Flight Question A safe manual reentry with XR2?

[jjake101]

What do you need to make your PeA to reenter safely with the XR2 Ravenstar? I always get a hull breach and the crew dies...

 

[Urwumpe]

What do you need to make your PeA to reenter safely with the XR2 Ravenstar? I always get a hull breach and the crew dies...

That number depends on many other factors. If you reenter with high eccentricity (even if you are actually suborbital), you need a much higher PeA for compensating for the higher velocity.

Generally, you should have not burn up unless you pilot the vehicle extremely bad during reentry. Generally, you have to start the reentry with full positive lift and only start to bank to the side once the temperatures start to drop again. Even if you are skipping out of the atmosphere, you should watch your temperatures before you bank. It is better to miss reentry (you can still save the day) than to burn up.

 

[johan]

What do you need to make your PeA to reenter safely with the XR2 Ravenstar? I always get a hull breach and the crew dies...

As Urwumpe said, it depends on your velocity as you enter the atmosphere.

Let's say you've just undocked from the ISS (i.e. you're roughly 300km up, in a low eccentricity orbit).

Burn retrograde until your PeA is between 50 and 60 km or so - I've found that this generally lets me have the ship and crew survive, even if I still have a long way to go to reliably get to the base I'm targeting. Read: I usually miss by about a continent or so, but at least everyone survives the landing. Even if they then die of starvation because it's in the middle of freakin' nowhere :lol:

 

[sitha241]

What do you need to make your PeA to reenter safely with the XR2 Ravenstar? I always get a hull breach and the crew dies...

What this guys said is correct and I just my add that if you want to hit the area to land my advice is if you are deorbiting from ISS-like orbits I usually go to lowering PeA to 40 km at the distance of 15-17 M from base..It usually gets the job done..

You can always torture the crew with some extra G force later if you miss

 

[N_Molson]

When you don't know what to do and feel that you are going down too fast, stabilize the vertical speed to -50 m/s, and do S turns until velocity drops.

As said above, what will certainly kill you is a too steep trajectory. And a negative AoA, as the top of the hull isn't well protected compared to the bottom.

Of course, when you come back from another planet, things are a bit more difficult and you need more precision (the reentry corridor is smaller).

Once in the atmosphere, AoA (Angle of Attack) is the key, and that's true for spaceplanes or capsules alike. Try "visualize" the airflow, and keep the protected areas of your spacecraft between it and you.

 

[Cras]

I use a complicated mess of MFDs from Aerobrake, Basesync, DvTools, IMFD and Glideslope2 to come up with a gentle re-entry with the XR-2.

 

[blixel]

What do you need to make your PeA to reenter safely with the XR2 Ravenstar? I always get a hull breach and the crew dies...

What is your starting condition? Are you trying to undock from the ISS and then land? Are you coming back from the moon?

Assuming you're undocking from the ISS, you will find that your PeA doesn't matter as long as it's low enough to get you down into the atmosphere. There is no single magic number. If you perform your deorbit burn when you are on the opposite side of the planet from the target base, you can have your PeA anywhere from 0 up to about 60km. (Actually it can even be negative [below the surface] by quite a bit, and you'll still be fine.)

I think most people would agree that a good "standard" PeA would be around 40km. But it doesn't matter if it's exactly 40.00km. 38.12km or 45.91km will work every bit as well as 40km.

The real key to reentry is managing your Angle of Attack. The XR2 has an extremely good AoA hold autopilot that makes this task as easy as possible.

So your checklist would be something like this:

• Undock from the ISS.
• Close the nosecone.
• Use a bit of RCS and 10x time warp to get away from the ISS.
• Turn retrograde and bring your PeA down to ~40km according to Orbit MFD.
• Use time acceleration to warp time forward until you're at Entry Interface (EI). EI is when your altitude is 120km. But I find that you can go all the way down to ~90km before you really have to worry about it.
• Somewhere between 90km and 100km, you'll want to close your radiator, close retro doors, close the nosecone (if you haven't already), close hover doors if they are open, retract the landing gear if it's out for some stupid reason, and close the payload bay doors. (Note that if you press 9, the XR2 has a re-entry check list that will test all these things for you. If it says re-entry check failed, then find what you have open and close it.)
• Switch the HUD to Surface mode and then turn prograde and get the vessel level with the horizon.
• Press 2 to switch to the Attitude hold Autopilot.
• Over on the right of the autopilot where it says Set Pitch, click that box so that it says Set AoA.
• Use the up/down arrows to set the AoA to +45 degrees.
• Finally, click the Engage box over toward the left side of the autopilot.

That will get you down through the atmosphere without overheating. Arriving at the base on target is an exercise I'll leave up to you.

EDIT: One final thing I forgot to mention. You must be patient during re-entry. Once you get down into the atmosphere, it's going to take quite a while before you will be slowed down to a velocity that you can manage with a joystick. (That will be when your velocity is down to about 700 m/s.) If you are impatient and try to time warp through the long re-entry glide, you're going to have a bad time.

 

[BruceJohnJennerLawso]

I use a complicated mess of MFDs from Aerobrake, Basesync, DvTools, IMFD and Glideslope2 to come up with a gentle re-entry with the XR-2.

I often try with nothing. Then I die, or at least end up crashing in the middle of the Pacific ocean at night :lol:.

Its actually not too unreasonable to manually reenter safely in the XR2, but the DGIV is much harder to do it in.

 

[Cras]

Its actually not too unreasonable to manually reenter safely in the XR2, but the DGIV is much harder to do it in.

I agree. The Xr-2 has tremendous amount of lee-way. It can float forever so if you come up a bit short its no problem. DGIV, its a brick. If not worse. You better be in control of the energy when you attempt a dead stick landing with that.

 

[PeterRoss]

I only use AerobrakeMFD and stock MFDs (Orbit, Map, HSI) to land XR2 precisely.

 

[Urwumpe]

I prefer IMFD and ReentryMFD. AerobrakeMFD is a case of TMI for my personal taste.

 

[Therius]

Aerobrake MFD changed my life. Land your XR2 or any winged craft with precision. It puts me right over top of Wideawake base every time. Now, landing a capsule with accuracy.... I struggle with that. I wish there was a capsule landing mfd.