Third, extra drag is always a nice bonus when you're trying to aerobrake. Second, the amount of force on the tail is also directly proportional to the force on your front main heat shield which both increase in magnitude as you descend down the atmosphere. First of it is a self-stabilising design since any part of it that gets pushed into the hot plasma by rotational forces will add more drag to that side of the vehicle thus adding an opposite force cancelling the motion out. This design have several nice properties. The only parts able to survive the atmospheric entry heating is an ablative heat shield, so you can mount at least four of those at the back of your vehicle so that about 3/4 of each protrude outside of the radius of your main heat shield being exposed to the atmosphere that rushes by it. As a general rule if one reaction wheel proves insufficient, you ought to find other ways to improve stability.Īn often more practical alternative to improve stability is to add atmospheric drag to the tail of your vehicle. And since adding more of them pushes the center of mass backwards this exercise can quickly become self-defeating and you end up making your instability problem worse. However since these only provide a small amount of rotational force and considering that the rotational force induced from the atmospheric drag increases as the atmospheric density increases the lower in the atmosphere you go, this means that you might find that you need more of them. Achieving a stable design following just this rule alone may not be easy in practice however.Ī reaction control system and/or reaction wheels may be necessary to help maintain stability. You can think of this as simmilar to the rule of keeping the center of thrust close to and angled behind (retrograde of) the center of mass since the heat shields is a point of impact and each generate a force, the sum of which you could consider being the exact inverse of a center of thrust. To maximize stability, try to keep the center of mass as far forward as possible. During an aerobraking maneuver, this can expose the unshielded side of the craft to immense atmospheric entry heat, leading to rapid catastrophic failure. It is possible to use them for atmospheric entry on other planets as well but you will find that they are simply too much dead weight to be carrying around.Īerobraking on Eve with aerodynamic overlayĪs with other air vehicles, aerobraking vehicles are at risk of becoming unstable and flipping in flight. However, as long as all of the ship's components lie behind the heat shield and as long as the craft generally faces close to prograde while aerobraking, a fairing is not required.įor atmospheric entry to Kerbin you may also redirect an asteroid since they are excellent ablative heat shields. A fairing to protect the components behind the heat shield is strongly recommended if atmospheric turns and maneuvers are expected during aerobraking, especially for longer vehicles. A single heat shield usually has more than enough ablator for typical purposes, and the ablator does a good job of carrying away heat by itself, making other heat-managing systems generally unnecessary. I haven't tested this mod with RealChutes yet, so I have no idea how compatible it will be.The main challenges of designing a vehicle to aerobrake consist of managing atmospheric entry heating, maintaining stability during atmospheric entry, and keeping a low mass-to-drag ratio.Ī craft designed for aerobraking should generally use a heat shield to protect against atmospheric entry heating, especially when moving at high speeds and plunging deep enough into an atmosphere to get significant drag. In the event a probe is disconnected, then the mod will attempt to automatically deploy parachutes attached to a craft once it is safe. Stock parachutes are all supported including drogues. Once installed, continue to launch your craft as usual. Just drop the 'RTEmergenc圜hute' directory into your GameData directory. This mod is a small add-on for RemoteTech that attempts to deploy the chute automatically, in the event that a connection to KSC is lost. RTEmergenc圜hute - RemoteTech Emergency ChuteĪutomatically deploy chutes on unresponsive RemoteTech probes.ĭevelopment of this mod has now ended - I decided it was probably better to implement this functionality within a kOS script.Įver built an early probe with RemoteTech to gather some early science.? Only to loose connection to KSC and have all your valuable science dumped into the ocean?
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