don't think there's any particular reason to deorbit directly from such a high orbit (it would seem rather difficult to get the right flightpath angle...).
Yes, I was trying to play it with "some" rules. It was remaining only 28% of OMS fuel from the extra fuel payload I took from the beginning, so the only option was to reenter from elliptical orbit. Since I have explored out-of-the manual stuff, here a list of other funny things, and less funny bugs that have happened
1) The MCC is confused with mass estimate, the extra implicit payload being actually burnt, it reported all the time super-heavy Shuttle. No issue though, because the mass in ITEM 9 was going down as expected even after I manually refill the OMS tank! So Shuttle mass works fine even when refuelling, well done! But I am wondering, does MCC / DPS knows about an explicit payload being released? And for implicit, how does that work?
2) Very weird report in SPEC 22 in the star table, one of the star report a Delta Min of 1923 (never seen such a high number before there)
3) In OPS 3, never succeeded to get a REI, but I am not surprised with such an elliptic orbit (I had e>0.1). So I solved equations on a piece of paper up there for re-entry to know what velocity to add at apoapsis to enter the EI with the correct c1 and c2. That does not give any information on the range afterwards, neither a way to target an landing site, but for bailout, it should fixed the flightpath angle right (in spherical trivial gravity and spherical earth). Here it is:
reentry.py4) @Thorsten, I got again (after 3 days) the bug for the burn attitude. This time, I did not align IMU at all to check if there were involved in creating the issue. Then I tried to align IMU to see it that would improve the situation (was still running S2 on G4 in OPS 3), not a change at all. Please, give me a list of things to monitor for my next flight to chase this bug, that is quite annoying
An idea: would it be possible that "pausing" flightgear is a cause, I am doing it for a cumulated tens of minutes in these long runs, so...
Then, I have followed your advice. I switched to INRTL just after OMS ignition to put the shuttle into something close to what it could be. That is quite-hard, shuttle rotations while OMS are running are very weird!
I've also anticipated that I would screw the thing during 30 seconds, so I added a velocity component to take into account my screwing time. My reentry calculation targeted something around HP=25nm, my extra burn time moved it to HP=-5, and... here we go!! That is quite some luck, especially if you see on the ADI ball in which position I was retro-firing... And, 4% left in the OMS tank.
5) I think the antenna gets stowed with the final dish orientation depending on the one at which the stowing starts, so yea, I see what direct stow is made for
6) Please, remove from the menu that thing called "Map (Canvas)", 5 minutes before reaching EI, I clicked on this menu hoping to find an airport nearby in case I could manually fly there instead of bailing out. My fg session froze totally, black screen. I am super frustrated, will never know if I could have survived re-entry, arrrrrrg!!!
Gonna fix my sadness by going back on super elliptical next time, maximal charge on the payload (still have to check what is the maximum payload weights)
Cheers.