The magic of NASA's HIAD

[cantorobriar]

The HIAD (Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator) is something that you may want to think about when Research & Development is introduced, because you get more research points for collecting actual samples than just taking pictures of them. You may ask, "What the heck is an HIAD anyway?" It's simple: it's pretty much a durable piece of cargo on an inflatable innertube with a parachute that deploys at the last second. Most people would consider this a heat shield (now you know what i'm talking about), except meant for use on Kerbin, not A planet with a ridiculously thick atmosphere. The idea is to collect samples, fly a ship back to kerbin, and dock it with a space station. Then you would decouple or transfer or whatever you want to do to seperate the samples from the ship, then attach a heat shield with a parachute and an engine to de-orbit it. Then, when it's near the ground, instead of jettisoning the heat shield, you simply deploy the parachutes, then go to the tracking station and hit "recover". You will get more research points that you would just transmitting a picture. If you had a rover that would stay on the planet for a very long period of time and it had an antenna or comms dish or whatever you put on it that had radio capability, you might even get more points for all those pictures it could send back.

[Jake Shifter]

Does anyone else think this is brilliant?

[Captain Sierra]

Hilarious, and genius.

[regex]

I like this idea. I'm also sure that people will find all sorts of creative ways to get data back to Kerbin for the most SCIENCE! possible. Small rovers could land with a docking station featuring an orbital return stage that would then transfer to the original bus, which would return to Kerbin and deploy a reentry vehicle.

[RQuinny]

Returning samples back to Kerbin is a really good idea.

[sharpspoonful]

I like this a lot. And I think it will give space stations a little more utility and make them more useful than space art or just refueling stations for interplanetary travel. I would like to see SSTO and planes have a function in Kerbal atmosphere as well.

[Cal'Mihe]

I think it was specified that the results of sample collection / data collection would be associated to a specific module. Thus if you could tranfeer just the module itself between different carriers, you could do precisely this trick.

[Thiagobs]

Heh... I can even imagine some people creating a "Kerbal Postal Services" company, specialized on delivering your science package from anywhere to Kerbin..

Bonus points if your package arrives at KSC like this:

[Captain Sierra]

That's just . . . .

Wow. Just wow.

[Outlander4]

Err....sample return missions? What's magical about that? I thought that such ability was a planned feature or we'd do it ourselves just by strapping a small rocket to our lander like Soviets did with their Luna program. HIAD is just a fancy way to do it; a metal capsule with a parachute will serve as well.

That is, I'm supporting heavily implementation of such kind of missions in the career mode!

[John FX]

So, a few seperatrons, a parachute and a docking port jr, fix sample, point retro and activate, wait, collect. Depending on how much the sample part weighs, maybe an ant and an oscar. Myself I will probably have a few covering a part on my station, probably the hab part, which I can send off for KSC to examine.

[ZodiaK]

Is no-one else worried that this could durn out like the andromeda strain?

ZodiaK. What do you call an alien dog excretement shovel? A:pooper-scoop 9!