Colonizing

[Spaceman83]

I have built small base on mun surface i have orbital station kerbin orbit and big mun ship with lander parked on station! I gonna build also mun orbital station and more ships which move between mun and kerbin station(s) so i going to colonize it then maybe minmus but is there any practical point of this? Do i get money or science if i start mining operations? I play career and not yet open those mining equipments! Also duna is interesting but is sooo far i have only sent probe there so it feels too damn hard to build anything there if there is no any practical point of it?

[bewing]

No, there is no practical point to it.

The only thing you get from colonization/mining is free fuel.

[Streetwind]

If you want to be brave and face a complex mod with a steep initial learning curve, then USI Kolonization System can make your colony useful. You do get science over time from inhabited colonies, and you can even build new spacecraft on site if you have the required resources on hand.

[Foxster]

No, there's currently little point to extensive "colonising" apart from the challenge, so is perhaps best done in sandbox mode. 

Minmus can be marginally useful as a refuelling base but tends to just complicate things with few savings/advantages. A small base with a Mobile Processing Lab can let you generate science very easily.    

[Snark]

15 hours ago, Spaceman83 said:

is there any practical point of this?

Not really (at least in stock), but that doesn't mean you can't have fun with it.  "Colonizing" is mainly about role-playing:  i.e. the point of building a base is mainly, well, just to have a base.  Other than being a source of free fuel, there's really no "point" to it... but then, when you get right down to it, there's not any point to, well, pretty much anything in KSP, other than "because I like doing it." 

One thing that can make having a base more interesting is if you've got the right set of mods installed.  Most of my career play-throughs, I don't bother with bases.  However, there's one particular pair of mods that makes them worthwhile for me; when I run these mods, then I build bases.  These two mods are:

• Kerbal Attachment System (KAS), to make bases practical
• Extraplanetary Launchpads (EPL), to give bases a point

KAS makes it easy and practical to build a base.  There's a really handy "connector port" part-- small, lightweight, can be radially attached practically anywhere-- which lets you send an EVA kerbal to connect any two ships that are parked within a couple of dozen meters of each other.  This makes it easy to land the various components of a base, then connect them together.  (I've always found that it's excruciatingly inconvenient to try to dock together ships on the surface.  There are people who manage to make this work, but I'm not one of them.  KAS, for me, makes the difference between "simple and fun" versus "really unpleasant and joy-killing".)

EPL allows you to build and launch ships in situ from your base, rather than having to ship everything from KSC.  For example, I did a really fun career playthrough where I established a base on Minmus as early as the tech tree would possibly let me... and then added the self-imposed rule that I would run my entire space program from there.  All new ships to be built and launched from the base, rather than KSC.  The only launches I allowed from KSC were to supply crew... and even there, I only allowed myself SSTO-to-LKO ships that offloaded the crew to a space station and then returned to Kerbin.  Not only did that make for an interesting challenge, but it also created quite a different gameplay experience.  If you're launching ships in vacuum from a world with tiny gravity and escape velocity, your design parameters end up looking rather different from when everything needs to punch through atmosphere and claw its way out of Kerbin's gravity well.

EPL also allows a style of gameplay for exploration that I really like:  send a fairly small mission to some very remote place (such as Sarnus, Urlum, or Neidon in Outer Planets), with just enough fuel and equipment to land on some little moon and set up a mining/construction base.  It then constructs all the ships it needs to thoroughly explore the neighborhood.  Then, when it's time to move on (either to go home to Kerbin, or to proceed to the next exploration destination), it builds the ship that will take the crew on to the next place.  This was really, really fun for me-- I had a blast.  That's probably the most base-building fun I've had.

As long as we're talking mods, it's also worth mentioning RoverDude's UKS/MKS.  That can also give bases a point, especially when combined with EPL.  I did one playthrough with that; glad I tried it out, just for the change of pace, though I probably won't be doing that again.  (Not that there's anything wrong with the mod; just that it turns KSP into a completely different game, where it's much more about managing logistics and much less about flying rocket ships.  That's fine, it just happens not to be my cup of tea.  I'm all about flying rocket ships.)

Anyway, for me, at least, KAS + EPL make the difference when it comes to building bases.  Either I'm running those two mods and I make bases, or else I'm not, and I don't.

[Aegolius13]

You can occasionally get contracts to mine ore, or mine ore and haul it to Kerbin SOI, or (less practically) land the ore on Kerbin.  The former two can be quite profitable since they pay well and cost you nothing if you already have the infrastructure.  Plus you can then turn that ore into free fuel.

[Spaceman83]

Ok thanks for answers!!! Practical business point of view there is always space turism