KerbalX Program? Reusablity.

[ArmchairPhysicist]

Today’s career save was started to address something that’s been bugging me. Whenever we play the kerbal way, we end up wasting a lot of money incinerating nuclear rockets or smashing 5m  asparagus boosters into the ground. Yes it may be the safest and most reliable way to go about things due to the simple nature of disposable parts and no pollution (please squad, uranium and reentry do not make rainbows and unicorns). However it’s still expensive. 

So ive tried doing the SpaceX falcon/bfr approach and its angering me. Yes, I can do a two stage to anywhere, that’s not the hard part. What’s getting difficult is the expense and complexity of designing the a booster that can put a heavy final stage into orbit, and have leftover fuel to deorbit, and have the heat resistance to not burn, and have the aerodynamics to not tumble through the atmosphere, and have the glide capability to land it into the 98%+ funds recovery area. 

Ive done it. My latest launcher bullseyed the KSC with enough accuracy to make modern icbms jealous. The problem is that in the time it takes to build the reusable rocket, Ive outgrown it and need a new size for bigger missions. This cuts down on time actually exploring. 

Do other players even bother recovering the first stage? Seems like it’s not all that worth it.

One good thing that came of it was I accidentally developed a Shuttle/parachute style pod that I can pop a womprat with. It reenters nose first and flies like a missile using air breaks to adjust its speed and fins to steer. First test flight I landed in on the abandoned runway from orbit.

[severedsolo]

I usually just slap a few parachutes on it and let stage recovery handle it. I don't particularly care about the money but it's nice to have the boosters back for KCT/ScrapYard to reuse.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

On stock career settings? No, it's generally not worth the effort as you should be literally drowning in funds after a bit.

Although if you find the play style to be fun and engaging don't let that stop you!

Sounds to me like you are forcing yourself to do it for efficiency, and possibly missing out on the parts of the game you enjoy more.

[ArmchairPhysicist]

11 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

On stock career settings? No, it's generally not worth the effort as you should be literally drowning in funds after a bit.

Although if you find the play style to be fun and engaging don't let that stop you!

Sounds to me like you are forcing yourself to do it for efficiency, and possibly missing out on the parts of the game you enjoy more.

The biggest reason I’m trying it is that after all my years playing, I’ve never done it, and the waste is bugging me. But if I can just mine xenon with the config Edit I don’t need funds, which feels cheaty. 

However it’s a skill I want to master for late game. My play style ends up as a very expensive space program. I like 7.5m-10m launchers. Some projects had a 5 core 5m Launcher. It’s gets expensive but it works. If I could build a single core ultra heavy launcher, think 10m-15m, I could get it reusable due to the stupid amount of fuel and lifting power granting me a bigger margin for error. SpaceX style sea dragon. Would maintain profits but still be able to launch a 2001 style ship in one go.

Edited April 12, 2018 by ArmchairPhysicist

[klesh]

It really depends on how you like to play and what you enjoy doing.  

Some players don’t care about their first stages, nor about leaving LKO full of spent upper stages. Some will leave their upper stages in LKO so as to play space cleanup after they research the klaw. Some might not know how to do a recoverable program yet, though its a goal theyre shooting for.

Some players will use the best equipment they've unlocked regardless of costs; Vectors and TwinBoars galore! While others with do prelaunch mathematics and launch only the smallest and cheapest and most minimal craft they can, no matter how many funds are available.  What is best is whatever you get a kick out of.

In terms of the economics behind it, the stategies can be used to adjust the contract payouts to suit your style. Should you be the carefree stage flinger, that playstyle can be paid for by converting some of your reputation gains into extra funds to cover the cost.  

Should you find landing your first stages to be tedious and not fun, then dont do it. Should you find yourself running out of funds using disposable launchers, then adjust your stategies to yield more funds and make that launch style economical. 

I personally enjoy recovering my first and second stages, but I reduce the tedium by relying on parachutes and not particularly caring how close I get to the KSC.   Closer is better, to be sure.  But recovering at 50% is also better than not recovering at all.  

Edited April 12, 2018 by klesh

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Personally, every stage I launch that isn't the last bit on top is disposable and throw away. (Besides space planes I guess, and even some of those use drop tanks.)

I think I have like 200+ pieces of debris being tracked in my current save? There is something to be said I think for ignoring min/max style efficiency and just getting on with playing and enjoying the best parts of the game. (Unless min/max is what you enjoy, and if so; carry on!)

For me, one of the highlights of the game is coming within visual range of some ancient piece of hardware from the early days of my program, and watching it sail by through the inky blackness.

[ArmchairPhysicist]

6 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Personally, every stage I launch that isn't the last bit on top is disposable and throw away. (Besides space planes I guess, and even some of those use drop tanks.)

I think I have like 200+ pieces of debris being tracked in my current save? There is something to be said I think for ignoring min/max style efficiency and just getting on with playing and enjoying the best parts of the game. (Unless min/max is what you enjoy, and if so; carry on!)

For me, one of the highlights of the game is coming within visual range of some ancient piece of hardware from the early days of my program, and watching it sail by through the inky blackness.

Have you ever suffered a collision? Everyone uses the *kesler syndrome intensifies* meme, but I’ve never actually hit anything except the spent stages of the same rocket (didn’t clear the booster before adjusting retrograde, things happened).

[Rocket In My Pocket]

5 minutes ago, ArmchairPhysicist said:

Have you ever suffered a collision? Everyone uses the *kesler syndrome intensifies* meme, but I’ve never actually hit anything except the spent stages of the same rocket (didn’t clear the booster before adjusting retrograde, things happened).

Nope, never have. I've come pretty close to some stuff though. Like close enough to rendezvous and go dock with it if I wanted to lol.

The odds are just so low. Anyone who has done rendezvous on purpose knows what a chore that is; imagine how unlikely that is to happen by accident. Honestly if I ever get struck by a piece of debris it'll be one of the greatest KSP moments I could ever have! Lol.

Anyways, I may be wrong and I'd love to see it tested conclusively but my suspicion would be that in most cases you'd be moving at rather extreme angles compared to each other, at wildly disparate speeds; and a physics collision would likely be impossible even if you intersected the other craft, it would be over and gone before the game engine knew what was happening.

Edited April 12, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[RizzoTheRat]

I decided to go as reusable as possible on my last career (I've started a new career for 1.4.2 and plan to do the same where possible).

I came up with an SSTO that can put a 45 tonne payload in to an 80km orbit, but uses parachutes for landing so only needs a small amount of fuel left for a final braking burn as the chutes get it down to something like 20m/s.  I can easily get it to land within a few km of the KSC and probably averaged something like 97% fund recovery.  Not every landing gets this close though...

The only non stock part is the landing gear from the Kerbal Reusability Expansion.

Payloads are attached with docking rings rather than decouplers, and my ships are modular, so I have a hitchhiker based crew module which then docks with the booster again for re-entry after the mission, so I can send up another crew module and attach to the orbiting ship for the next mission.

This lifter got me to Duna and got the supporting elements of an Eve mission in place, with the Eve lander launching as an SSTO from Kerbin.  Then 1.4 came out and I started again so I don't know if could manage a Jool mission without a heavier launcher.

SSTO has some hefty weight penalties though, I think a multi stage approach like Falcon is better, but dropping a stage before orbit requires either Stage Recovery mod to assume it parachutes down and is recovered, or Flight Manger for Reusable Stages which saves at the point of separation and lets you go back and fly the booster down once you've parked the upper stage in orbit.  Not played with these yet as the SSTO approach works fine for the sort of payloads I'm hauling, but gets trickier as your payload gets heavier.

The Reusability Expansion also includes Falcons Grid Fins and cruise missile style folding wings that I've not had a play with yet.  I'm also using kOS on my current game and can now automatically put parachute landing craft down within about a 1km radius, but as I'm using USI Life Support and Kolonisation I suspect my payloads are going to get heavier this game.

 

Edited April 12, 2018 by RizzoTheRat

[juanml82]

I've been playing science for months so I never cared about recovering the first stage, but I've started a career save yesterday so I'm wondering about that (a bit. Will probably do it only once or twice), but how do you land the first stage back at the KSC?

Essentially, unless you're taking off vertically until the first stage is exhausted, you'll do a gravity turn that will make the first stage separation happen over Booster Bay. So in order to land your first stage at the KSC instead of the ocean, you need enough fuel to cancel out the horizontal speed (which is towards the east) plus burn back to the KSC. A hop to the island airfield seems to consume less fuel

[Snark]

3 hours ago, ArmchairPhysicist said:

Do other players even bother recovering the first stage? Seems like it’s not all that worth it.

There's basically no economic reason to do it, at least not in my experience.  The amount of money recovered is fairly negligible, and it's a lot of extra time and hassle to do a thing that I, personally, don't find fun or interesting.  So instead of spending those extra few minutes trying to recover a stage, I can spend 'em to dash off a quick contract with some simple throwaway craft, and get more money in less time.

However, economics aren't generally the dominant factor in a career game, I've found, unless you've got the difficulty setting cranked way up.  I find that by the time I get to late career (in particular, after I've got R&D upgrade), I've got plenty of cash to do whatever I want, so I don't have to worry about it much.

So the main reason to do this is the same reason as just about everything else in KSP, i.e. because you find it fun and/or challenging to do so. 

So:  if you like designing for recovery, and then executing it, by all means go for it!  Just be aware that that's why you're doing it-- you don't need to, economically speaking, so you should only be doing it if it's actually fun for you.

[KerikBalm]

Try spaceplanes? they aren't so hard in stock... they even work if you scale up kerbin 3x... (with a lot lower payload fraction, but who do you expect when orbital velocity at LKO is >4,000 m/s)

 

 

[Cavscout74]

I've been through several phases regarding reusable rockets.  Initially, I was just happy to make orbit, then hit Mun/Minmus, etc.   Then I went reusable, and was launching just about everything on top of a 3.75m reusable "Nexus V" that mixed parachute & powered recovery.   After large interplanetary missions, i'd sometimes spend most of a play session landing a fleet of my "Nexus V" launchers one after the other.  Then I flipped back to "heck with it, I have 50 million saved up, I don't feel like landing rockets any more."   Now I mostly use expendables except for the occasional 3.75m launcher.  I can get most payloads I frequently use to orbit with 2.5m or smaller launchers. 

My one nod to being environmentally friendly is a change to a combined lander & relay I send to all the planets & moons.  Originally it had a Recycled Parts mod 2.5m nuclear engine (either FTMN-180 or -280) carrying a small comm relay & a lander set up for either vacuum or atmospheric landings.  The relay would get separated in orbit, then the whole assembly would deorbit, staging the nuclear drive off to burn up/smash into terrain while the lander either parachuted down or did a powered landing.   Now, the comm relay is built into the transfer stage which stays in orbit while the lander gets staged off to land on its own.  So no more uranium rainbows on Laythe. 

Prototype of the new combo lander/relay design, the final version uses a smaller lander:

1.4 rebuild of my Nexus V launcher landed near KSC:

 

[Corona688]

9 hours ago, ArmchairPhysicist said:

Have you ever suffered a collision? Everyone uses the *kesler syndrome intensifies* meme, but I’ve never actually hit anything except the spent stages of the same rocket (didn’t clear the booster before adjusting retrograde, things happened).

Knew a guy who'd launch rocket after rocket without reverting to the point he'd catch debris of the last one on the way up.  For this he earned the nickname Captain Kessler.

Someone also once managed to forget their space station was in a retrograde orbit, with messy results.  This caused a massive amount of prograde and retrograde mess in the same orbit, to the degree rescue became impossible.

Beyond that space junk collisions are very rare.

Edited April 12, 2018 by Corona688

[KerikBalm]

If it works in a 3x system, it will work in stock:

Spoiler

No part mods or kerbal joitn re-enforcement, all stock (except the planet, and the TAC life support container)

This one works even better, is unmanned, and completely stock:

I've found that twin boom spaceplane designs work well for large cargo. You could of course also do orbital assembly of stuff that fits into the mk3 bays.

[RizzoTheRat]

12 hours ago, Cavscout74 said:

 Then I flipped back to "heck with it, I have 50 million saved up, I don't feel like landing rockets any more."  

I can see recovering a whole fleet manually being a bit of a drag, so far I've only ever had 2 or 3 up at a time.  This is part of the reason I'm currently playing with kOS, my intention is that my SSTO's will return to land as close as possible to the KSC with just a single button press.