Reusability in Career with SpaceY: Is it Worth it?

[EnDSchultz]

I understand one of the common (and legitimate in my experience) criticisms of Career mode is that it's grindy - completing random contracts to put useless satellites into useless orbits, or extract 10,000 units of ore from Eve to deliver to Gilly, or build a base with 5,000 units of liquid fuel on Moho... in order to earn enough money to fund missions you actually want to do. I find this is primarily a problem towards the late game, where

A. The solar system really opens up and enters "sandbox" mode. Early on your sources of funding (Make orbit, plant a flag on the moon, etc) often coincide with your personal missions, but later on you often want to do things completely different from the contracts offer.
B. Your crew roster is large (especially gets out of hand when trying to build permanent colonies and bases) and hiring new crew is prohibitively expensive.
C. Rockets and hardware for more ambitious missions become exponentially larger and astronomically expensive. Especially when using things like life support mods that force you to bring much more mass along for long duration missions.

The first problem can be at least partially addressed with the various contract packs and mods like Strategia. The second can partially be offset by rescuing Kerbals from contracts. The last can be partially managed by developing reusable launchers.

I personally have been tinkering with SpaceY in my latest career, however I am so far unconvinced that this SpaceX style RTLS reusability is particularly viable given the mass fractions of KSP rocketry. For reference, in real life Elon Musk has stated that a Falcon 9 first stage pricetag ranges in the tens of millions of $$$ (I don't remember the exact number but we'll say ca. $50mn), whilst the propellant for the entire stage only runs you about $200k. Thus, notwithstanding the inevitable expenses of recovery and refurbishment, you are recovering nearly all your losses by bringing the first stage back.

Now, upfront I admit I'm a pretty terrible rocket designer, but in my career I developed a SpaceY booster capable of sending a 3-Kerbal capsule into LKO (basically an orbital shuttle). It consisted of a RTLS SpaceY 3.75m first stage, and an expendable stock 2.5m second stage. The cost of the first stage alone ended up coming out roughly 70,000 for the hardware, and 25,000 for fuel. And here's the rub: For 25,000 credits, it turns out I could easily have built a barebones 2.5m expendable first stage instead - two orange tanks and a mainsail - capable of imparting more delta-V to the payload.

So with that, I solicit the brilliant KSP community for thoughts. Am I just a terrible designer? Is SpaceY not actually balanced with career practicality in mind? Or are there advantages to RTLS reusability that only begin to manifest at larger scales (5m)?

[Shadowsteps]

You are running into the same problem Elon is going to in the next 5 years.

[mk1980]

i'm not familiar with the SpaceY mod, but a 3.75 meter lifter to put a 3 man capsule into orbit sounds like overkill. you could probably just use the "expendable" mainsail + jumbo tanks lifter, slap on some chutes and a probe core and de-orbit it for recovery.

recovering lifters is always a tradeoff. in theory, you save funds, since you recover a large fraction of the hardware cost. in practice, you trade time for funds, since you have to land the lifter system, which takes extra time. in my experience, it's not necessarily worth it. for large payloads it may be worth the effort. if you can get some 100 tons spaceship to orbit and recover most of the value of the lifter (probably >>100k funds), it's probably worth the effort. if it's just some small payload, you're probably better off using your time for something else.

Edited May 9, 2016 by mk1980

[Snark]

This issue isn't particular to SpaceY.  The fact is, in KSP there's really little economic point in trying to recover anything.

The cost of rockets is pretty low, the amount you recover from them is even lower, the hassle of trying to do a recovery is significant, and you can easily generate scads of cash with a well-placed contract or two that will offset dozens of recovered launches.  Bearing in mind that the ultimate currency here is not KSP funds per se, but rather the player's time:  how does it make economic sense to spend, well, just about any of the player's time at all trying to recover 10K or 20K funds from a spent booster, when all the player needs to do to snag an extra 500K is to spend a couple of minutes building and launching a new station on a solar orbit?

Note that I used the qualifier "economic" point.  The above dismissal of recovery only pertains if what you primarily care about is "cash per hour of play time."  If that's not your motivating factor, certainly there are opportunities for recovery.

• Plenty of people play the game with recovery programs, and have fun doing so-- for example, introducing a "role-playing" element.
• Perhaps if you've got the career difficulty cranked up so high, with money really incredibly tight and every penny counts, it might be worthwhile?  I can't really speak to this, as it's not a mode that I have any interest in playing (turns the game into a horribly draining and un-fun economic grind, at least for me).  Perhaps this applies to some players, but I expect that most players don't play that way.
• I could also envision running a mod that tinkers with the relative costs of things, to make fuel much cheaper but hardware much more expensive, to encourage recovery.

In any case-- regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the above opinion, I think it's pretty clear that this isn't particularly a SpaceY issue.  "Recovery: worth it or not?" is a fairly frequent topic that comes up in the forums.  It's a debate that's been going on for considerably longer than SpaceY has been around.

[panzer1b]

While i never spent alot of time in career, ill say that the ONLY thing even worth recovering are SSTOs (or multistage aircraft).  The reason is that they use very efficient engines (most well built SSTOs dont exactly require tons of fuel as majority of the hard work is done on jets alone), and generally speaking can be landed right on the KSC runway for a 100% recovery.  With a RTLS style booster there are 2 things going against you.  One, is that in order to recover it effectively you need to use a near vertical ascent profile, which is so inefficient it isnt even worth bothering with.  Second, unless you are using some obscenely expensive parts to make said booster, the cost saved because of fuel isnt really worth it when you could have created a lighter disposable rocket (and for a 2.5m payload is prolly use alot of SRBs to save even more money).  All in all, it just isnt worth the time to engineer reusable boosters (unless you actually enjoy the challenge of engineering such a booster in of itself).  While im not one to tell anyone what to spend their time on, i enjoy actually doing stuff once in orbit, and for me the whole lifter is essentially done as fast as possible just to get what i want in LKO in LKO, and i dont really bother engineering launch stages unless its something very hard to get into orbit like a wing covered space carrier that needs to have a top mounted engine booster or other crazy design.

 

All in all, if you actually enjoy recovering stages and designing them, then by all means, done well they will save some money.  Otherwise, the amount of time spent on it is better spent actually doing what you enjoy (provided you arent the type that actually wants to spend time on booster design and recovery).  If you actually want to make solid money though, you need a winged SSTO because its the only method which actually gets you considerable savings (and if you are truly insane just set a few IRSUs near the runway and you have 0 launch costs minus payload itself.

[TrooperCooper]

 

If you are into recovering and reusing stuff, making it worthwile and also giving you tools to develop and test, I highly recommend the Kerbal Construction Time mod together with Stage Recovery.

 

[John JACK]

KSP is just that bad in economics. Fuel tanks cost more than engines, and fuel is just too expensive. But wings and parachutes are too good and too light.

[wumpus]

7 hours ago, John JACK said:

KSP is just that bad in economics. Fuel tanks cost more than engines, and fuel is just too expensive. But wings and parachutes are too good and too light.

Your best ticket to fix this is likely via realism overhaul.  Most of the price issues are due to the unreality of the kerbal system (mainly that it is at 1/10 scale).  This leads to fuel tanks that are too heavy and other things needed to make sure that a delta-v of ~3km/s is somewhat as challenging as a real rocket with ~9km/s (but in space much faster).  Once you fix the scaling factors.

Jet engines no longer make it to orbit.

SSTOs are next to impossible.  Anything you can do with an SSTO, TSTO (two stage to orbit) will deliver *much* more cargo.

You can basically fix the economics if you want.  You don't have to worry about dealing with broken physics.

[John JACK]

30 minutes ago, wumpus said:

You can basically fix the economics if you want.  You don't have to worry about dealing with broken physics.

KSP physics are good enough very good for a fun and simple game. And KSP economics are based on just some arbitrary prices that was assigned at random long ago when there were even no funds, and never got a second glance. It's not about jets and SSTOs, it's about decouplers more expensive than boosters and fuel cans more expensive than engines and even FINS more expensive than engines. It can be fixed, just no one bothered still.

[wumpus]

Unless Squad ruined the price of fins in 1.1.x, they introduced a "cheap fin" in 1.0.x  This fin should do the job (although it might blow up on the way up and probably won't survive the way down).  You shouldn't need any other fin until the [lol fake physics] reaction wheels can no longer steer the rocket.  At this point you have to decide if you are going to use a rocket with enough vectored thrust or not.  If not (probably because you are using kickbacks), you need to cough up for a winglet.  My trick is to only use two winglets attached to the North and South edge of the rocket.  This give me enough control to do the pitchover/gravity turn and hope that the reaction wheels can handle the rest (expect to use enough basic fins to stabilize  the rest of the rocket).  As far as I can tell, the rest are airplane/SSTOplane parts that are overpriced because SSTO are so overpowered.

Basic fin: 25 funds

Winglet (AV-T5): 500 funds

As far as the decouplers, they are also priced so high because they are overpowered (although they probably need rebalancing as there is no longer any reason to attach non-kickback SRB boosters to decouplers.  Real rockets have only a few stages (typically two.  Saturn V had three.  You have to get to the crazy SRB-only Orbital-ATK stuff to get to the five stage rockets).  Soyuz (and others) have all those lower boosters, but you really only need two decouplers and attach all the boosters to them (this works well with the N-S winglet trick I mentioned above).  Remember: a decoupler is an explosive device built right next to a fuel tank full of rocket fuel.  That ain't cheap, no matter how kerbal it is designed (Spacex uses pneumatics, which is probably even more expensive).  I suspect that [magical KSP] fuel lines should be even more expensive (and probably scale with fuel flow), but what we have seems to work.

It's a game, and it has to work on a scale of little green men.  I will admit that the basic fin was dearly needed (especially after the rockets became so much less stable).  The decoupler cost makes sense, but it is unfortunate that the effect is to simply drive the player to use the next bigger rocket (which is exactly what is done in real life.  Sure, there are rockets like Delta that spam boosters around the engine for bigger cargoes, but expect a bigger rocket if big cargoes become more common).  To a degree this is done in real life and KSP for similar reasons.  The engineering cost for Delta is sufficiently big that it makes more sense for an inefficient smaller rocket to spam boosters.  In KSP the true cost is player time (i.e. engineering costs) and again you add "more boosters" to an old design.  But generally this only works for things that get sent from KSC to LKO.

In the end, the real reason nobody has bothered to fix things beyond "add the basic fin" is that it doesn't matter (unless you slid the difficulty to the point where rocket science is no longer the hard part of the game).  Expect that rocket costs are either irrelevant (or if you slid the difficulty all the way up, required to be recovered).  Decouplers aren't recoverable, but did you really think they were supposed to be multi-use anyway?

Edited May 10, 2016 by wumpus

[Loren Pechtel]

On 5/9/2016 at 8:32 AM, TrooperCooper said:

 

If you are into recovering and reusing stuff, making it worthwile and also giving you tools to develop and test, I highly recommend the Kerbal Construction Time mod together with Stage Recovery.

 

Stage recovery gets you some cash back without a lot of hassle.  Beyond that one's time is better spent on contracts than flying things back.

[G'th]

^ That. If you like the challenge, by all means go for Flight Manager so you can actually fly back your boosters without trying to finagle two flights at once. If you just want the benefits (while still requiring that you make it possible for the things to fly back), then Stage Recovery is best.

Also highly useful for things like SRB's. Use chute cones as the noses on these boosters and they're very valuable if you need the thrust.

[Geschosskopf]

On 5/9/2016 at 7:13 PM, EnDSchultz said:

So with that, I solicit the brilliant KSP community for thoughts. Am I just a terrible designer? Is SpaceY not actually balanced with career practicality in mind? Or are there advantages to RTLS reusability that only begin to manifest at larger scales (5m)?

There's a big discussion of realworld Space-X in general in another topic.  For the record, I don't see how they can possibly make money that way given they have to over-engineer their boosters by 20-25% to make them landable, which means the payoff period is way delayed even if they can turn rockets around cheaply.  I suggest taking discussion of the real Space-X over there.

But as to KSP, any grind in career mode is a combination of 3 things:  player-controlled difficulty settings, player-controlled mission profiles, and player-controlled use of mods that add more science-per-mission.  Given that all these variables as player-controlled, the only reason to consider career mode a grind is if you do so deliberately or just don't know how to avoid grinding.

So, starting at the bottom and working up, there are mods like DMagic Orbital Science that add new science experiments.  Thus, your ship can carry more instruments, so can get more total science from any location/biome it finds itself in.  This goes a LONG way to reduce grinding, especially because its effect is amplified by the other things.

Next is leveraging science per biome/location into science per mission by hitting multiple biomes/locations.  The way you do this is to built biome-hoppers.  You can hit every single biome on Minmus and return home with fuel to spare if your lander has 3500m/s when it 1st lands on Minmus.  Build the lander around a 1-seat pod and an Okto probe core for SAS, put a scientist aboard, and carry every instrument you can.  The scientist can reset the Goo and Materials experiments between biomes.  With such a ship, you can loot Minmus in a single mission lasting about 30 days and return with thousands of science points, having spent very little on the rocket itself.

And finally, you can use the difficulty sliders to make things easy on you.  Try 200% science rewards.  That makes pillaging Minmus as described above, with all sorts of DMagic experiments as well as most of the stock ones, bring home 7000-8000 science points.  After that, you can do whatever you want to finish off the tree, and then get on with the fund-limited sandbox game you wanted to play all along, using all the parts.  Life begins when the tech tree ends.  What's the point of having all the top-tier parts if you end the game once you unlock them?

Now, you can also farm science with the mobile lab, but I find that too tedious.  You can get way more science in way less elapsed gametime by biome-hopping Minmus and returning everything in 30 days, and only need 1 scientist, who immediately becomes useless once you finish the tech tree anyway.  So why ever have more than 1 scientist, and why ever use the lab?

And to be back to your Space-X thing, I have NEVER found it necessary to recover stages with anything except hard difficulty settings.  If you don't have to pay entry costs for parts, and you get 100% funds rewards, you can easily afford to ditch boosters and never need bother with SSTOs.  You'll make way more than enough money on contracts along the way to finishing the tech tree to stay comfortably solvent.  Reusable rockets make sense in RSS, where they cost way more than in the stock-sized solar system.  But in the stock-sized solar system, the dV required to go anywhere isn't enough to break the bank at normal or easier difficulties.

[G'th]

Scientists don't become useless once the tech tree is done, so long as you take the strategy that autoconverts science to funds.

[Geschosskopf]

1 hour ago, G'th said:

Scientists don't become useless once the tech tree is done, so long as you take the strategy that autoconverts science to funds.

But if funds weren't a problem before you finished the tech tree, they won't be a problem afterwards.

[Alshain]

I've found re-usability in KSP really isn't worth it unless your playing hard mode or have lowered the funds sliders.  Money is not really something that is difficult to get, and if you build cost efficient, re-usability is just wasted effort, unless you just enjoy that sort of thing.

On 5/10/2016 at 10:42 AM, wumpus said:

Unless Squad ruined the price of fins in 1.1.x, they introduced a "cheap fin" in 1.0.x  This fin should do the job (although it might blow up on the way up and probably won't survive the way down).  You shouldn't need any other fin until the [lol fake physics] reaction wheels can no longer steer the rocket.  At this point you have to decide if you are going to use a rocket with enough vectored thrust or not.  If not (probably because you are using kickbacks), you need to cough up for a winglet.  My trick is to only use two winglets attached to the North and South edge of the rocket.  This give me enough control to do the pitchover/gravity turn and hope that the reaction wheels can handle the rest (expect to use enough basic fins to stabilize  the rest of the rocket).  As far as I can tell, the rest are airplane/SSTOplane parts that are overpriced because SSTO are so overpowered.

Size 1 the basic fin is all you need.  Size 2, the cheapest option is the Structural Wing Type D, and Size 3 is debateable, you could use a small delta which is cheap, but also of interest is the Big-S Strake for added fuel.  Winglets are over priced.  I have no idea why kickbacks would mean you can't use vectored thrust.  I use vectored thrust all the time with kickbacks, of course my TWR isn't 3.

Edited May 14, 2016 by Alshain

[wumpus]

15 hours ago, Alshain said:

I've found re-usability in KSP really isn't worth it unless your playing hard mode or have lowered the funds sliders.  Money is not really something that is difficult to get, and if you build cost efficient, re-usability is just wasted effort, unless you just enjoy that sort of thing.

Size 1 the basic fin is all you need.  Size 2, the cheapest option is the Structural Wing Type D, and Size 3 is debateable, you could use a small delta which is cheap, but also of interest is the Big-S Strake for added fuel.  Winglets are over priced.  I have no idea why kickbacks would mean you can't use vectored thrust.  I use vectored thrust all the time with kickbacks, of course my TWR isn't 3.

The point of not having vectored thrust with kickbacks is when *all* the thrust comes from kickbacks (or otherwise overpowering any vectored engine). Then two winglets do the job nicely.  I haven't tried TWR with 3 yet, but don't be surprised if it works better in 1.1 (early reports are favorable to such things).  Although with TWR approaching 3 you might just launch at an angle and let hypersonic effects lock you in place (and enforce stability that way).

Don't underestimate the use of the basic fin.  And a wad of kickbacks + 2 winglets give an amazing amount of delta-v and control for the price.  I'll check the structural wing type-D: the low lift seems critical to low drag. I doubt I'll need it unless launching with low TWR.

[Alshain]

2 minutes ago, wumpus said:

The point of not having vectored thrust with kickbacks is when *all* the thrust comes from kickbacks (or otherwise overpowering any vectored engine). Then two winglets do the job nicely.  I haven't tried TWR with 3 yet, but don't be surprised if it works better in 1.1 (early reports are favorable to such things).  Although with TWR approaching 3 you might just launch at an angle and let hypersonic effects lock you in place (and enforce stability that way).

Don't underestimate the use of the basic fin.  And a wad of kickbacks + 2 winglets give an amazing amount of delta-v and control for the price.  I'll check the structural wing type-D: the low lift seems critical to low drag. I doubt I'll need it unless launching with low TWR.

Well, one of the great 1.1 additions is that SRB fuel consumption is tied to the thrust limiter.  So now, it is advantageous to limit the thrust coming from the SRB's so they last longer during flight.  This makes conventional rockets that use a combination of a liquid fuel engine and SRB boosters much more viable.  You can put kickbacks on there and drop their thrust down so your total TWR is a nice 1.5 and then you need far less fuel overall which dramatically reduces cost.  Of course this only works if the Kickbacks would have put the TWR way above 1.5 in the first place.

[wumpus]

1 minute ago, Alshain said:

Well, one of the great 1.1 additions is that SRB fuel consumption is tied to the thrust limiter.  So now, it is advantageous to limit the thrust coming from the SRB's so they last longer during flight.  This makes conventional rockets that use a combination of a liquid fuel engine and SRB boosters much more viable.  You can put kickbacks on there and drop their thrust down so your total TWR is a nice 1.5 and then you need far less fuel overall which dramatically reduces cost.  Of course this only works if the Kickbacks would have put the TWR way above 1.5 in the first place.

You might want to test that out.  I assumed that limiting the thrust of SRBs in 1.1 would help.  It turned out that all tested rockets (that didn't explode) worked best without reducing thrust (I think one of the tested rockets had a TWR of 3).  In 1.0.5 you could minimize aero and gravity losses by reducing SRBs to launch TWR of 2.0 (and weaker rockets shouldn't have been reduced at all).  Note while this might reduce gravity and aero losses, control suffered and you might have greater cosine (steering) losses.  And yes, I expect that greater thrust means greater control challenges (I'm not planning any heavy testing until I have a 1.1 friendly Kerbal Engineer.  I also suspect that Squad didn't intend this).

 

[Alshain]

37 minutes ago, wumpus said:

You might want to test that out.  I assumed that limiting the thrust of SRBs in 1.1 would help.  It turned out that all tested rockets (that didn't explode) worked best without reducing thrust (I think one of the tested rockets had a TWR of 3).  In 1.0.5 you could minimize aero and gravity losses by reducing SRBs to launch TWR of 2.0 (and weaker rockets shouldn't have been reduced at all).  Note while this might reduce gravity and aero losses, control suffered and you might have greater cosine (steering) losses.  And yes, I expect that greater thrust means greater control challenges (I'm not planning any heavy testing until I have a 1.1 friendly Kerbal Engineer.  I also suspect that Squad didn't intend this).

I have tested it out.  I've been reworking my lifters all week.  Not all of them were appropriate to drop the thrust on the SRB's, however maintaining around 1.4-1.5 TWR certainly makes the gravity turn work a lot better and in cases where I end up overpowered due to needing part of the thrust of another SRB, limiting the thrust makes the SRB's last longer and that means I need less fuel in the center stack.  I know some people build with nothing but SRB's on the first stage, but I dislike doing that personally.  Even if it is cheap, it's not very real to me.  In any case, back on topic, re-usability is very worthwhile even with my LFO launchers, if an all SRB launcher is cheaper that is even more so.

Edited May 14, 2016 by Alshain