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Fuel space station


Chik Sneadlov

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KAS is also a good mod for this. Just pull up beside the fuel tank, attach a fuel line and bobs yer uncle.

Make sure to do a quicksave first if you're going to try the fuel pipes.

I tried that same thing last weekends and as soon as I connected the fuel pipe it introduced some sort of phantom forces and both ships started to wobble like crazy till one of them came apart.

Both were moving so much I couldn't even right click on the pipe end to disconnect it.

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This doesn't contradict what I said. If you've got a good heavy spaceplane that can loft a decent amount of fuel, then you'd be better off simply using THAT as your fuel depot instead of a rocket-lifted station. Put a few docking ports on the plane and let smaller vessels link up with it as necessary; when it's nearly empty, return it to the surface. Or, build your plane such that it detaches a cargo of fuel tanks once it reaches orbit and returns immediately. Either way, there's just no reason to move that fuel to a station unless your planes' capacity is much smaller than that of the station (and with the way things scale in KSP, you CAN make the planes huge).

It's all about perspective. You're looking at it as the station as a baseline and the plane refueling as an efficiency improvement, when you could be looking at it as the spaceplane as the baseline and the station as an avoidable inefficiency. Now, I personally don't mind a bit of inefficiency if it looks cool, so I launch my depots with reusable rockets, but if I really cared about money I'd do it with planes.

The reason to refuel the station instead of just leaving the spaceplane tanker in orbit is because the tanker has a cost and part count about 10x that of the station itself, and the presence of fragile aerodynamic surfaces requires a more cautious docking approach then would be allowed otherwise.

Obviously, this is a YMMV issue. But there are valid reasons for dedicated orbital fuel stations that don't depend upon ISRU.

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