Kerbal: Project B.E.A.S.T: Part 06

This is why they never should have gotten rid of Ghoul!

Still the best series around, can't wait for the next episode.

Next episode music gets me hype

Science hype

Is it weird that this game makes me question why things that seem so intuitive to me just don't work? Like I actually want to understand/learn why you can't just put a solar powered battery on an actual space ship and have it move forward. XD

Space, man. It's hard.

Ya I realised this after I typed out the comment and went back and edited out the bit about efficiency. I think what I was trying to say was that they are are easier to design efficiently with, because if you use them for your take off stage exclusively it makes things a lot simpler.

An example is the arrayed fuel lines and engines in this design are emptying at different rates, and when Vinny decouples them it causes instability by changing the shape of the rocket when they're still in atmosphere.

I really like identifying the problems with their designs and seeing other people do the same, but I hope they don't pay any attention to what we say.

Oh man what a cliffhanger!!

You know, Austin has contributed to a lot of good stuff on this website since he joined, but his contribution that I'm most thankful for is his "Vinny!" shouts.

As an educated guess, at our current tech levels, you would never be able to produce enough power through solar energy, although the ship would be 'weightless' in space it would still have the same mass, and as mentioned before newton's third law of motion means that you would need to push enough force in the opposite direction to get it to move. It would be pretty slow going.

If you think about the ships mass as the arrows on the right, you would need the same amount of arrows on the left (the thrust) to do anything. Which i'm not sure solar power could produce. I could be wrong though.

<< || >>>>>>>>>>>>>

@shivoa: True, but a rocket shouldn't need stabilizer wings. But you are right, adding wings to keep from flipping over and then ejecting them before they get to the part where they flip over is a bad plan.

No offence, but yeah you're completely wrong. In space, any thrust at all adds to your velocity. The problem with doing it with solar power is that you still need to push something away from you to give you thrust. That's just how momentum works, it's always conserved for a closed system, so in order to speed most of the ship up, you have to speed up a small part of it (the fuel) and push it in the opposite direction that you want to go.

Anyone notice that Kerbal's Ark waypoint? Is is that where it landed in the last episode?

The theme of this episode: Tsiolkovsky rocket equation and how does it work lol? :P

@l1ama: Yeah of course any thrust will affect your momentum but my point is it wouldn't be enough to have any significant outcome. Is this not correct?

And yeah the power alone wouldn't do anything but there are ways to use that energy for propulsion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_rocket

I feel like they should try making a space plane, they are so much more efficient and manageable, I mean they are playing in sandbox anyway so all the parts are there.

I kinda miss the editing from the first episode or two.

This series is so great

Symmetry Vinny! For the love of God click the Symmetry button! My OCD can't handle this.

It's really amazing how they can't hit that 90 degree EASTERN trajectory.

Polar orbit? check

Equatorial? NOPE

I really don't understand the fixation to turn at about 10000 meters up. That just makes the first phase harder!

No doubt you can use solar energy to power an engine. But like that article says, you still need "reaction mass" or "propellant" in order to get anywhere. There are actually electrically powered engines in KSP, which use xenon gas as their propellant.

One theoretical answer to this, and something which relates to your question, is the idea of a solar sail. A photon reflecting from an object actually exerts an extremely tiny force on it. So in a way you can be propelled DIRECTLY by solar energy. The thrust is very low (depending on the size of the sail), but as long as you're willing to wait long enough, any amount of acceleration can eventually add up to a very high velocity.

As far as thrust versus weight in space goes, your weight can obviously still be defined by the force of gravity exerted on you by whatever you are orbiting. By the time you're in any stable orbit, that's a very small force, but it still exists. If you're thrusting against that force, and your thrust is smaller than your weight, then.... I think you're right? I don't actually know for sure. But, fortunately, you almost never want to thrust in that direction anyway. For most maneuvers you will want to thrust in either the prograde or retrograde direction of your orbit, which for a circular orbit is at 90 degrees to your weight. Therefore, you don't actually have to fight against your weight at all.

That cliff hanger! GAHHH!

Oh my god, that preview! Don't flip the lander, Vinny!

haven't checked in on this series for awhile- the added music and editing helps a ton. Totally love it

Build a giant liquid fuel tanker truck to the heavens, THEN strap a comical, ridiculous amount of solid fuel boosters onto to it to get that semi truck into orbit. Works every time!

@vinny, stop casting bufu so much.

I used to enjoy the fusing episodes :)

Only a few seconds in and I suddenly realized how much I've missed Austin this past week.

Haha, yeah. Damn, now I want to re-watch the ER again.

what a cruel cliff hanger! Im hoping this K.P.B runs at least as long as Persona 4.

VINNNNYYYYYYYY!!!!!

move pitch get out da way.

Yep. I can't fucking wait for the next episode. This series is just too good.

I love this series! Beast thing in a good while! :D

Poor Valentina. Brought back to life so many times just so she could be spun around and blown up again.

Luda Lander <3

@austin_walker The reason why the navball has south and north upside down is becouse the navball is infact upside down ;) You are looking at Valentinas navball which is inside the cockpit and shes facing directly upwards with the dashboard and her navball in front of her.

Wings was all right, @austin_walker.

@shepdelonge: ok

I haven't played Kerbal in a bit, but I don't recall ever turning as soon as Vinny does. I used to start making angle adjustments when my solid boosters were done and I was pretty much out of atmosphere. Could someone who plays this more chime in on this?

@ssully: Honesty I think he's making his accent turn too soon or too aggressively. If you haven't played since 1.0 official, they redid the aerodynamics system and where you used to be able to start an aggressive accent turn around 5-7km (i think) it's now like 12km as the air looks like it's just pulling him side ways cause of all the junk he has mounted at the top.

Has anyone complained about using Oxidizer inside the atmosphere yet? If not, let me do it.

There, done.

@xymox: On Earth, you can move around by walking. You use your legs to push yourself away from the ground, which propels you forward.

Now imagine that you are on an ice skating rink without ice skates. You try to walk, but your foot just slips. You can't grip the ice well enough to push it away from you, so it's hard to move anywhere. On the other hand, suppose a friend is nearby. If you give your friend a good shove, it will push her away - and correspondingly, it will push you in the opposite direction. If you want to go north, you can push your friend south. The only problem is that once you give your friend a push, you'll be alone again. But, if you gather 20 friends together, and you guys all huddle together and push one friend away at a time, you can propel yourself around like this. But once you run out of friends, there's not much you can do, even if you still have the energy to push.

The situation is similar if, say, you're skydiving. If you push someone away from you, you'll be able to move yourself. Other than that, even if you flail your arms around and try to move, it won't accomplish much. Insects can fly because they have large wings, which allow them to push the actual air away from them. But there's no air in space (well, technically there's some infinitesimal amount, but never mind that).

So that's the deal. If you're in space, you really need to push something away from you to move anywhere - energy alone won't help with that. Some spacecraft have, for example, ion engines, which are indeed powered by electricity - they use electricity to shoot particles away from the spacecraft in order to accelerate. But you need to actually build an ion engine into your spacecraft in order to do that. Just having electricity is not enough.

@uracilhokenut:So, if I understand, the electricity you'd gather through solar panels would (kind of) be like eating a bunch -- just storing up energy that you're not actually using unless you "move those legs". Cool.

Using particles to propel you sounds pretty awesome though but I guess you need a lot of particles to get anywhere at all, or? Like to even begin to understand the effects of gravity or massive objects on your space ship is mind blowing to me. I always thought you just "point the thing at the thing" and Kerbal goes and shows this whole orbiting loop-de-loop "ride the gravitational pull" crazyness is a more effective way of doing just that.

@xymox: Yeah, that's right.

I'm not too sure of the specifics, but I believe that ships with ion thrusters can get away with having relatively small amounts of mass to shoot out (I think they use argon gas or something?), because they accelerate it to such a high velocity. A regular rocket is ejecting massive amounts of mass (it burns fuel and shoots it out of the back), but it's coming out at a slower speed compared to an ion engine.