FAR/Deadly Reentry/Procedural Fairings near-death experience

[undercoveryankee]

I built a ship that was supposed to re-enter with some odd-shaped cargo cans attached. (Uranium nitride cans from Interstellar. Not taking risks with anything radioactive.)

It had a DR 2.5m heat shield attached directly to the bottom of the Procedural Fairings base.

I make the delivery to the orbital construction project and make my deorbit burn. Pilots are Jeb and Bill (again, not mixing rookies and radioactivity). Around 30 km altitude I check on the heat shield and see "IsShielded: True." You can probably imagine the rest. I go in with a fraction of the drag I'm expecting. The fairing sides overheat and blow up first. The heat shield is still shielded. I fired the drogue chutes while I was still getting heating, hoping they would make some kind of difference. Note to self: they didn't last long. So passing through 10k where I would normally pop drogues, I'm still on the high side of Mach 3 with only the mains left.

By around 5k, I'm down to around 400 m/s and I can fire the mains. Everything holds together and I splash down. Jeb and Bill didn't buy the farm on a low-orbit cargo run. But there were moments along the way where I was pretty sure they were going to.

After that reentry, I stuck an S6 service compartment between the fairing base and the heat shield as a spacer. Haven't taken the new version up to orbital speed yet, but I did a launch escape system test and confirmed that the heat shield is now properly exposed.

I'm curious, though: Does anyone know a way to make a heat shield directly under a fairing base work, or is a spacer the only way?

[Tiberius]

I have the exact same problem with KSP 0.23.5. Did you ever find a solution?

[Link]

You need a bigger heatshield.

Imaging your heat shield as a cylinder going straight up. Anything that is sticking outside of that cylinder is prone to the heat of reentry. In addition, the angle you are reentering, and the speed, could be your issue. I personally never had a problem with heatshields and procedural fairings, but I always deorbit from 100km. The higher you deorbit from, the faster you'll go, the hotter you get, and the ship will blow!

So, if I were you, first id try deorbiting from a lower point, and try spending more time in the upper atmosphere to reduce your velocity. If that dont work, you will need to try the bigger heatshield.

Good luck!