Congrats on your first good reentry and landing! That's a significant milestone!
Now do it with DGIV
The most odd reentry and landing I've had was when I was tring to get XR5 to the Moon.
I fly up to like 25 km at full SCRAM and main thrust to gain 1.5 km/s at 25 km attitude. Then I shut down main fuel and let the SCRAM engines take me almost to orbit. I fly right at the edge of burning my ship, right until the SCRAMs are gonna blow. I made it into orbit with 74.2% main fuel left... so I though that's enough to get to the Moon and land with ease. I do my burn... but for some reason I missed the Moon. So I'm like... wth and start planning how I'm gonna get back and land.
Then the LOX alarm comes on and I'm like... oh no!
Usually when ever I'm returning from the Moon, I use the atmosphere to slow down. I just set the PeA to around 55 kms and it's usually enough to slow me down to remain in orbit and not destroy the ship. Then I wait for an optimal reentry window. But this time I couldn't do that with 11 hours of LOX left. So I set my PeA and dump fuel, knowing that reducing mass is the only chance I have to survive. Sure, I barely made it with temps going crytical to white, but was ejected into the atmosphere. So yea, now I'm over Australia and thinking: "Crap, I'm dead!" and the next thought was: "Damn it! Why did I dump so much fuel?!". I dump SCRAM fuel right after stop using SCRAMS to dump excess weight to get me better acceleration for burns, so SCRAMs weren't an option.
I looked at my Map MFD and saw that it was gonna take me over South America and start thinking... "Hmmm, how close can I get to Cape?"
I started reajusting my orbit with main engines, but with 5% of fuel left, I couldn't do much. Then I transfered all the RSC but 15% to main engines and burnt that. But the orbit would still take me a few thousand kms from Cape, so I when I came back into the atmosphere, I started using it to turn.
After a while I managed getting my orbit over the Cape, but the APU fuel got low... and I knew I didn't have enough to get back. So what I opened AeroBreakMFD and used it to plot my corse to bounce off the atmosphere. Doing that show me flying 3000 kms over Cape... so I finally knew I had enough energy to get there. But the main problem now was APU fuel. I knew I barely had enough for landing, let alone getting there. So I held Delete to change my aileron to pich me up and leveld the ship... then I turned APU off. After that, I was pretty much sitting here for a while until the ship got close to Cape. By then, I only had 4% of RSC fuel remaining.
I turned on APU and RSC, piched up, slowed down and started gliding towards Runway 33. It ended up being a perfect landing
, why didn't I pack more fuel? :fool: ". I transfer the rest of RCS to main, restoring it to 4%, and head towards SpacePort at Mach 1.5. By now, I am about 20km away and can see it clearly. So I align with the airstrip and prepare to land. At 2km away, gear down and engine throttleback to 25%. 1% main fuel left. I open hover doors, as a safety measure in case I'm not able to flare. I transfer a little bit of fuel to RCS to get that extra control. 500m to runway. I begin to flare and I arm my drag chute. Touchdown! Drag chute deploys slowing me down. As I stop, I notice that main fuel is 0.5%, RCS is 0, and Scram is 0.
