If KSP 1.0 has resources will that lower your costs in career mode?

[Valley]

I was looking over how much my ships and launch systems cost in my VAB and realized a few things - such as how cheap my new SSTO was when compared to my other spacecraft which needed launch systems - but I also realized how much it cost just to get fuel into space.

I am looking forward to playing my sandbox game with resources but I also realized how much it may help those player who play career mode. I don't play career mode much but I was wondering if players who do are looking forward to resources and do you think it will make things cheaper or a HECK of a lot cheaper?

[dryer_lint]

I think it'll be the sort of thing you need to invest into heavily. Good mining equipment will cost a lot and probably be very heavy, but once you get it going it should be a good source of fuel... and funding, if you recover the fuel/resources.

[Superfluous J]

Launching the ship into space using its own fuel to do so is massively cheaper than otherwise. Before I started using Extraplanetary Launchpads, I had set up a Kethane base on Minmus and found that the old adage "Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere" is very VERY true. All you need to do is build a ship that can get into orbit, and then ferry down all the fuel from your base on Minmus to that ship, fill it up, and then that ship can get anywhere.

Easier (though more wasteful but now that Karbonite has unlimited supplies of fuel at any drilling station wasteful is not an issue) is to make the ship a little bigger at launch time and make it so it can arrive at Minmus with dry tanks. Then fill it up there, and from there burn down to a low Kerbin periapsis at the correct time and use the Oberth effect to launch out to your destination. And as a bonus, you will feel like a BadS for nailing that maneuver.

With EPLP installed, things go from cheaper to free, as you can just build the ship on Minmus (or in Orbit) and fly off from there. The only thing you need to launch from Kerbin then is the astronauts, and all they need is enough dV to get from the launchpad to Minmus orbit.

[Streetwind]

There's an old adage saying "time is money". It applies in a surprisingly large number of situations. Also in this one, for example.

Hauling fuel to orbit is expensive, yes. You can probably save a lot of money mining your own. But do you know what you will be doing then? You'll be mining and hauling fuel for a mission instead of actually flying that mission. Everything will take you a whole lot longer, and certain tasks will quickly get repetitive and unexciting. As such, there's a tradeoff: do you pay money and fly now - or do you pay with your playtime, spending an hour to procure your "free" fuel from a mining station, conducting orbital rendezvous and docking maneuvers and other such things?

The resource mechanic is probably not truly suited as a long-term primary fuel infrastructure. I mean, I don't doubt that it will work as such, sure - but you'll be doing tasks that are not particularly fun to play. At the same time, you don't want to ignore the refueling mechanic completely, either. Where it is really going to shine, I think, is when it enables you to fly missions that would involve excessive launch and transfer costs. Prime example: a vessel designed to make manned landings on all of Jool's moons and return. That Tylo lander is going to be heavy, and that's not yet taking care of the other four moons. Maybe, depending on how the mining equipment turns out, it might actually weigh less than the contents of the tanks of the Tylo lander - and in that case, well you just launch towards Jool with all your lander tanks empty. That will greatly reduce the weight, launch cost and assembly tedium of the vessel. Once at Jool, you hit up Bop and/or Pol, and mine them for fuel for the larger landers.

[Starwhip]

My costs are low anyway, because I use SSTO's to do nearly everything.

Refueling in space will open up new capabilities for spacecraft. Grand Tour ships in Stock KSP, for example, no longer need to be absolutely massive. Single Stage to Laythe ships can be much smaller, only needing enough delta-v to do the longest leg of the trip instead of the WHOLE trip.

So yes, my costs will be lower.

[Skorpychan]

On the whole, no.

I feel that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I'll stick propellant bases EVERYWHERE, send fuel depots out anywhere it's not viable to drop bases onto, like Moho. Sure, my launches will cost less, but I'll be launching so much more and hauling so much from planet to planet that it'll end up costing me MORE.

[Bill Phil]

I'm planning on using ISRU on my 1.0 Jool mission. But that's about it.

[FlyingPete]

It might be useful to have a fuel dump in orbit of the Mun or Minmus, and refuel interplanetary missions there. Burn into an elliptical orbit, finish the burn at 100km or so, and you would save quite a bit of delta-V.

[goldenpeach]

the only fuel I will save is the fuel wasted by the enormous stock drag.

Other than that, it will depend on on the mass of the fuel-collecting parts.

[PB666]

I was looking over how much my ships and launch systems cost in my VAB and realized a few things - such as how cheap my new SSTO was when compared to my other spacecraft which needed launch systems - but I also realized how much it cost just to get fuel into space.

I am looking forward to playing my sandbox game with resources but I also realized how much it may help those player who play career mode. I don't play career mode much but I was wondering if players who do are looking forward to resources and do you think it will make things cheaper or a HECK of a lot cheaper?

They can increase the cost in career mode, as long as the fix all the bugs.

[AbacusWizard]

For me, in the long run, absolutely cheaper! I tend to focus on huge reusable interplanetary ships, and once I have a few of those in play, my largest expense is sending up colossal tankers to refuel them. With resources, I'll be able to keep reusing the same tanker over and over again.

I've recently been trying this with the Karbonite mod and it's working quite well so far. The infrastructure includes:

• one karbonite extractor station on a plateau on Minmus

• one karbonite refinery in low Minmus orbit

• one tanker (four Kerbodyne tanks with atomic engines and maneuvering jets) docked to the refinery

• two landers packed with karbonite storage tanks

The extractor mines karbonite and pumps it directly into the attached lander; when the lander is full, it detaches and flies up to dock with the refinery, which converts the karbonite into rocket fuel and deposits it in the tanker. Repeat until tanker is full. (If desired, I can detach the full tanker and leave it in a parking orbit, then send up a second tanker and fill it up too, and so on.)

Now the starship _Voyager_I_ doesn't even need to descend to low Kerbin orbit (and ascend afterwards, costing lots of ∆v) between missions; it can just ease into Minmus orbit, settle into a parking orbit a few km from the refinery, and wait while the tanker putts on over and transfers all the fuel it needs for free. (Meanwhile the crew can fly to Kerbin on a spaceplane, check in at home base to drop off science data and level up, and return to the _Voyager_ on the same spaceplane.) If needed, conventional rockets can deliver new cargo to the _Voyager_, and everything's ready for the next mission!

[Slam_Jones]

In the end, cheaper, but the start-up costs are a bit higher. Dragging several tons of machinery around isn't exactly cheap, but the ability to re-fuel and build ships outside of KSC in invaluable (once it's all set up, at least).

[Hobbes Novakoff]

I wonder... Would sending up empty fuel tanks, filling the tanks with mined fuel, and then recovering the tanks at or close to the KSC be a viable way to make money?

[Superfluous J]

I wonder... Would sending up empty fuel tanks, filling the tanks with mined fuel, and then recovering the tanks at or close to the KSC be a viable way to make money?

Not really. You could likely make much more money spending the hour or so just doing a few contracts.

If you had Extraplanetary Launchpads installed as well, and every once in a while just built a "fuel returner" on the surface of Minmus and returned it full of fuel, then that would be profitable, because you're not really spending that much time (just launching from the surface of Minmus back to Kerbin as opposed to launching into orbit, then transferring to Minmus, orbiting, landing at your base, loading it up, and then launching back to Kerbin for your proposed plan) for the same profit. Or more, as you can build the largest ship you can LAND, not the largest one you can LAUNCH.

[Torquemadus]

I'm going to experiment with the new resources system to see what the practicalities are in terms of cost and time to set up the required infrastructure.

I expect I will mostly use ISRU to make the fuel needed for the return trip from interplanetary destinations, thus saving me the mass penalty of hauling it all from Kerbin.

[helaeon]

With the way MKS/OKS/Karbonite/K+ work currently, it's possible if you do it right you may be funding your space program with it (as in sending goodies back to Kerbin for profit). Basically it may be another way to make funds outside of contracts. Which it should! For example efficiently selecting (probing) and mining an asteroid efficiently would be hugely profitable! Should be no different for Kerbals if they can over-come the challenges

But, making a profit takes planning, skill, and often multiple launches to be in a place that you can do that.

[Monger]

I guess that mining resources will be a late-game (i.e. end-game) game element. You need an enormous amount of technology, and even then it probably isn't worth the effort as long as you don't need to get into very deep space. Mining on planets might be interesting to support return missions, but I assume that not all moons will have resources. You may need to fly very complicated paths to get your fuel where you want it to be.

In the end, mining will make a few missions possible which were next to impossible before, but it probably won't make the game significantly easier.

When docking was introduced my first thought was: "Whoa, now we can assemble big crafts directly in space". In the end, I used docking a lot less than I thought I would - mainly because it is so much easier to test and optimize crafts on Kerbin than in space.

[Dakota2063]

I see the resource system as a way to expand the desirability of extra-planetary bases, as well as keep local ships in operation longer outside of kerbin. I'm still looking for in situational base building on other planets.

[magnemoe]

I guess that mining resources will be a late-game (i.e. end-game) game element. You need an enormous amount of technology, and even then it probably isn't worth the effort as long as you don't need to get into very deep space. Mining on planets might be interesting to support return missions, but I assume that not all moons will have resources. You may need to fly very complicated paths to get your fuel where you want it to be.

In the end, mining will make a few missions possible which were next to impossible before, but it probably won't make the game significantly easier.

When docking was introduced my first thought was: "Whoa, now we can assemble big crafts directly in space". In the end, I used docking a lot less than I thought I would - mainly because it is so much easier to test and optimize crafts on Kerbin than in space.

Kethane /Karbonite is pretty late game, youneed the large solar panels for anything serious, you can put an small refueling station for refueling an mun lander and similar but hardly any export.

Depend on your scale, if you send kerbals to Eeloo in one man landing pods you don't need it, 10 kerbals on Jool 5 and you cut the fuel demands to an faction.

[Sampa]

And, I suppose that now, not only have the asteroids, meteoroids, and other planet and moons now have a bigger role to play...with the implementation of resources

[godefroi]

I thought in Karbonite that it was never efficient to lift the mined resource to orbit, i.e. it would take more fuel to get it up there than it would generate?

[Superfluous J]

I thought in Karbonite that it was never efficient to lift the mined resource to orbit, i.e. it would take more fuel to get it up there than it would generate?

"Never" is a long time.

It may never be worth lifting Karbonite off of Eve (I don't know, just saying if it is,that's where it'll be for sure) but Gilly? You could probably lift some off of Gilly by getting your Kerbal to fall under the ship and do the "stand up" animation, tossing the ship into an escape trajectory.

[AbacusWizard]

I thought in Karbonite that it was never efficient to lift the mined resource to orbit, i.e. it would take more fuel to get it up there than it would generate?

Depends on where you're lifting it from. I recently installed Karbonite and set up my first mining base on Minmus, where the gravity is so low that I can extract karbonite from the ground, use a big lander to pull it up into orbit, dock at my orbital refinery, and convert it all to rocket fuel. The lander is big enough that each round trip fills a large Kerbodyne tank with fuel, and then I pull a small amount of that back into the lander to power the next round trip. (It really helps that Minmus gravity is so weak that I can use super-efficient atomic engines on the lander.)

[godefroi]

Right, but I think that wherever you put it, it would be more efficient to refine it on the ground and lift the resulting fuel into orbit instead of refining it in orbit.

I could be wrong, though, as I didn't spend much time with Karbonite. Kethane wasn't like this, but Karbonite is more realistic (you can't get 100 kg of gasoline from 50 kg of oil).

[AbacusWizard]

Right, but I think that wherever you put it, it would be more efficient to refine it on the ground and lift the resulting fuel into orbit instead of refining it in orbit.

That is correct; 2 units of karbonite will convert to 0.9 units of liquid fuel and 1.1 units of oxidizer--but 2 units of karbonite weighs way more than 2 units of LF/O mix. I realized this halfway through launching all the infrastructure but decided to just finish the project as is, partly because I had already designed and built most of it and partly because I like the idea of mining raw materials and then transporting them to orbit to finish production. The next one I build will combine extractor and refinery in one surface outpost, with a colossal tanker that clamps in at a central landing pad.

Edited March 10, 2015 by AbacusWizard