FlamingPuddle01

Actually wait one second. If I set up a lunar colony and kept the SSTO docked, what I could do is set up some mining for refueling, have the lander wait a cycle to be picked up again and then refuel the SSTO entirely, making the entire trip cost only the delta v it takes for the SSTO to get back into Kerbins orbit (less than 1000 delta v if I wanted a super smooth descent, even less if I make my ship capable of handling harder descents). It's a bit complicated and of course the easier way to do it is cut out the space station with the fancy orbit and just have a SSTO with a lander that does the same thing, but I think the important thing to keep in mind is that I'm looking for a reason to justify using the space station with a fancy orbit instead of building the space station with a fancy orbit for a specific reason.

Thank you for clearing this up, I totally did not think about the relative velocity of the ships, which is a really important thing to consider. Whoopsie. Ok, at this point I'm just grasping for straws to have *any* reason to make the space station with a funny orbit (I guess I don't even want it to be a cycler, but I'll make a better description of what I'm trying to do in the next paragraph), but if I made the station big enough to house more kerbals than would be realistic for a single rocket, have a few really big landers attached to the station, and take a crap ton of tourism quests that require landing on the moon, and then basically take multiple trips to fill up the station with relatively small SSTOs that go and dock with the station, undock and then return home in one piece, then use those big landers to land and then return to kerbin with as little fuel as possible. I ask this knowing that the answer is probably that I'm just making a reusable rocket ship with extra steps and a big hunk that I'll never get the funds returned from because it is constantly in orbit, but I'm hoping that I'm missing something. Anyways, now to describe the orbit that I was thinking of making originally that apparently isn't a cycler. What I want to do is make an orbit that goes from Kerbin to the Mun, uses the Mun's SOI to alter its tragectory by a small amount, just enough so that it will return to Kerbin, go around it and then when it is reaching its heading towards apoapsis again, BAM! there's the Mun, rinse and repeat. The orbit would end up looking like a sort of flower if I'm imagining it correctly and I have to believe that with a delicate hand and enough elbow grease it could be done. I'm pretty sure that this way it wouldn't take nearly as much time as a normal cycler since it is constantly moving from Kerbin to the Mun, all I really need to figure out is if it breaks any laws of physics to do so since I'm not confident enough in my knowledge of orbits to figure it out with any degree of certainty, since I keep finding myself wanting to put it all in terms of a linear plane.

Oh, and would doing this make it repeatable? because ultimately I would like to set up a station moving between both bodies that I can hitch a ride on whenever I need to do a tourism quest

Ah, I had a misunderstanding of what an Aldrin cycle was then, the place I first heard of describing it suggested doing one from Kerbin to the Mun, so I had assumed that it was an 2 body orbit that used the gravity of the orbiting object (Mun in this case) to modify the trajectory of the ship so that it would return to the orbit of the orbiting object at the next position. Thank you for clearing up that misunderstanding, it makes sense now why I couldn't find any more info on Aldrin cycles to the Mun or Minmus! But followup question, is there any type of cycler that can go from Kerbin to the Mun so that I can do an Aldrin cycler from the Mun to Minmus, making a sort of spacial pony express?

I've just recently learned about the Aldrin cycler and I've been looking for resources on how the mechanics of one works and how to make one yourself, while I found plenty of explanations of what it does, but nothing goes in enough depth to teach me how to make one myself. I would really like to make a Minmus-Kerbin cycler but I don't know if the Mun's gravity will end up messing with the orbit. Is it possible to account for that? Thank you in advance! P.S. I have taken basic college level physics and calculus, so while orbital mechanics of this game have been extremely complicated for me, I've been able to handle the math side of things so far, but I might be overconfident in my abilities with this scenario. No need to explain the basics of kinematics or anything, I just want to know the steps I can take to create this kind of orbit. Thank you again!