Eve return mission pain

[EdwardB3020]

For a while now I’ve been having mission-critical issues with Eve landers mainly with the 10-meter inflatable heat shield colliding with the lander alongside making the ship a reasonable size. I was wondering if there was a way to mitigate that particular issue. Thanks in advance.  

[Vanamonde]

I tried ejecting the heat shield with sepratrons but it was not successful. After that I mounted enough parachutes that the craft fell slower than the shield, allowing them to separate. But there's still the risk of coming to rest on it. 

[xionix4]

I typically ditch heat shields the same as Vanamonde's second description, i.e. parachutes and detach shield once heating's not an issue. You could potentially combine the methods to avoid the risk of landing on it. Something like a probe core on the heat shield (wasteful, I know), and then sepratron-ing it after it's fallen away while lander's still descending via parachutes. I haven't tried vehicle switching during entry, but if you didn't know already, you can switch between nearby vehicles with [ and ]. Best of luck; happy engineering :3

[xionix4]

I had a thought. You could also potentially do something like this:

The KAL controller is set to decouple when staged and then 5 seconds later, activate the sepratrons.

I didn't have time to test it, but hope this helps. Best of luck :3

EDIT: I tested this morning. Two things: adding the controller to the stage action group doesn't provide a staging icon, so can't treat it like a normal stage, but assigning it to the gear group (g key) worked as intended. I am so happy we can detach microcontrollers, and they continue to function (probably just while in physics range). ^.^ I was worried it wouldn't work once detached, lol.

Edited November 9, 2022 by xionix4
Tested.

[magnemoe]

I tend to eject heat shield pretty early, as in as soon as not needed because of heating, in part because it starting spinning after ejecting who can damage the lander, 

Here is an standard lander of mine, has one with 4 side booster to for sea level launches. 
The weird fuel pipe with radial decopler is to use the landers fuel going to Eve, it get decupled in Eve orbit after craft is refueled. 
I drop the science rover first, then  I'm done on surface I drop the accent craft to pick up the kerbal and the science. 

After the lander has slowed down I first drop the drag plate after disabled the main engine and staged the small retro rockets. 
This flip the lander around, the landing legs is to protect lander from shield, after dropping the shield I drop the rear and front struts and lander falls with nose first. 
Now this is steerable because the fins and reaction wheels, the reaction wheel spam on the landing struts is to keep it stable during liftoff, once I reach 50-60 m/s I drop them. 
Because the lander has many kilometer cross range dropping from around 20 km the other parts lands well away. 

[king of nowhere]

to keep the mission within reasonable mass, you can use an helicopterocket. it's still going to require several tens of tons, though.

an example of helicopterocket. at 15 km of altitude it jettisons the helicopter part and goes up like a rocket

as for reentry, landing on eve tends to require some careful sequence. here i am first dropping the upper heat shields - which I use as aerobrakes and to keep the craft pointed the right way

that's because they fall slower than the rocket, so they have time to move away

then I activate the parachutes

including parabrakes first, because opening the main parachutes too suddenly may destroy it.

finally, now that the rocket is falling slower than the thermal shield would on its own, I can drop the lower thermal shield. parachutes are opened at high altitude to give more time to gain distance from the shield.