Reentry effects

[FITorion]

KSP.

Real.

The KSP effects look great for an approximation of something no one really had a reference to but now we have a picture of real Reentry effects.

The point of contact needs to be White hot. Well... at least things which are melting... like ablating heat shields should be white hot. It would be possible to take a shallower (and or slower) path and not build up as much heat and thus not be white hot... The space shuttle heat tiles would be glowing orange where as the Apollo capsules heat shields would have been white hot.

The trail needs to be longer and then I think there should be a range of heat colors from red to white depending on speed and thickness of the atmosphere. As I recall the heat effect is just a colored light shining on it from the velocity vector. Shouldn't take much to vary that color. The difficult part as I see it is getting the long trail. I think the fur shader currently used looks fine close into the craft but doesn't look so good deeper into the tail. Where you start to be able to see the repeated fur texture instead of it all overlapping is where I think more work should be done if you want to make KSP reentry look more like real world reentry.

So in a nut shell I wanted to share the pic of real reentry and suggest reentry effects get another look at some point down the line.

Edited November 5, 2013 by FITorion

[Kasuha]

When we have some reentry damage, it would be nice if parts about to explode shined brighter, yellow to white instead of orange. Apart of that, looks close enough to me.

[vetrox]

EDIT:Just reread your post properly.

Although you get trails from your jets. I wonder if there is some way to make a coloured trail that works in a similar way

Edited November 5, 2013 by vetrox