fuel cheat - sort of...

[GeorgePauley]

I made a wonderful mun mining base and mun orbital base.  I have flown many missions to pick up fuel from the mining base and carry it up to the orbital base.  The orbital base, in turn, serves as a refueling base for my deeper space missions.  The problem is that each mining base to orbital base takes about 2 hours real time, and it takes 10-15 missions to fill up the orbital base.  So about 20-30 hours total to get my orbital station full and ready to supply a deep space mission.

I've become a space trucker, and I'm not having fun anymore! 

I want to "cheat" and fill my orbital station up with fuel w/o having to run those 10-15 missions.  The infinite fuel cheat isn't what I want.  Or at least I don't think it is.  I just want to fill the orbital station, but have my other missions have to rendezvous and refuel as normal.  I just am SO tired of running the mining base to orbital base mission over and over again.

Can anyone offer some advice?  A mod?  Or maybe a save file edit?

[Spricigo]

There is several advice we can give in regards to designing more efficient vessels to cut the need for fuel or/and how to use ISRU /refuelling more effectively.  But more than anything the best advice we can offer is don't keep doing what is not fun for you.  Automatize the refuelling or just plain cheat and pretend you did it. 

There is a few mod options,  which one (if any)  works with the current version of KSP I don't know.

 

Edited June 3, 2017 by Spricigo

[bewing]

There is a cheat command in the Debug menu called SetOrbit. It can cut your non-fun time by a lot, I think.

When you have your tanker ship landed on the Mun and filled with fuel, open the Debug menu, select SetOrbit, and click the bottom buttons until it shows the name of your orbital base. Click "rendezvous". Suddenly your tanker is in orbit, 150 meters from your orbital station. You still need to dock and transfer the fuel. I would suggest transferring every single drop of fuel. Then undock and turn on infinite fuel. With infinite fuel, you should be able to do a very fast, very inefficient landing right where you want. Turn off infinite fuel, then fill it back up and repeat the process.

That should reduce the number of launches considerably, and make them much faster. Also the novelty factor of cheating away all the launching part should make it fun again for awhile.

 

[Starman4308]

The only other piece of advice I could give is to build your mining and transport ships as big as you can without dropping framerate too badly. If the limiting factor is human-time, then it's an excellent idea to build big, even at the expense of some efficiency.

Also, I think Hyperedit has some functionality to add resources to a vessel; I haven't used it, but it's there.

EDIT: And I think stock has bigger fuel tanks than ore tanks, so you might want to have your miner also be a refiner, so you can fill up a smaller number of larger tanks on the transport vessel.

Edited June 3, 2017 by Starman4308

[xendelaar]

another  way of filling up the tanks is to edit the save file. if you're ship consist out of several large fuel tanks it will be easy to adjust the fuel values in the safe file:

in game...just press ctr f5 and save the game. then edit the savegame file from the savegame folder with notepad.

in notepad, use the find function to locate your space station using its name in the searchquery.

somewhere in the lines below the ship's name you will find all its parts and the fuel it contains.  you can adjust the current fuel value from 0 to whatever you want. 

if your ships consists out of a gazillion F100 fuel tanks this method is clearly NOT the way to go.

[Foxster]

In your circumstances I'd use HyperEdit to refill the tanks for any missions already in flight.

After that I'd re-think my strategy and fly missions without the need to refuel. There is nowhere in the KSP system you can't get to and back from with a single launch from Kerbin, unless you are doing some base building or role-playing hauling of massive loads. 

Edited June 5, 2017 by Foxster

[Aegolius13]

I would second the "make your mining ship bigger" concept.  Mine seem to get bigger and bigger in every new career.   One Rhino can lift an absurd amount of mass off Minmus or the Min.  Nukes are probably better in theory,  but the part count can get excessive. 

[MiffedStarfish]

Yes, making your transport bigger is a good idea. depending on how competent you are at rendevous, (probably very, as you have done 10-15 refueling missions) I would capture a class D or E asteroid, and dock it to your station. it would eliminate the need for a signifiacnt protion of those missions.

[Nicias]

I use hyperedit mostly for this task. I make sure my refueling rig works, then I just fly the ship to the gate orbit, refuel with hyperedit, and leave.

[suicidejunkie]

1) Make your tanker at least 200 tons wet so you need fewer trips to orbit.

2) Include ISRU on the surface so you don't have to waste station fuel on the tanker going up and down.

3) Add docking ports to the tanker.

4) Reroute traffic to dock directly with the tanker. 

 

The old station is now a science ship that only needs occasional visits.  Problem solved?

Bonus: If your tanker includes nuclear engines, it can be a station orbiting almost any body and still refuel itself on Minmus as required.

 

 

[bonyetty]

Put your mine and refinery on minimus and fuel your interplanetary ships on mimimus surface. It takes stuff all deltaV to get to orbit there. It's something fun, different and not cheating. 

[sevenperforce]

Hack gravity and turn on infinite fuel.