Procedural Heatshields?

[CyanAstro]

Something that KSP 1 really lacks is the ability to have large heat shields on crafts such as SSTOs. I would love if you could ‘paint’ the underside of a ship with black ceramic tiles to create a heat shield. Also from a realism standpoint heat shields are necessary for entering the atmosphere.

It would also allow for recreations of spacecraft such as the space shuttle (probably the first thing everyone thinks of), but also crafts such as Dream Chaser and Starship.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Don't most aircraft parts already have high reentry survivability? 

[MechBFP]

I agree, more options for heat shielding is needed for sure as it severely restricts the possible builds of a craft otherwise.

[Sesshaku]

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Don't most aircraft parts already have high reentry survivability? 

They do, but he's talking about being able to get a more realistic look.

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

I really like this idea, but it definitely needs drawbacks of some sort to prevent players from making totally OP any-reentry-anywhere ships from day 1. Maybe heat shield paint adds weight/cost, or for off-Kerbin VABs, maybe heat shields require a resource that is common enough to make them easy to build, but rare enough that you don't want to cover your whole ship in them.

[mcwaffles2003]

12 minutes ago, TheOrbitalMechanic said:

I really like this idea, but it definitely needs drawbacks of some sort to prevent players from making totally OP any-reentry-anywhere ships from day 1. Maybe heat shield paint adds weight/cost, or for off-Kerbin VABs, maybe heat shields require a resource that is common enough to make them easy to build, but rare enough that you don't want to cover your whole ship in them.

Base it's tech level out of the tech tree. Early stuff requires more weight and has higher ablation speeds and as the player advances material cost goes up but they are lighter/have slower ablation rates. I dont every part needs to be based out of specific materials for rarity.

[Vl3d]

On 9/29/2022 at 9:17 PM, TheOrbitalMechanic said:

Maybe heat shield paint adds weight/cost, or for off-Kerbin VABs, maybe heat shields require a resource that is common enough to make them easy to build, but rare enough that you don't want to cover your whole ship in them.

Cladding has already been confirmed.

 

[Pthigrivi]

4 hours ago, Vl3d said:

Cladding has already been confirmed.

Well its confirmed that some parts will have specific cladding, like actual heat shields, but this is probably just a visual texture rather than something separate with its own performance properties. (In fact since the question was about visual uniformity by "nonstandard cladding" he probably means things like the experiment parts that have their own unique part texture that doesn't appear on any other part.) It's not confirmed that you can custom 'paint' heat-shielding where you want it. The latest spaceplanes we've seen were in the interstellar video and you can see that the MK2 parts have that visible heat shielding underneath but its not clear to me whether the procedural wings have heat-shielded variants. I think it could be very cool to have half-shielded variants of lots of parts including cylindrical fuselages, and it would just be reflected in the mass and max temp. Whether thats in the cards for release we just don't know. 

Edited October 13, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[SciMan]

No need for procedural heat shields to be "confirmed" in any way by any of the evidence provided so far.

Just make the part's overall heat tolerance high enough to generally survive reentry, and then using the (confirmed) ability to paint your craft pretty much however you want, simply apply a heat shield texture to the underside.

"Best part is no part" after all, right?

EDIT: Of course, having the ability to make procedural parts that act as a heat shield would be nice, but my point is that it's not in any way absolutely required for the game to be "complete". All you need is enough heat shield sizes to be useful with the various reentry-capable crew capsules, and maybe some more to cover the larger cylindrical fuel tank diameters. The space plane parts can, as I mentioned, just have a fancy paint job and a normally high heat tolerance, because most space planes IRL don't even use an ablative heat shield in the first place (well, neither the Shuttle nor Buran did anyways, and the X-34's heat shield isn't "supposed" to ablate, but it "can" if the temperatures get too high, and that's also how Starship's heat shield is probably going to work (as in it will also be an "optionally ablative" heat shield)).
END EDIT

Trust me, I'm not trying to be a pessimist here, but at the same time, KSP 2 isn't "the ultimate accurate space flight simulator" and never was intended to be.
KSP 2 is a Capital G "Game", and a very much lower-case s "simulator".
From that, not everything needs to be simulated super realistically. Lots of things ARE, but that's because they're part of core gameplay loops.
If your vessel survives reentry or not isn't something that they're going to be focusing a lot on, because all it has to do is have a reasonable "pass" and a reasonable "fail" state.
Nothing more is required of it. They don't have to force you to optimize the heat shield thickness so your barely-good-enough spaceplane lands with a razor-thin margin left on its heat shield.
It just has to have a high enough heat tolerance that the player can believe that it would survive reentry if it has the right paint job on it.

Heck, before the Mk2 parts were part of stock KSP (and yes, they were originally a mod), the description made particular note of the "painted on heat shield tiles and oh just trust us it'll survive reentry *wink*" more or less, it was very tongue in cheek (also back then reentry heating wasn't even simulated at all, neither was the reentry plasma effect in the game, those came around back in 0.17 IIRC, and we still had to deal with "air-hogging" SSTO's and the "souposphere" instead of the atmosphere we have these days that meant you basically couldn't exceed the speed of sound no matter how much thrust you had below 10km altitude).
And back then, we only had like maybe 5 people complaining about the lack of accuracy of the atmospheric modeling, we just kinda dealt with it and had our fun because we didn't know it could be any better until it actually got better (you can thank Ferram of FAR fame for pushing forward the idea that KSP's aerodynamic physics were all kinds of messed up, these days there's not much difference between the stock aerodynamic model and FAR but back then it was night and day).

All it is is that I see an easy way that they could get something that looks and functions like it has "procedural heat shielding" on it, without actually needing that system (that needs time spent to code it, iterate on it, test it, and finally bring it to a polished state).
In other words, my way gets the same results faster, even if it means the simulation isn't simulating as much.

Edited October 25, 2022 by SciMan