Tips/advice on Kerbin landing heavy ships?

[BanDHMO]

I got a few interesting missions for mining ore from other bodies and then bringing it safely back to Kerbin. Everything in space and on moons sounds easy enough, but I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to airbrake and then land a full heavy ore carrier. Just the ore and its tanks alone will easily top 20 tons, so I suspect I'll never be able to slow it down to 500m/s where drogue parachutes can deploy.

Obviously, the brain-dead approach is to just build a lander with enough dv to TWR to slow itself down and land without relying on the atmosphere, but that sounds incredibly tedious, having to ferry that thing into orbit and then all of its fuel.

Maybe a massive plane design of some sort that can glide gradually down through the atmosphere? At the moment, I don't have the parts unlocked to build one big enough, I think. Any other approaches?

Or am I just overthinking it, and it isn't really a huge problem to slow down a 20t ship on the way down?

[FourGreenFields]

Well, you could allways launch it with a docking port, and then dock it on some kind of lander you send to orbit as the thing returns (kinda like your idea for a landing glider - there are SSTOs out there lifting 2 orange tanks to low orbit without using any of their fuel, and they can reenter as well).

[raydioactive]

You could use drogue chutes, I personally attach a load of them and then about half as many normal parachutes, it helps slow down your craft before the real chutes deploy

[Xoho]

Or you could put wings into orbit with a drone core attached and have docking ports on the wings. Then attach them to your ship. I did it and it worked incredibly well. Otherwise I recommend slowing down enough that you wontburn up and pancaking that ♥♥♥♥ into the atmosphere. If nothing else you can try to dock multiple large lightweight pieces and make a structural parachute of sorts. Like a giant steel umbrella to slow down.

[Xoho]

Originally posted by raydioactive:

You could use drogue chutes, I personally attach a load of them and then about half as many normal parachutes, it helps slow down your craft before the real chutes deploy

He said he didn't think he could slow enough to deploy even those chutes safely.

[Flamin Jesus]

I'd first try to establish an 80km orbit, then dip the periapsis to 60km. If your ship has enough drag either through a flat design or with airbreaks, I'm pretty sure it can slow down enough to get drogues going before hitting the ground.

[andylaugel]

Lots of parachutes. ;) Given a parachute's radius, you can determine it's area. There is a ratio of parachute area to mass that'll ease most ships down safely. Once you compute that, you can determine how many parachutes you need to land a spaceship of a given mass.

Here is a vehicle that can put a 50 ton payload into 100 km orbit, and land on Kerbin again. It's insane, hense the name, the Insanity. ;)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=591183416
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=591183746
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=591184168
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=591184472
Oh yeah.. the Insanity used airbrakes and drogue chutes too. Had to burn the last of its fuel very carefully, just at the moment the engines started to overheat. Slowed it enough that it cooled down after.

Here is a ship that wasn't designed to land on Kerbin, but I docked a parachute unit to it's upper docking port.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=590449338
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=590449580
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=590449913
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=590450046