It's not a seamless transition, if that's what you mean.
---------- Post added 09-20-14 at 07:41 PM ---------- Previous post was 09-19-14 at 09:11 PM ----------
added portholes
---------- Post added 09-21-14 at 02:31 AM ---------- Previous post was 09-20-14 at 07:41 PM ----------
For the
(emergency-only) parachute system, I decided to look at a parachute
calculator. The conclusion was that my ~8000-9000 (dry & full masses) kg spacecraft could have a descent rate of about 7 m/s with four 33.9-m-diameter parachutes.
Compare with the Apollo capsule (about 6000 kg), which has
three 24.4-m-diameter chutes.
Here is a rough mock-up I made to see what it would look like:
(The calculator calculates for one parachute only, so take the radius of that, find the area with pi*(radius)^2, divide the area by four, then find the radius with sqrt((area)/pi). In this case, one 67.8 m parachute is equivalent to four 33.9 m parachutes.)