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Fuel base


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Thinking of making a stock refuelling base on the Mun. How would i go about doing that, and how would i make docking easy + transferring fuel, power and other things between craft? I might also make a space station orbiting the Mun, but i don't know if that would be useful. I'm looking for a docking system that is only using the Jr or regular docking ports, or bigger if they exist, to fuel any size of craft, rover, etc. And then i'll move to other planets :)

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To make a refueling base, you need a drill, an ISRU converter, cooling, fuel tanks, docking ports, and optionally, space for Kerbals. There are three docking port sizes, the Jr which is 0.625m in diameter, the standard port which is 1.25m, and the senior port which is 2.5m. For reference, the top of a Mk1 pod is 0.625m, the bottom is 1.25m, and all Rockomax tanks are 2.5m.

For the base, you can build a + shaped design, with one side being ISRU, the second being drills, third fuel, and fourth docking ports. You can then put solar panels on top to provide power.

If you have Breaking Ground, you can do this for the docking ports:
For horizontally-docking craft like rovers, place a piston facing down and put a docking port on the end, then rotate it to face outwards and move it so it isn't clipping. Move the piston so that the docking port can move up and down depending on what vehicle is trying to dock.
For vertical craft, like rockets, place some docking ports facing upwards on the base and on the craft, a docking port of the same size on the bottom of the craft. Alternatively, you can put the port on the side and dock to the horizontal ports.

If you don't have Breaking Ground, include enough RCS or engines on all of your craft to reach the docking ports.

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I have a standard fuel tank, driven by a standard starship drive section:

DAg6AVG.jpg

It refuels by sitting on top of the miner:

ovGc7Hv.jpg

I've since redesigned the tanker to survive deep aerobraking into LKO from Minmus. Which means it can also do Vall to Laythe.

Edited by FleshJeb
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3 hours ago, GlaciacUtopiian said:

Thinking of making a stock refuelling base on the Mun

Have you considered Minmus instead? It have a lower gravity and is a lot easier to find flat terrain there.

Anyways, you can prevent some issues if build things horizontally and don't let your base resting on anything with springs or hinges. 

There is a few mods that allow you transfer resources without docking, for stock (as you asked) is either the Grabbing Units or Docking ports. Personally, I'd go with docking ports facing downward/upward similarly to @FleshJeb design, however I prefer the transport to have the wheels.

 

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i recomment using large tanks. your refueling trips will become a big nuisance if they require 20 trips each time. using refueling extensively, i ended up loading the convert-o-tron and drills directly on a ship that goes up and down from the planet. it's less efficient because you have to drag along the weight of those mining equipment, but it's much faster in-game, because you don't have to drive a rover from the base to the lander all the time.

whether you end up doing that or you make a full mun base, i have a few more recomendations

- make your lander with a large base. it will be easier to land, which you will want to do often

- make your lander with lots of reaction wheels, and possibly a good rcs system. you will have to dock often, so you want to make it manueverable for easy docking. for the same reason, put your docking port somewhere easy to reach.

- once you are around mun or (worse) minmus, oberth effect will be unfavorable. i discovered that to make big burns, it is often less convenient to launch from there, even if you save 900 m/s to get out of kerbin's gravity well. there are ways around that, of course, my favourite one is to launch back towards kerbin and get a gravity assist from it, though it requires to time well the manuever. anyway, you have to take that into account. you also can launch a very big fuel tank (mine has a 600 ton capacity) that you refuel around mun or minmus, then you bring it back to kerbin orbit to refuel stuff there. you only have to refill it once in a while.

- put an expert engineer with the mining equipment. it's not strictly necessary, but even a level 0 engineer will quintuplicate the yield over no engineer at all.

 

my standard refueler has 1 convert-o-tron in the middle and 4 rockomax 18 ton around it. it is very easy to land and manuever. i used a single wolfhound engine with a TWR around 0.5, which is good for working on mun. i also made a larger version that holds 300 tons and have 5 wolfhounds (with 4 convert-o-trons and 12 drills), but that one is significantly harder to land because it grew in height more than in diameter; i made it to refuel my 600-ton orbital tank in a reasonable time.

i also have a few space stations that double as fuel depots, but most times i refuel directly from the mining ship.

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12 hours ago, Spricigo said:

Have you considered Minmus instead? It have a lower gravity and is a lot easier to find flat terrain there.

That is a good idea. Minmus has some inclination but is also easy to reach if you do the burn from low Kerbin orbit at the ascending or descending node. If you would arrive early just do the transfer burn some orbits later. You don't have to match the inclination that way and changing the inclination high up at Minmus orbit is cheap.

You don't have to do precision landing and docking on the surface, two alternatives are:

  • Ferry ore from the surface to a converter in orbit. Advantage: No need to carry ISRU-converter up and down.
  • Have full mining equipment on the lander. Advantage: If you run short on fuel you can use your payload on the way back into orbit.

If you decide to ferry ore to a converter in orbit it is important that you use the the large converter. The large converter can create much more fuel out of the same amount of ore.

The large drill has the advantage that it also works with low ore concentrations in addion to being faster.

Edited by EveMaster
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