Kerbal: Project B.E.A.S.T: Part 08

I seem to remember the Apollo missions went into orbit around the moon and then the lander detached while the other ship orbited. Is there a reason for not going into orbit and then landing?

Pretty sure i feel a stomach ulcer coming on...

*Puts on space pants*

I'm ready, go go go go!

Yep

Have they not ever heard of Terminal Velocity? They don't seem to understand how in atmosphere gravity works.

THIS EPISODE WAS TO GOOD! So many tragic mistakes.

Recommendation: Kerbal Alarm Clock

You have to set the timers and it will force time warp off. It prevents most murder-by-time-warp incidents.

The real question is will they learn about aerobraking between this episode and the next?

JAAAAAAAAAACK!!!

I'm so sorry for Austin. This series is going to kill him.

Or they could keep going since several of us find it entertaining. I love the madness of this feature.

This was better than I could have possibly hoped for. Only way to improve it is to have Scott Manley sitting in the audience booth, watching helplessly.

Great job, guys. See you later, Jack, Eridolin.

@dovah: The biggest difference between reality and KSP is that KSP is in miniature scale, so even though things are sort of realistically bound, there are margins of error that KSP lets you get away with that NASA didn't get to take advantage of.

So the Apollo missions had stricter constraints on deltaV and went with the idea of the command module remaining in orbit while a separate lander went to the surface, because every little bit of mass you take down takes energy to bring back up. That necessitates capturing the command module in orbit for the obvious reason of it still being there when the lander wanted to go back up.

Once you make the decision that everything going down can come back up, screaming at the Mun straight from Kerbin and braking at the last moment ends up being the most efficient way to go about it, minimizing losses of energy to direction changes. However, you are kind of playing roulette that you don't land on a crater's edge, and unless you are a wizard you won't exactly know where you are going till the last few moments, which is a big deal in Science and Career modes where you need to do science experiments in certain places. I split the difference and come in around 12km altitude, circularize, make a rough correction to get on a landing approach, and fine tune the final leg to make sure I'm coming down on something flat.

What a hero.

@alex Are you hopeful? Don't you worry...

This episode man...

Vinny, the angle of attack you take on Kerbin is a big f***ing deal. The part where you explode is when you hit high air resistance with a crazy speed. You want to skim the thinnest parts of atmoshpere to lower your apoapis with multiple go arounds instead of diving right into the thickest parts. That's the only way you're gonna land it without creating a 70-100k by 70-100k orbit.

TLDR

AEROBRAKING!

Next episode, he will learn aero-braking

One one hand, I hate sharing tips with the B.E.A.S.T. crew, because it might potentially mean fewer of these episodes. That said, this is such a great series, and I really hope you guys succeed.

One pearl of wisdom I remember from Scott Manley's tutorials: when you're really far away from your target, the location of the maneuver doesn't need to be precise, but the Δv requires very careful precision. The opposite is true when you're very close to your target, location of the node is much more important than speed changes.

Also, the reason you are supposed to burn half before the maneuver node and half after is because the node assumes an instantaneous change in speed at that location. Since your rocket needs to accelerate or decelerate, you try to average the burn on both sides of the node.

The sad thing is i really thought that was gonna be the run. I think they need to break their no save-scum rule after that.

The music for the "Part X" title cards is so, so good.

I imagine after getting this close, they'll be able to stick the landing next episode.

The next problem I see is recovering the stragglers, especially that one that appears to have been kicked into an orbit around the sun. My hope is that Vinny accidentally ends up visiting all of the other planets in his quest to recover it, although he might want to consider using the probe bodies lest he litter more kerbals everywhere (or worse yet, accidentally have one on an escape orbit out of the system).

I think they need to break it for the case where Vinny presses the warp button too much. There have been so many times where my heart has skipped a beat because it goes from x100 to x100000

I don't think I've ever seen a game Nope that hard.

They should have burn retrograde to reduce the velocity a lot before entering the atmosfere, they had the fuel and all the time in the world to do it....

@vinny: My one tip (though it may be too late): When approaching the surface of Mun, you are guesstimating the amount of burn to land, though you can do it more efficiently and less stressfully with Kerbal Engineer. In the VESSEL panel, there are two numbers you should watch: Suicide Burn (Dist.) and Suicide Burn (dV). These numbers tell how far above Mun's surface you can be at your current speed and still slow down before impact, assuming a full burn.

Also I pronounce "Eridolin" to rhyme with "her Ritalin." I could be wrong, but it sounds appropriate!

VINNY

WHY

DAT ENDING THOUGH

Autosave....

Denied.

Jack and Eridolin have just made my Mondays great again.

Vinny is getting frighteningly good at pulling off exactly what he wants to do... The only problem now is that he doesn't know what he should be doing, and that makes this constantly terrifying to watch!

And suddenly they know how to play Kerbal Space program.

oop, nope, spoke too soon.

this series is the best.

My favorite part of this series is the when they get nervous about hitting Mun when they are more than 30 kilometers away from it.

@vinny Awesome feature & great work on your inital orbit this time. I know you record them in advance so old news but good initial orbits make great foundations. Keep getting those down. Also just do the minimum you need so you're not wasting fuel. You're doing hard burns with steep angles sometimes. Along those lines, the timer next to the nav ball already has the time to burn there, why do the "test burn"? That does change velocity and changes your maneuver from it's intended trajectory.

I'm not 100% on this, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but also properly time your burns. When my maneuver node is 30 seconds away and it's a 10 second burn I'll do full throttle at 5 seconds until node intercept until 5 seconds after. Also the calculation is for full throttle, not the partial throttle you've been doing.

Sorry for the suggestions at all, just offering them up to make your launches more consistent. Maybe not the best suggestions since these are all already great videos and you're making it around the solar system just fine. Thanks again!

After watching the Battery explanation Periscope. I wonder how long it took Scott Manley to explain all that stuff to Vinny.

Vinny you did this on purpose I'm devastated

SPEECHLESS.

This should not have happened, you guys did everything right... but, I guess not, I'm bummed. Don't give up! We believe in you!

This is taking years off of Austin's life doing this.

Also, VINNY.

I super enjoy how fucking emotionally invested we are in this adventure. This is one of the best features GB has ever produced.

Vinny.

While I was initially a supporter of Project B_E_A_S_T, I can no longer in good faith defend the senseless loss of Kerbal life. Bob was a national treasure! He knew there were risks, but he didn't care. He took welcomed the chance to be the first Kerbal to tumble aimlessly on the surface of the Mun. His heroic journey in the face of impending doom inspired each and every one of us to be the best damn Kerbal we could be. But with each passing year, we send more and more good Kerbals to their deaths in the cold abyss. Leadership at Project B_E_A_S_T is complicit in the murder of dozens of cosmunauts. It feels like the mission controllers are flying by the seat of their pants! They use gut feelings and not hard science. How many taxpayer Kerbucks are being lost in space every year?

I can't stand it any longer! Jack and Eridolin had families; they had friends and now they have nothing. For what? In the name of science? Do you think Gud gives a damn about Munnar soil samples or EVA reports. Project B_E_A_S_T has condemned these brave souls to hull. This madness must stop immediately, which is why I am calling for the immediate defunding of all Kerbal space programs. If you would like to help in this initiative you can sign the petition at change.guv/Slay_the_B_E_A_S_T. Please be sure to sign and use the hashtag #SlaytheBeast to help put a stop to these atrocities! Bring out Kerbals home!

This might have surpassed Metal Gear Scanlon as the best ongoing video series.

VINNY YOU'RE TEARING ME APART VINNY!

That ending! Holy shit!

The tale of Jack and Eridolin will be forever etched in Giant Beast history.

Early on Alex is worried about jinxing the mission by putting something too positive on the flag. Then, right after he mentions Kerbal being the fourth best game of 2015, it crashes to desktop. There are no coincidences, only dead kerbalnaughts.

I have never been more glued to a video on this website, or possibly any other. I had to remind myself to breathe at times. That was so good gents!

This whole series would be over in 1 episode if you would QUIT TAKING SHORTCUTS.