What was your fastest rentry?

[dharak1]

Mine was my Laythe rentry a couple minutes ago at 7.25 km/s:

I wonder how hot that was O.O

Post your fastest rentry! (with or without bugs)

[Deadpangod3]

And I though 3180 m/s was fast and bright, o.o I barely slowed down in time ...

*sends Jeb to re-enter kerbins atmosphere at 500 km/s*

[dharak1]

This aerobrake actually overdid it. I had to do some prograde burning to keep it out of the atmosphere.

[Brotoro]

5450.3 m/s coming back from Eeloo.

[Levelord]

My VTOLSSTO, coming on a transit straight out from Jool to Kerbin. Belly flopping into the atmoshpere and it is designed to recover from flat spins. The ultimate spaceplane if you ask me.

[OrbitusII]

Over 6 km/s coming into Eve, and then with that probe's cousin at over 2 km/s coming into Laythe. No pics except of the probes now...

Curiosity had 7 minutes of terror, I had 10 seconds of terror! Twice!

Hopeful 1:

Wayfarer 1:

[Itsdavyjones]

oh gosh, the g force, that shouldn't even be possible.

[Extemporary]

oh gosh, the g force, that shouldn't even be possible.

Keep in mind that KSP velocities are much, much lower than real life. The Galileo probe was 47.8 km/s when it hit Jupiter's atmosphere. It withstood 250g, or something ridiculous like that. Half its mass was heatshield, and it was 24% lighter when the main parachutes deployed.

[BananaDealer]

Unbreakable Joints on... About 6km/s...

Off... 3~3.2km/s... Then it flew apart...

[magnemoe]

a bit over 10.000 m/s taking an shortcut back from Eeloo after doing the great tour.

Path, think the burn was around 3000m/s, yes the projected path was inside Moho orbit.

Stand by for hard aerobrake.

Pretty low down. A bit surprised the ship would take this, but I guess much of the same force acted on the miner and mothership and the top part including lander was empty of fuel and pretty lightweight. Ship was pretty stable but had to turn on rcs during the hard aerobreak part as it started to wobble, had it turned sideway it would be toast.

Done and landing the small lander.

The huge miner at back, was dropped off before doing an second brake to get down to low orbit as it went to Minmus.

Edited May 13, 2013 by magnemoe

[TheDarkStar]

I once managed a 9 km/s reentry to Kerbin after an Eeloo mission.

[dharak1]

Wow These are awesome XD I hope my rover I'm making has a fast entry to Duna.

[NeoMorph]

Speed is all well and good but how low have you got your aerobrakes down to? I got one at 3km on Duna when was trying to save fuel... Nearly came a cropper when I came close to hitting a crater wall.

[StarManta]

You know, now I want to get a ship into a retrograde Kerbolar orbit and smash it into Kerbin at 18km/s.

Edit: Come to think of it, I would probably get the thing into retrograde orbit in the first place by (in part) swinging it around Jool. Then burn for a good long while to get it into a real retrograde orbit.... and then try to get an intersect with Kerbin. Falling in from Jool orbit, I'd be going MUCH faster than 18 km/s when I hit.

Edited May 13, 2013 by StarManta

[dharak1]

Neo, 3Km? Really? I would never do that unless it was completely essential. And Star I had a station in minmus orbit that I tried to dock with on a retrograde orbit to it, lets just say 600m/s collisions in minmus orbit look pretty cool when they have hundreds of pieces of debris.

[magnemoe]

Speed is all well and good but how low have you got your aerobrakes down to? I got one at 3km on Duna when was trying to save fuel... Nearly came a cropper when I came close to hitting a crater wall.

How fast was you coming? I was incoming in 4000 m/s from Moho during the grand tour and was down to 8 km. On the other hand your ship was far smaller than mine so you would get less drag.

[maverik83]

I had a nice Laythe lander with a return stage sent to jool some month ago.

It was on good way to jool. But as I entered Jools SOI i detected my main failure: went the wrong way in orbit!!!

My nice lander had a counterclockwise laythe orbit!!! *woot*

So I had to decide either to just go back to kerbin on a free return trajectory or trying the hardest aerobreak I've ever done so far.

Tough Jeb, Bill and Bob (those days my only crew) faced an aerobreak at whooping 8500 m/s.

I had to do several quickloads to get the sweetspot of altitude to not land directly (and somehow uncontrolled in laythes oceans),

but to get in some kind of orbit forst to land my land-lander *g* properly.

I ended somewhere about 18km high with a 21g breaking-insanity.

All Kerbals went unconscious but that was of no problem. Steering was not needed.

Laythe... retrograde jool orbit... pah!

Never gonna happen again

The story ended quite happy - all kerbals EVA'ed at laythe had some nice Jool-set and returned to kerbin in one piece.

What a journey!

Edited May 13, 2013 by maverik83

[NeoMorph]

How fast was you coming? I was incoming in 4000 m/s from Moho during the grand tour and was down to 8 km. On the other hand your ship was far smaller than mine so you would get less drag.

Wasn't that fast because I used Ike to give me a bit of a slingshot but I overcooked it and ended up at 3km. Was the first time I had seen flames on Duna re-entry though. At less that 1800m/s too lol. I actually could count the rocks on the ground at one point... Then I went back to Ike and dropped the mining pod off... and it all worked perfectly... until I docked with this old rocket that was a right pain as everything went wrong with it.. and it blew up as I docked.

At least Jeb and Bill were happy to find Kethane...

Edited May 13, 2013 by NeoMorph

[dharak1]

Speaking of counting rocks, how close do you have to be for terrain scatter to show up? I'm pretty sure it is more than 2.5 km but it might be that.

[kknight13]

At what altitude are you measuring from, I had an 82.1 G thrill dive which had me at about 4km/s somewhere around 10 km up

[NeoMorph]

At what altitude are you measuring from, I had an 82.1 G thrill dive which had me at about 4km/s somewhere around 10 km up

Actually I can't remember if it was center of Duna or AGL. Mechjeb was the one reporting my height so I think it was centre of the planet (but don't quote me on that). I do know that it didn't feel like 3km because I was counting rocks fly past on the ground lol.