Kerbal: Project B.E.A.S.T: Part 12

Omg, like everyone else, I was just wanting to scream for the to JUMP!!! 27 meters is only 27 meters!

At least with going to the mun they seemed to understand what they needed to do, now they seem to just be doing things that aren't needed and somehow get it after an hour.

That last one is going to take a lot of hours. And Kerbals.

Also, H and N are forward and backward with the RCS thrusters, so you do have retro thrusters.

This was kinda frustrating to watch. The ending was worth it though ;)

Man that was a disaster.

The crafts literally crashed into each other and they could have flown the kerbal over. Why are they fucking around!

I don't even know how they'll get the guy orbitting the sun, I don't even remember how Scott did it *goes back to watch it*

Ice cold.

Small tip: RCS thrusters work best far from a ship's center of gravity and mirrored across that center, so like four thrusters around the nose end, and four more around the tail end.

Think of the ship like a lever, and the center of gravity as the fulcrum. Push at the tip of the lever.

In contrast, a reaction wheel works best at the center of gravity, since it wants to spin the ship around itself.

That should help with orienting such a large vessel.

Aagh. 30 minutes of trying to get the orbits exact by manuvering a massive ship instead of just jumping a tiny Kerbal. It's like they're trying to pick up a toothpick with a forklift and refusing to get out and just grab the toothpick.

And then dropping all the fuel instead of using it to slow down even a bit so that they're coming in at 2500 m/s. Even without the mountain I doubt they would have made it.

This series is great but guhhh.

Anybody know what "Mistakes Were Made" is in Latin?

True, it's not necessary to get that close with the ship (The suit has enough deltaV to land from orbit around around Minmus and get back again into orbit), but I generally parallel park too, just because I am a perfectionist I guess.

BUT: There are docking controls and RCS thrusters for a reason, to do that fine manoeuvring. Docking mode is the button right below staging. Space-bar then switches between translation and rotation mode and with caps-lock you can enable even finer controls.

Nah, their technique is fine, you can pull even faster re-entry speeds without problem. As long as you don't come in too steep the atmosphere should slow you down to free-fall speed by like 5000m, at which point you can engage the parachutes. Of course if you do it blind you gamble on not hitting a mountain, so... sometimes you lose.

You guys are making it a lot harder than it has to be. When your relative speeds are that low, just point yourself to the other spacecraft.

The game keeps auto switching your navball to target mode for a reason!

And your intercept changes when you turn because the RCS is causing micro changes to your orbit.

Going to your apoapsis does not change your orbit. Your orbit is your orbit and will not change unless you add or cancel out more velocity with your rockets and rcs.

Your spacecraft is wobbly because you didn't balance your RCS and its creating torque on your craft when it fires.

Target is you pointing at the target. Anti-target is you pointing away from the target. These are perhaps the most important directions to point when you are trying to rendezvous. As as I typed earlier, when your relative speed is as low as it is, just throw away what you know about orbits and just think about how would you get close to something down here on Earth. If you're in your car in a parking lot, and want to get closer to another car, you drive straight at it. AKA you point your craft towards the Target position on your navball and accelerate.

You guys are in perfect position for half the video but you keep going relative prograde/retro instead of just pointing at the craft.

You guys got the right idea at 21 minutes, but your relative speed is too high. In a case like that, point retrograde while in Target Mode and cancel out all relative speed, then point target and go.

31 minutes in, and I think you just had your Eureka moment. You are doing the right thing, I hope you realize why its working. Sorry for writing a fucking mini essay in here, but rendezvous and docking are very hard to do, especially if you don't read/watch tutorials.

You do have retro thrusters, your RCS. I think its N to activate retro RCS? Or maybe J, I can't remember.

Slow down at closest approach, don't do it right away.

Now you guys have the opposite problem now that you're close. Just point target retro grade to get speed to 0. You guys just did that 10 minutes ago! Target/Anti-target is not the ships prograde/retrograde. Target is literally just you pointing at the other object. You want to burn retrograde to 0 out your relative speed.

Holy shit guys just point retrograde. This is so frustrating especially since you had to do that to get this close to begin with.

The debris is going faster than you because its more aerodynamic so it has less drag slowing it down.

If those mountains weren't there, you would've been fine. To make reentry even better, put a drogue chute on your craft, in addition to the chute you already have. Drogue chutes open at a higher altitude and speed, slowing the craft down enough to safety deploy the main chute. I bet you would've survived the mountain landing if you had one. Drogue chutes are the orange ones.

You guys absolutely have enough fuel to go out and there and return. That thing has so much fuel you can go on a solar system tour if you wanted to.

Time to start yelling at the monitor again....

Had to stop watching, this series has become maddening.

By far the most frustrating episode to watch. The overthinking is making this series the hardest to deal with. I hope the crew end up at some point watching one video about rendezvous to realize how silly they're being. I mean, the ship is laying on top of the other and Austin says "not yet", and they spend 20 minutes wasting time until they reluctantly jump off.

Hopefully they'll learn this stuff soon enough. Still going to keep watching either way.

Austin saying "we're moving a meter a second, nah we can't do this" killed me.

Not going to lie, the last two episodes have not been fun to watch, with each one being about 90 minutes of these guys just painfully overthinking everything.

@vinny@austin@alex

The jetpack gives you guys about 500 m/s of deltav, and the thing about space is that there's no friction to slow you down. So even if you had the ships 10 km apart, with the ark travelling away from CFL at a relative velocity of 100 m/s, you could have the kerbal get out, point at the ark, spend 200 m/s of your jetpack to start travelling towards the ark at 100 m/s, wait for 100 seconds to travel 10 km, and still have 3 times as much jetpack fuel as you'd need to slow down and board.

The idea of eyeballing a spacewalk at 10 km is certainly terrifying if you haven't tried it, but the point is that at any distance under 1 km, and any relative velocity under 100 m/s, is well within the tolerances you're looking for with a rescue.

So... Step one, while in a tighter orbit and gaining distance to the target, match orbits with target craft before the point of passing it, so you will always stay a few hundred kilometers behind it. Step two, attempt to pass target craft so you can then slow down to let it pass up with you.. to...? No, I'm lost. 15 minutes into the episode and I have no idea what they're trying to accomplish.

Edit: Since when is 20 meters "not that close"!? Guys...!

Edit 2: This makes me really want them to record their reactions while watching Scott's video, so they can see just how silly they're being right now. I get that they don't know... But they could at least try.

Edit 3: It is just me, or does it sound like they're thinking of orbits as something completely separate from.. like, the place and speed of things in space? As if there's some external mechanic that's happening simultaneously as their attempt to dock. You can't screw up something's orbit by flying up to it and nudging it at 2 m/s. If you're in the same place, going in the same direction, at the same speed, then you've got the same orbit... All this talk about prograde and retrograde burning while in spitting distance of the target craft... If you wanna get closer to it, fly toward it!

Ooof, start of the video and possibly messing up "speeding up" with "going faster" there really makes that a lot slower than it otherwise would be.

You guys fussing over a couple meters per second and mere tens of meters as if it's insanely dangerous is both frustrating and hilarious at the same time.

Yards!

Vinnnnnny, why? You were 200 meters away and you muddled with it. You could saunter that distance in under 5 minutes.

And then it hits you! Two bodies in space collide at the speed of a slow hug and you think you still have to jigger something.

You were in its headlights and you didn't think to go for it?

Ahhhhh, nuns slapping yard sticks across your knuckles. That's a meter!

@chuck_: I hope so too! Watching Scott Manley handle the rescues so deftly has definitely spoiled me on the east coast crew's overly cautious approach.

I only watched first 15 minutes of the video before looking for the moment where they finally EVA, and then I skipped again to their actual landing attempt.

It's more fun if they're risking another Kerbal! :P

o7

awesome, looks like they have not learned anything since the last time. still obsessively matching orbit paths without worrying about intercept distance & relative velocity. Oh well, I'm sure they'll get it eventually

I feel like the easiest solution to a lot of this is to tell them to remember Bill, as they actually had hands on experience with the EVA then.

Bill was blazing by so fast that he killed himself on impact. To just keep that in mind would go a long way for them.

it is not unlike watching someone try to parallel park for an hour.

but, I mean, I had a youtube tutorial open on my second monitor the first time I did this. they fact that they are more or less figuring this out on experimentation, educated guesses, and whatever research Vinny did beforehand is pretty impressive.

@tekzero: Yeah, they really shouldn't of put that episode up until they were done. Having watched it and seeing how easy it is to cover large distances with the jet pack, it's pretty frustrating seeing them trying to get within 10 ft before jumping when they could of jumped 30 minutes prior.

There is way too much science happening here. Just get inside 1km and EVA already!

@awalczak08: RIGHT!? to be fair though, EVA's are terrifying when you're just starting out with them, even if a kerbal adrift in a spacesuit is not concretely worse than a kerbal adrift in an empty ship.

It's really the only reason this series works. It's easy to watch youtube and figure everything out, but this can be way more entertaining watching them slowly absorb orbital mechanics.

Dunning-Kruger in full effect here

Orbital docking works best if you get as close as you can and burn towards target, then burn retro to null target speed, then repeat until you're there. I feel like the GBEAST crew is trying too hard.

Also, the need to dump that huge ship for doing fine orbital maneuvers like this.

Yeah, you can only get so far with intuition and guessworking with minimal actual experimentation, and not having the physical knowledge that a position and velocity define an orbit. It's alright, it took Kepler a while too.

don't jettison stuff so high, use that fuel to bleed speed on approach. you don't instantly blow up on reentry, things overheat and then explode.

When they watch the Manley video I hope they record it.

That last 20 mins was some of the hardest I've laughed in a long time. Next episode looks...interesting.

Success has changed the B.E.A.S.T. program and the administration has become smug.

They are no longer reckless about throwing Kerbals out of and back into the atmosphere, which is detrimental to their mission goals.

The B.E.A.S.T. program was founded on the ideal of "Give us the biggest engine and fuel tank you've got!" Go rescue that poor planetoid Kerbal and hang the consequences!

They will never get that guy unless they stop underestimating the EVA suit's jet pack.

An actual spaceship actually crashed into actual Mars because the Americans were using Imperial and everyone else was using Metric. It's not just some theoretical issue.

I've never skipped through one of these before, but that 45mins-60mins section was the definition of unnecessarily overcomplicating things. Weeks ago, Bill (RIP) proved how good those jet packs are!

Don't get me wrong though, I am still super enjoying this series!

Maybe they will consider using a drone now...

Just fucking jump you are 20 meters away traveling .1 meters a second! Its been half ah hour of this bullshit GAHHH!!

Fucking love these videos keep them up.

Man, I want nothing more than for them to watch and comment over Scott Manely's video now. Maybe once they try to save the last Kerbal. I think they'll learn a lot and their amazement would be hysterical.

In Vinny's defense, he seemed like he wanted to go for the jump way earlier.

The argument that they didn't jump earlier because they didn't understand the distance in meters is a bit silly when they still didn't jump when the ships literally ran into each other. This just seems like a case where they watched too many movies in space where a little jump is incredibly hard.......without a jetpack. To be fair, it's not like they have kerbil jetpacks irl.

I wonder how many of these frustrated comments exist because they put the manly video up. At least their reaction to the jetpack stuff should be pretty great.

come on guys why do you still use maneuver nodes for basic stuff like deorbiting? You know how the physics work now , just point retrograde and burn untill your periapsis is sufficient.

Vinny needs to slap some more parachutes on that ship. A couple of drag chutes would solve that. Every time they come in so hot and this was bound to happen.