They said the Apollo 11 command module re-entered Earth's atmosphere at Mach 36 and temperatures of the air in front of the heat shield reached nearly 20,000° degrees Fahrenheit, which is well beyond the melting point of sanity. Today, I loaded up the latest build of SimpleRockets 2 with the new re-entry effects Philip and I have been working on and I hurtled my command pod at Smearth at nearly Mach 40.
The new, resizable Heat Shield part is protecting the command pod and if you have really good eyes you can see in the lower left that it reaches over 13,000° Celsius. The command pod is mostly protected, though it does take some damage from the excessive heat. The G-forces from the deceleration (which I did not measure) would undoubtedly turn any person into a pancake of squishy. So, while I am way hotter than Apollo 11, my astronauts would be far more deader. It's a good thing we don't have any astronauts in SR2 yet.
We're really excited about the new effects. Players have been asking for them for ages and we really struggled with how to tackle the visual effects. Philip did a great job with them and we're all really happy with how they turned out. We also reworked the drag model so we could monitor part temperatures. Amazingly, after implementing some thermodynamics equations discovered by really smart people, the model seemed to be about right without much tweaking. Of course, I'm sure when you all get your hands on it, you'll find all the hidden features (ie - bugs).