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Mun Base Design and Thought Process


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Pretty sweet base! If I may ask, how did you go about connecting the towers to each other? Some construction rover nearby, or were they rovers themselves at some point?

 

Rune. Or you are Kod flying skycranes, of course.

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I tried rovers for a while, but I suspected claws of bugs that made me stop using them. Now I skycrane everything on Mun/Minmus.

I have a couple Skycrane designs. My heaviest skycrane is a 2.5m 1600 fuel body, with twin 1.25 400 fuel side mounts. Those side mounts carry thuds. It has a large reaction wheel, and lots of RCS. 400 side tanks have 4 place anywhere RCS underneath them. This craft has LOTS of RCS. This makes the skycrane very wide so that I don't scorch the payload.

My first step is to just land somewhere pretty close with the piece and save my game. :)

After that I take a moment to orient myself with the piece the rotation and the RCS, so that I'm comfortable with the controls.

I start bumping up my thrust until I've just about overcome Mun gravity. I'm trying to make the craft near-weightless with the Thuds. Then I use RCS to hop off the ground and dock with the base. I occasionally tap vertical RCS since the Thud thrust will never be perfect. Once I dock, I fully refuel the skycrane, and send it up to the station for the next piece, leaving excess fuel at the station.

Sideways planetside docking is pretty laborious, which is why I gave it up and built the vertical landing for the ore hauler. With a little practice, you can fly over your landing pad, line up, and then just dock normally. It's not fuel efficient, but late game, I want time-efficient.

Late game, I bring Ore to stations instead of fuel for the same reason. It's much easier to refuel many ships at an ore processor -- you just hook everybody up, turn everything on -- everybody gets whatever fuel they need.

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Oh, so over-engineering and good piloting. Good, trusty combination! Still, as you say, horizontal expansion is tricky, and high gravity wells become very difficult and tedious (all that fuel to hover!). I encourage you to look at my Base-In-A-Box for additional inspiration, if you don't know of it, or @Temstar's old examples. It is a bit tricky to figure out a good construction rover and standardizing the port height, but once you figure things out, it's a trusty method that works all over the place, and bases that sprawl over a large area look cool as boop.

The ore thing, I totally concur. It's much more convenient, not to mention it's incredibly dense and gets an awesome tankage fraction, so you actually save some in theory, even if in real life margins and such eat all those savings.

I would also add that a rover with Klaws is a very easy way to refuel on the ground... and if it has two Klaws, it can actually serve as a towing vehicle to connect to the base and refuel directly form the drills (if the lander has wheels, of course).

 

Rune. Also, not so glitchy if you leave if unhooked before you exit the scene, and quicksave before refueling operations.

Edited by Rune
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When you lay your pieces from base-in-a-box on their side, how are you getting the rover to connect its top port to what will be the bottom port of the tower and then erect the piece? Do all the connecting fuel tanks that are between towers also have a bottom port?

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Although it is cool to build ground bases, also giving a sense of self-accomplishment rarely found elsewhere I found out that, in terms of game efficiency, it is better just to build a huge craft with big fuel tanks, isru, drills, nuke gens and or solar gens and land it in one piece, drill and back to orbit when filled, to refuel other ships, than having all smaller ships landing on the ground base.

 

but they look pretty, ground bases :)

Edited by Jaeleth
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5 hours ago, Jaeleth said:

in terms of game efficiency, it is better just to build a huge craft with big fuel tanks, isru, drills, nuke gens and or solar gens and land it in one piece, drill and back to orbit when filled, to refuel other ships, than having all smaller ships landing on the ground base.

but they look pretty, ground bases :)

Agree, but It's always going to be cheaper to keep the ISRU in orbit that way. If you do that though, you need to be reasonably confident as to the fuel requirements, and it makes the craft design a tad more complicated.  You could also just have a fuel rig which brings processed materials to orbit and acts as an orbital fueling station.

I just think of my mining rig as a orbit capable ground base. I like to keep it capable of ferrying payloads to the surface too 

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15 hours ago, Wcmille said:

When you lay your pieces from base-in-a-box on their side, how are you getting the rover to connect its top port to what will be the bottom port of the tower and then erect the piece? Do all the connecting fuel tanks that are between towers also have a bottom port?

Well, I think what you mean is "how do you put one of the cylindrical modules upright" and the answer is "legs!". I came up with a fancy uprighting system for the long ones, and the short ones can usually just do it themselves with the magic of reaction wheels. After they are upright, the rover drives underneath and if necessary makes a little hop on monoprop rockets to establish a connection. And no, the corridors (no fuel tanks there, they are properly hollow!) don't have a docking port for the rover (too small for the rover to fit with the legs and all). Instead, when I have another module on top of the rover, I drive to them and dock them for transport, while they erect themselves tanks, again, to OP reaction wheels and disposable legs.

7 hours ago, Jaeleth said:

Although it is cool to build ground bases, also giving a sense of self-accomplishment rarely found elsewhere I found out that, in terms of game efficiency, it is better just to build a huge craft with big fuel tanks, isru, drills, nuke gens and or solar gens and land it in one piece, drill and back to orbit when filled, to refuel other ships, than having all smaller ships landing on the ground base.

 

but they look pretty, ground bases :)

The nice part about bases, once they are set up, is how you can land any other thing and fuel it on the spot. Sure, a rover would do the same thing, but as you say, a big base looks cooler. My crews all stop at Minmus for some flag-planting when they are doing their experience runs, so it is a mighty convenient place to top up on fuel and snacks before popping out to interplanetary space for a bit. But yeah, in the end it's just another node for a fuel depot architecture... for low gravity moons it's not that convenient, I agree. But when the gravity well is steeper... refueling on Tylo's or Laythe's surfaces can open them up to easy and reusable transport architectures.

 

Rune. The difference between 7km/s all at once and 3.5km/s, refuel, then 3.5km/s is dramatic on ~300s Isp engines.

Edited by Rune
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  • 4 weeks later...
On 1 June 2016 at 4:15 PM, Violent Jeb said:

Agree, but It's always going to be cheaper to keep the ISRU in orbit that way. If you do that though, you need to be reasonably confident as to the fuel requirements, and it makes the craft design a tad more complicated.  You could also just have a fuel rig which brings processed materials to orbit and acts as an orbital fueling station.

I just think of my mining rig as a orbit capable ground base. I like to keep it capable of ferrying payloads to the surface too 

Yes. Best of both worlds is having ISRU and large fuel tanks in orbit and a big ore hauler going up and down at a low gravity world. This way you'll minimize energy needs since orbital stations have much more light available than slow revolving planet surfaces, plus you can make fuel in orbit at the same time you're collecting ore down there or, even if you don't want to pack a whole lot of ore containers in the station as well, fuel manufacturing is a much faster process than ore drilling anyway so, you'll save time.

 

Only drawback is, indeed, fuel calculations, but with 2 or 3 launches one will probably get a very good estimate, plus margin.

 

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