So this design was sort of an improvement with some real deficiencies remaining. The raw power of 6 massive SRBs will get you to space but are a huge waste at the same time - you're fighting the air most of the way up! I took their exact design and did a few staging and piloting tweaks to get there and back with a reasonable amount of fuel... and then decided to do a little bonus mission based on an offhand comment in the video!

BONUS MISSION TIME!

During the video they happened to spot a distant moon on the map screen and commented 'we're never seeing that in this series'... so let's go see it!

F'ing awesome.

@heycalvero: Thanks. I'm glad at least someone liked this! :)

These are awesome. I don't have much to add other than to say that I hope you keep doing these!

Awesome stuff! Kerbal is not a game(sim?) that I'd particularly get into, but I've enjoyed the BEAST crews adventures and glad that others are getting ambitious with it. Well done.

These are soo good.

Love the bonus mission.

This game looks like a ton of fun, yet difficult to master.

These posts are some of my favorite on the site. I love seeing someone else try their ideas. Awesome work duder!

Thanks, it was a lot of fun to try and pull off!

Yep, these are great. Not sure why they aren't featured more prominently. It really helps me understand how much of their ongoing crashing and burning is down to design and how much to piloting and navigation. There's always a moment in every episode when I think they're making sense and then Vinny gets a crazy idea, so these tell me if he was right or not (because their flying sure doesn't).

These are always super entertaining. Keep up the good work!

Good job!
I think these expeditions of yours make it clear that while their construction skills are improving, B.E.A.S.T still has a lot to learn about flying the damn things!

Aw shucks, I'm just happy some people seem to like them. Kind words are encouraging!

Sometimes I do see disaster coming a mile away... like during landing when Vinny kept his SAS locked to 'retrograde' - meaning when he started going up his rocket whipped around to point straight down! At least change it to 'stability assist'!

Keeping SAS to retrograde is fine as long as you don't flip signs on your vertical velocity. If you perfectly zero it out, either by inhumanly good throttle control or cutting the throttle when you contact the ground, it will even swap to stability assist for you as it fails to recognize retrograde as a direction anymore. Back when ASAS was all there was I feel like I did a lot more flips during landing trying to track everything by hand.

Also you mentioned SRB staging, but are you aware you can right click SRBs and scale their thrust?

Wow it has been a while since I've played Kerbal - I didn't know that! Thanks! It will help when I finally decide what I'm going to do with their current video.

As for SAS you're right, I was more commenting on their propensity to overcook things, in which case switching to stability assist was the way to go for added safety.

You can limit SRB throttle and in real life you can actually vary the throttle aswell, The Spaceshuttle SRBs lower their thrust when passing max Q as an example. It is done in the buildingphase by using different fuel compositions so if you are gonna use the rocket project BEAST built it would strictly be cheating by going back to the VAB and changing stuff ;)

It rarely makes very much sense to limit their throttle instead of just removing one booster however. If you have to do that its usually a sign of a bad rocket design :)