Heat sheilds

[Pthigrivi]

So Im surprised there hasn't been more discussion about re-entry heat being in. Ive been playing stock career for almost a year now and haven't done DR in a long while. Its going to be a funny thing to balance, especially early in career when you wont have access to much on the tech tree. To my thinking most parts should be able to survive a nearly ideal shallow descent from LKO, but anything steeper or faster than that only command pods and engines will survive without a shield. You should also need them for interplanetary aerobraking. Ive never been a huge fan of procedural components, but now that they're doing the fairings that way I guess its okay. To keep parts down I think they could do 3 inflatable heat shields: a 1.25m shield that can inflate as wide as 3m, a 2.5m shield that can be as wide as 5m, and a 3.75m shield that can inflate as wide as 8m. Do we need anything wider than that?

[Brotoro]

They should get the contractor who figured out how to fit their high gain antenna into such a tiny package to design the inflatable heat shields. Then we could have a 1.25-meter part that expands out to 8 meters!

[chrisb2e9]

It would be nice if we had more information.

implementing a new re-entry heat system

Doesn't actually mean that things will burn up. It could just be a visual system that they are working on. We don't really know at this point.

[Guest]

Do we need anything wider than that?

Possibly. Maybe they should be procedural like the fairings. That would allow the designer to pick a shield that fits their needs.

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah I was actually super against procedural but so long as they snap when its set to snap Im pretty cool with it. Just a weird thing with me.

There has to be an upper bound though.

[Guest]

There has to be an upper bound though.

Why? If you clamp the lower end size and the mass to the upper end size you could end up with a situation where it is more preferable to build the craft thinner rather than ship a larger, heavier heatshield into orbit. This is a much different balancing concern than procedural tanks, for instance.

[Pthigrivi]

I think mainly because it would be absurd? Just visually it would be totally unbelievable to have 30m shield packed into a 1.25m can. Are we talking about the same thing?

[Brotoro]

How long is the 1.25m can?

[Dodgey]

What about a set of differently shaped heat shield parts. Say triangular, square, hexagonal and circular. Which wouls allow us to create our own heat shields if need be.

[klgraham1013]

What about a set of differently shaped heat shield parts. Say triangular, square, hexagonal and circular. Which wouls allow us to create our own heat shields if need be.

That's the Kerbal way of doing it. Though, I find myself beginning to lean toward the procedural side of things. When did that happen? Ah. When I hit the memory ceiling with 32bit.

[Tuareg]

What about a set of differently shaped heat shield parts. Say triangular, square, hexagonal and circular. Which wouls allow us to create our own heat shields if need be.

this would be the best way though it would need connection matrix instead of part tree so no way squad will EVER implement it... maybe a modder

[Robotengineer]

If we are going to get P-Fairings, give us P-Heatshields! Seriously though, I want to be able to have the perfect heatshiled for whatever I build.