Lack of heat shields in career mode - Annoying or just me just being pedantic?

[XrayLima]

Greetings fellow kerbals!

Ok so I've been playing KSP for a few months and apart from it eating my life its been great. And I love 0.22 and I really like the science / career mode. My only gripe so far, and I can't work out if this is just me or if it actually detracts from the experience, is that I can build suborbital and LKO craft quickly (ie first couple of tiers) that can lift goo pods but I can't really build a believable reentry vehicle that can bring them back.

The CP Mk1 with a 'chute looks and feels right but clamp a goo pod to the back and it looks daft. Ditto if you build a lander / service module type thing which you reenter retrograde on the engine bell... looks wrong. I would be tempted to try and return samples separately except we can't.(yet?) Is this just me or have other people thought this? And am I destined to have to radio in the results and jettison my science pods to burn up my glorious science points in exchange for an honest(ish) landing? I've faked heat shields with fairings in sandbox, but that isn't going to fly in career!

Oh the choices!

XL

[sal_vager]

Well, there's no re-entry heat in the stock game as of yet, but there is the deadly re-entry addon until then, so feel free to try it

I'm sure that when Squad add re-entry heating there will be options for protecting our craft and our experiments from harm, from thermal tiles for our pods and space shuttles to high temperature capable science return cannisters

[macegee]

Oh, I feel you. And I've got something to add to this. Compare how transmitters and experiment containers work - you can't close the latter (casings) without destroying results, if I understand it correctly. But you can deploy/undeploy transmitters. So when you're trying to re enter with your experiment results, all of them have to be opened. And it looks silly.

Also, I love "more realism" mods out there. Tried Deadly Reentry some time ago, but then thought that reentry heat doesn't change anything much since you don't even have to return anything back. I try not to use too much addons for compatibility and stability reasons, so I decided to stop using Deadly Reentry pretty quickly.

But now when we gain more by actually returning stuff from space, reentry heat seems an important aspect and I'm thinking about getting DR asap.

On a side note, I don't really feel that reentry heat is a good idea to have without proper atmospheric drag model. If you know how reentry is actually done IRL, you would understand.

So uhm.. yeah.. I can relate to this problem. Oh, yeah, payload fairings.. Those are lacking too of course.

[KatzOhki]

You can add the science parts' doors to an action group. Then you have the ability to open / close the doors on them without destroying science contained within

[Starwaster]

This has a nice heat shield for the Mk1-2 and I think it's DR compatible but I haven't tried it with DR. (not using it right now)

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52362-0-22-Sum-Dum-Heavy-Industries-Service-Module-System-%28V1-1%29?highlight=sdhi