible and come in retrograde.  The engines can also take a lot of heat so sometimes backwards is better even with the engines off.

 

[natsirt721]

On 9/26/2020 at 4:57 PM, Klapaucius said:

I actually like things the way they are. Not all parts are equal

Agreed. Engineering is about compromise. Sometimes you're not going to be able to do the thing that you want - that's ok, because you can probably do something similar. I have successfully used the large LF wings on some spaceplanes, but you have to be very careful about your entry angle. I had to add a few airbrakes to the rear and fly with a very high AoA while high up in order to bleed enough speed before entering denser air. Lost a few of the prototypes coming in too hot. I found it helps to keep them as full of LF as possible, increasing their thermal mass and the time it takes for them to overheat. Frankly, they are not designed for spaceplanes anyway, so the fact that they don't immediately poof on reentry is a blessing imo.