Kerbin Space Stations

[RizzoTheRat]

I find stations are very useful in the early game in career mode. I like to get a lot of kerbals to plant flags on the Mun and Minumus totrain them, so put a station in orbit of each moon and do single landing science missions from there.

My stations look pretty inelegant compared to many on this thread though, this is my current Minumus station (although some might class it more as a mother ship I guess) with my science lander docked on the bottom, and a mining probe and rover on the top.

Later in the game I usually use the Hubmax and docking ports to make modular stations, but I think I might work on some fancier designs seeing some of the ones posted here.

[Goomblah]

My space station orbits a little higher than all of yours do

Orbital altitude is about 24x24Mm, which puts it at over twice the distance from Kerbin to the Mun. dV costs to reach the station from an 80x80 parking orbit are about 1250m/s (910 to kick it out there and 280 to circularize, plus a little extra for course corrections and rendezvous).

I assembled it in 4 launches, ignoring the tug and SSTO docked to it. The first launch was the main body with the Mk3 passenger module; then I sent up the docking tugs, monopropellant tanks, science module (on the dark side of the station), and small docking truss all as one launch. Recently I added the longer docking truss, moved the old small one onto it, and added a second set of fuel tanks to give the station just enough fuel capacity to top off my Grand Tour interplanetary craft all at once. I've tried to design it as best I can to reduce part count as much as possible and minimize lag. The main sources of parts are the docking trusses and all the stuff attached to them; otherwise everything is very simple and minimalist, to the point that almost all of the modules do not have probe / MJ cores or reaction wheels of their own. Once the launch vehicle reaches the station, the station's two Klaw tugs grab the inert payload and attach it to the station; that way the payload goes straight from the launch vehicle's stability control to the tugs' stability control, and they don't need any RCS, electronics, or reaction wheels of their own.

I'm sure you're wondering why I put the station in such a high orbit, though. I put it in an extremely high orbit so that fuel tankers coming from Minmus spend less fuel to reach the station, as opposed to a LKO station, where you're looking at around 1500m/s just to make a round trip from Minmus. This much higher orbit is a lot cheaper to reach and return from. But why didn't I just put the station in orbit around Minmus then? The reason: transfer windows. Minmus has an awfully long orbital period, which means that you may miss your ideal launch window by a few weeks because Minmus wasn't in the right place. In its lower orbit, the Kerbin Gateway Station has an orbital period of 18 days, meaning that, at worst, I will miss the perfect transfer window by nine days. It's also easier to plot maneuvers than it would be for a Minmus station, because there's no SOI change to deal with or orbital inclination. All I have to do is undock a few days in advance of the window, drop my Pe to 75-80km for a nice Oberth effect, then burn at Pe at the transfer window. In practice, this actually saves a significant amount of dV over an escape from LKO due to Oberth, even taking into consideration the burn to drop Pe. It requires a little more planning and tweaking to make the whole scheme work, so I generally don't bother for smaller launches, but if I'm sending an SSTO to Laythe and back (which is what you see docked up right now) I'll take the extra time to service my reusable craft.