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

These encounters are killing me, it's so infuriating. Quit monkeying about! Isn't the motto "JUST THROW KERBALS AT IT!"

I actually wanted to claw my eyes out around the 50:00 mark. Vinny was perfectly happy to use the jetpack to accelerate a kerbin to the speed of sound and turn him into a smear on the lunar surface, and then spent twenty minutes dithering because he wouldn't jetpack half a football field through space to catch a ship moving at a slow walk.

To sum up this video and most of this series:

Alex: We're fucked.

And then Vinny panics.

Austin: VINNY!

@avaren: but that's what I'm interested in. The thought process and trial and error. If all I wanted was an edited clip of success or failure I would simply skip to the end to see the results.

Jump out of the ship......PLEASE!!! (at the 48, 50, 55 minute marks)

OH. MY. GAWD.

I finally bought Kerbal Space Project and after going through the tutorial i don't understand how they are having so much trouble with landing from orbit.

Undoubtedly. The argument of not wanting to change because the current system seems fine enough from your perspective probably isn't arrogant, either.

NOPE GOTTA BE PERFECT

Is NASA using kerbin to run test procedures?

OH MY GOD HE HAS A FUCKING ROCKET PACK

YOU'RE TWENTY METERS AWAY

Ease up on the metric complaints guys. The issue isn't the meters. Americans know a meter is about a yard. And it isn't like they didn't know the ships were close when they hit each other.

The issue is surely the "per second" part. It could be feet per second or yards per second and they still would be a bit lost. Non-scientists usually work in distance per hour.

Anyway, what should have happened is they switch to the outside view and see the ships look like more than specks to each other. And then they realize it's okay to just try to head right at the other, either in ship or in a jetpack.

But they didn't, they messed it up.

Could they have deployed the chute and saved the kerbals at the end, or was something not allowing Vinny to deploy?

It would also be fun to see manly watch some of these videos and then come in to teach them.

This has little to do with metric vs imperial. Telling them they are 6 miles apart instead of 10km apart likely still feels too far for them even though in space terms that might as well be dead on.

The issue is they are missing out on the relative 3d coordinate, acceleration, relative velocity and distance. They keep pushing and pulling the ship closer and further in orbit but never sit back and see how that would pans out over time. They were getting better intercept further down the line when they draw their ship close, but decides to pull back again after thinking they are gaining "too fast" but didn't realize they are on a different plane so there's a limit on how close they can really get.

They went through the similar problem again during the ram into the other ship part. Having a wobbly ship certainly doesn't help either.

@roy42 said:

@tobiasparker said:

For day to day use the imperial system is undoubtedly better and for scientific purposes the metric system is already used.

Undoubtedly. The argument of not wanting to change because the current system seems fine enough from your perspective probably isn't arrogant, either.

Undoubtedly.

I mean, Liberia and Myanmar certainly couldn't be wrong about this either.

Undoubtedly.

Oww, I've killed a lot of kerbals in my day, but not because I hit a mountain before my chutes could properly deploy.

I think they're ready for a proper trip to Duna. I learned how to reach that looong before I learned orbital docking.

When you do get around to watching the Scott video please make a reaction video.

This was the most frustrating episode yet. good christ, I don't even play the game and I know you don't need to be anywhere near that close. I love the guys bu they are trying my patience

I've landed on the Kerbal equivalent of Mt. McKinley before and it didn't go well. But I wasn't foolish enough to bail out of my ship.

They were close to being able to deploy their parachute and the parachute works quite quickly. He bailed out at 280m/s and he could have deployed at 250 (maybe). Heck, why not just deploy early? It's not like you have other uses for that parachute anyway, fire it and then leap out after it rips off!

They need to get their return capsule weight down. That's why the ship is still going so fast so close to the ground.

I'm pretty sure the problem isn't their lack of familiarity with meters. When they were 100 meters away he mentioned how it's about the length of a football field (300 feet). Which is totally accurate.

They just greatly undervalue the power of the Kerbal Jetpack.

My cat just died suddenly from heart disease. Vinny and crew is exactly what I need right now. Thank you so much for making these videos.

This. I think a lot of the early videos also show that BEAST doesn't really understand this -- all you're trying to do in a maneuver is make your velocity vector look how you want it to look at a given position.

It seems like they get very hung up on the various things exposed by the game, like apoapsis, periapsis, "intercept" nodes, etc. Without realizing that those are just properties, not the thing itself.

@skullcrushermountain: and wow I live in Smallish town (Chapel Hill N.C.) United States .... and I am pretty sure I could parallel park better than that. Man...

You CAN deploy the chute early, BUT you still have to be going slower and you also have to change the level the chute opens (not deploys, but opens. you have to change the altitude according to the height youre landing at)

@avaren said:

I love seeing all this meticulous inching their way towards something they could just reach out and grab with their hand.

Others have suggested this, and I want to see it so much. I especially want to see their reaction when Scott Manley laughs at their Mun rocket!

This is getting frustrating to the point I don't if I can finish it.

@alex: You can't really mess up an orbit by bumping into something (unless you are going very fast or are very massive). The only two things that affect the shape of your orbit are your velocity and position so bumping into something at 2 m/s (about 5 mph) isn't going to have a noticeable affect on the orbit of either craft. If you were in a car going 5 mph and hit another car it would nudge it a little but isn't going to have a major effect on its position or speed. Another effect of this is that if you are close to an object and have a relative velocity close to zero you must have the same orbit to that object. Knowing this makes it a lot easier to park next to an object in space because you don't need as much fiddling around in the map, you can just pull up next to it and match speeds.

YES!

@alex@vinny@austin y'all can watch Scott's video now. What he did won't help you with the one orbiting around the sun. Also, please record yourselves watching that video.

My heart.

I love it, the screwing up is the best part. It brings forth the emotions! And thats exactly what makes this series! IF you weren't screaming at your screen it wouldn't be as good.

Now that it's been brought up, how did Austin survive living in Canada with the metric system for so long?

Also I'm realizing Vinny perfectly parking that spaceship and rescuing that one guy is his version of Drew's The End fight. A glimmer of skill and triumph just to show how good things could be. Then everything collapses into bullshit again immediately.

That was utterly excruciating. Why have they collectively decided that the only way to descend from orbit is to take the shallowest possible entry vector at high speed? Just... slow down!

Next week looks like an absolute riot. Can't wait.

I really want them to watch Scott's video and react to it on video.

Austin doesn't understand the metric system, Alex doesn't understand relative vs absolute velocities, and Vinny just wants to watch it all burn.... The screwing up I get and love, that's what made the series so gut busting hilarious up until now, but watching them fumble over principles that have been previously demonstrated to them yet somehow never really sunk in is just frustrating. Trying to get the ships within inches because you are so worried about the jetpack thrust/dV is lunacy when they have seen previously just how powerful and efficient the pack really is. I really hope that after all then when they made the transfer using only 10% (or less if I remember) of the mono in their pack, that they have an "aha" moment and stop trying to park the ship right up the other ships ass....

Please don't blame the Metric system for their issues with distance. A yard and a meter are pretty much the same length.

This feature is so good. Those previews always look so amazing though I imagine it takes an exhaustive amount of time for Vinny to cut them. For the record I'm extremely interested in seeing an attempt to build and dock with space stations. Even after watching all of these videos I'm no where near understanding how one is suppose to play Kerbal by themselves. You guys make it look so much more appealing to play with other people that I might never play Kerbal Space Program. I could always look up tutorial videos but pfffffffft boooooring, who wants to see people who know how to play this game when you can have these three knuckleheads banging their brains against it. I really thought you guys would make it until I saw those mountains. Better luck with the next attempt.

I LOVE this series but please maybe learn from some of your mistakes.

Learn more about entry speed to Kerbin. You're coming in really fast and jettisoning your fuel tank so early without using it to slow down first.

Learn about the parachute.

Learn about how far you can go with an eva. The 45 minutes of trying getting closer was tough when you were right there.

I'm sorry if this seems like telling you how to play. Just suggestions to keep learning and make these less frustrating. Mistakes are fun to watch, same mistakes, not so much.

You guys make this really maddening sometimes, but I'm still loving it.

However, you MUST figure out when and how to use your SAS and RCS though! Seeing you guys turn the reaction wheel (T-key) off while trying to turn that flying missile silo just using RCS by itself instead is monitor-yelling annoying.

Just remember :

• RCS is for micro-adjustments on POSITION
• SAS reaction wheels are for ROTATION.

Additionally, I strongly recommend hooking up an Xbox 360 controller, switching to "Docking Mode" in the UI and using it for your RCS thruster maneuvers. That way you don't have to use any confusing keyboard controls that are hard to remember.

Fun fact regarding rocket engine overheating in space - This is oversimplification, but basically, rockets can more easily overheat from continued thrust while in space... because there's no medium to dissipate the heat from the rocket engine body with. In atmosphere, the air hitting the rocket is generally much cooler than your rocket (unless you're traveling at re-entry speeds) so as cool air hits your rocket, it cools it quickly. Space itself is nothing, so there is literally nothing to exchange heat with.

Think of the rocket engine burning at full thrust as a hot plate in a blazing oven - taking that same hot plate out (shutting the engine off) and exposing it to the air in the kitchen is sort of like turning that engine off in space. The plate will cool slowly as long as it is not exposed to heat again (throttling the rocket back up). However, putting that hot plate in the kitchen sink filled with room temperature water (think of the water as Kerbal's atmosphere) will cool that hot plate much faster (might break it too) than just holding the plate in the air.

So, how does Kerbal allow you to address this issue for long burns on high efficiency rockets in space? Radiators. Just like in cars and liquid-cooled CPUs, radiators can be used to dissipate large amounts of generated heat when regular convection is not sufficient or possible, but in KSP, really only the nuclear engine gets hot fast enough from continued full thrust to be a problem, so don't worry about it, unless you decide to build a ship with a rocket engine that will be fired at full thrust for a very long (2 minutes or more straight) amount of time.

TL;DR - DROGUE CHUTES, DROGUE CHUTES, DROGUE CHUTES!! Add them alongside your main parachute! And stop using RCS only for turns instead of either SAS by itself or SAS + RCS. RCS is mostly for position adjustment, not rotation. Also use a controller for RCS maneuvers to make things easier.

@jhebbel said:

The sad thing is, Austin seems like the most educated of the group but he keeps second guessing himself. I like that they didn't go through all the tutorials at the start of this series, part of the fun is learning from your mistakes but it doesn't seem like they are learning that much(or remembering what they learned).

The most frustrating to watch is when they loop around Kerbin multiple times cause they're afraid they will burn up in the atmosphere.

Yea, at the beginning I really thought Austin was going to be the one to bring some sanity to this, but he keeps listening to Alex who is scared if the ship is not inches away moving at a rate of 1 in/yr. Also Alex's constant mistrust of instrumentation and constant need to switch to the ship to see it (as if looking at it could tell him more than telemetry) is annoying as well, but a little less so because the ship view plays a little nicer in a video broadcast format anyway.

So after doing like 50 u-turns with the rescue ship and worrying about whether the Kerbal can cover 75 meters with his jetpack or not, he does it with 96% fuel remaining.

@jdp83: Actually RCS are great for rotational control as well especially given the mass of the ship, they just have them in the worst place possible, the need to be placed as far from the COM as possible. And Vinny needs to learn the translation RCS controls as well instead of constantly wiping that massive space turd around to perform minute maneuvers.

Yes this.

@cooljammer00: I did totally fine in Canada because I totally understand (and even support) the metric system. Working in units of 10 makes a lot of sense!

In the end, the metric/imperial conversion was not our problem with this stuff. If it had said "This ship is 100 yards away" I promise, we'd still have been nervous about sending a kerbal across that distance. The problem was that we don't have lots of experience with orbital rendezvous and things the power of the EVA jetpack. If you do know about those things, then you know that 100 meters "isn't that far" for a kerbal to travel. But when all you know is "We only did this once before and it was the tensest thing we've ever done in the series, so tense that we literally couldn't bring ourselves to keep recording that day," then a football field of space seems pretty fucking far.

That's a thing that I think has been lost in a lot of this: The only time Alex and I see this game is when Vinny plays it for the feature (which we record basically once every other week.) Vinny has played more than that, but it's not like he's at home practicing maneuvers. So we're gonna keep goofin' up as we learn. Sometimes that results in hilarious explosions. Sometimes it results in bad parallel parking. But when I think about how far we've come from that first set of videos (what the fuck's a delta v?), I'm pretty proud of what we're managing to do these days.

This is actually the worse disaster the BEAST Space Program has endured. Two Kerbalnauts killed in one catastrophic accident. All previous incidents only involved a single fatality. My condolences to the families of Megxie and Bob Kerman.