Best place to build a gateway in the Kerbol System?

[NSEP]

What is in your opinion the best place to build a gateway/outpost for other spaceships to refuel and go explore the rest of space?

In my opinion Minmus is the best, its rather close, fuel efficient to get to, and has low gravity for easy and efficient escape and landing. Minmus also has a Flat Landscape wich makes base building much easier, and since Minmus is located near the edge of Kerbins SOI, its cheaper to get to other planets. And don't let its orbital inclination fool you: its very easy to acces Minmus.

Edited October 8, 2017 by NSEP

[cratercracker]

My gateway which is called "CONTRASTELLARIS" is situated in between Duna and Kerbin. It is perfect for manned missions.

[NSEP]

1 minute ago, cratercracker said:

My gateway which is called "CONTRASTELLARIS" is situated in between Duna and Kerbin. It is perfect for manned missions.

Cool! Do you have an Asteroid attached to it for Mining? If you don't, i highly recommend it, it might be hard to get an Asteroid there but once its there, you bassicly got fuel for a lifetime, you wont run out and you wont need to refill it routinely anymore if you have.

[adsii1970]

I am going to put an orbital platform at the edge of Kerbin's sphere of influence. That's my plan!

[NSEP]

2 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

I am going to put an orbital platform at the edge of Kerbin's sphere of influence. That's my plan!

Thats a cool idea too! 

Okay, pretty much any Orbital Station, i recommend omend Asteroids for a fuel supply, if you are planning big spaceships to refuel there.

[adsii1970]

19 minutes ago, NSEP said:

Thats a cool idea too! 

Okay, pretty much any Orbital Station, i recommend omend Asteroids for a fuel supply, if you are planning big spaceships to refuel there.

Here's the thing... I decided to do this for a few reasons:

• This will justify regular refueling missions from Minimus to the orbiting platform and return to Minimus.
• It guarantees that ships leaving Kerbin's sphere of influence has refueled and resupplied. 
• It can serve as a waiting point for the ideal point to leave the sphere of influence of Kerbin to begin the transfer process to other solar bodies.
• It will force me to get better at docking... I am pretty good now, but sometimes it may take me a couple of times to get it.
• It will present some neat building challenges within my game:
  • No Kerman left behind! This means there has to be adequate craft to serve as life boats in the event of a disaster.
  • The station can only use electricity and monopropellant. Straight forward. The station may refine ore into LFO, but it cannot utilize the fuel.
  • The station must produce enough snacks for itself and for a stockpile. Just what it says. It does no good if the snacks (from @Angel-125's mod) generated can only feed the station's crew.
  • Capability to handle multiple vessels docking at once. This is more than slamming a bunch of docking ports onto a station. It means can it handle the work load?

Edited October 8, 2017 by adsii1970

[memes in space]

I never make these, but if I did I'd put one in LKO because its easy to rendezvous, not out of the way

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

My main gateway is at Minmus. It's easy to mine and shaves a lot of the dV requirement off of a Kerbin ejection burn (either directly or by dropping your PE down to Kerbin and using the Oberth Effect, depending on which position Minmus is in in its orbit at the time of departure.) I also have mines and fuel stations set up at Ike and Gilly for easier access to the outer and inner planets, respectively. I've also got a fuel station and mining outpost on Moho, along with one en route to Dres and another one planned for Eeloo (fully designed but not launched yet due to my tugs being needed for higher-priority missions) but those are mainly to support missions to those planets themselves, since their inclinations make them unsuitable as stopping points for longer journeys. The Mun is also being mined, but that station is rarely used now and I've recently recalled all personnel from it (it still works unmanned, though, albeit at reduced efficiency.)

A big priority of mine at the moment is the development of the Jool system. This began with Project Foothold, which established a mine and refuelling station in orbit around Pol. I've also got a mine and station headed to Laythe which will act as a refuelling station for SSTOs, but they haven't arrived yet. My Tylo mission is going to include a small mining installation of the same design as the one I'm sending to Eeloo, but that's mainly to support landings on Tylo itself (so that I don't have to pack enough fuel on my lander for both the landing and the launch, instead only equipping the lander for a one-way trip and refuelling on the surface.)

[invision]

laythe so everyday is a beach party

[septemberWaves]

Depends on the purpose of the station and on the planetary system. In the stock system (or in any system which doesn't move Kerbin or its moons around) Minmus is obviously best for refuelling, but the Mun is perhaps preferable for a general-purpose station if you're doing something like NASA's deep space gateway for training crew and such. Alternatively, for the Jool system in particular, Bop is pretty good but Laythe is probably preferable if you're able to build a fairly large cargo spaceplane since Jool missions will spend most of their fuel on the inner three moons.

In New Horizons (see the diagrams below for the locations I'm talking about), I'm probably going to build such a station around Serran to practice for long-duration missions, and excursions on large atmospheric worlds, because Serran is the most distant moon of Sonnah (making it far enough for long-term missions but also accessible enough to be practical) and the only one other than Kerbin with an atmosphere. It'll also serve as a spaceport for testing experimental spaceplanes destined for Laythe and Asclepius, since conveniently Serran's atmosphere allows jet engines to work (unless that's been changed). All in all it's quite a useful moon to build a station at for that range of purposes. But if I just wanted a refueling station I'd put one around Aptur, which is only about a day away from Kerbin at most points on its orbit and has pathetically-low gravity (it's the Minmus of New Horizons, since the actual Minmus now orbits Eeloo).

[regex]

Dres because I've been playing with OPM. In stock I find precisely zero reasons to make a gateway station because Eeloo is so easy to get to. An Eve station for Moho visits might make sense, though.

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

Kerbin orbit. Easy to get to and you can just launch fuel up #sciencemodemasterrace

[MythicalHeFF]

I had a gateway at Eeloo with OPM installed; it was SUPER convenient for refueling in the Sarnus system. I built it around Ovok originally, then moved it to Eeloo because a ship that was going to refuel there didn’t have enough dV to make it. 

  I ended up landing the station/base thingy on Eeloo and refueled it, then launched it again and was able to completely refill the ship’s tanks. Only thing is, that kind of used nearly all of its liquid fuel in the process, and it was stuck there with just oxidizer. RIP

[Pipcard]

A propellant depot in low Kerbin orbit, served by ore miners on Minmus + reusable tankers that travel back and forth.

Edited October 9, 2017 by Pipcard

[septemberWaves]

2 hours ago, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

I built it around Ovok originally, then moved it to Eeloo because a ship that was going to refuel there didn’t have enough dV to make it. 

A nice alternative solution to this problem can be to make a fuel tanker to transport fuel from your station around Ovok (or generalize to whichever small moon the mining station is at) to an unfueled ship waiting in orbit of the planet. It's a decent use for ion engines if you have the patience; it doesn't take much xenon to transport several huge tanks of rocket fuel between a moon and an awaiting spacecraft. Obviously you won't want to use xenon without a way of mining it (which some mods add), but even with nuclear engines it'd probably be more efficient to use the smaller moon for lifting fuel from the surface to a tanker ship.

[juanml82]

15 hours ago, regex said:

Dres because I've been playing with OPM. In stock I find precisely zero reasons to make a gateway station because Eeloo is so easy to get to. An Eve station for Moho visits might make sense, though.

Is Dres worth it? Transfer windows to and from Dres don't happen as often as they do with the inner planets and since it has no atmosphere nor a heavy moon to help with capture you need plenty of fuel to capture into Dres orbit.

 

For just refueling, a mining base in one of Minmus flats where tankers are refueled before going back to LKO is a good practice, and it allows you to lift empty upper stages, making for simpler, lighter and cheaper lower stages (the alternative is to use mods with 5 and 7.5m parts)

I've been using Ground Construction in my current career save and I think the Mun is better for an off-world factory. There is more gravity and no perfectly flat terrain like Minmus. But the Mun makes for a better starting point for interplanetary transfers: From low munar orbit, you plot a return to Kerbin trajectory in which your Pe is at the point (or near the point) were you need to burn for an interplanetary ejection. Your starting (Kerbin) orbit is a highly elliptical one which is just some 150-200 dV from exiting Kerbin's SOI,  you take full advantage of the Oberth effect (because your Pe is low above Kerbin) and you burn with near filled tanks (the only fuel expenditure is the dV to get from low munar orbit to a Kerbin Pe of around 100km. And off-world manufacturing in a body without an atmosphere means you don't have to worry about the ship's aerodynamic profile. All this can be done from Minmus, but Minmus slower orbit and longer transfer times make more difficult to coordinate your resulting Kerbin's Pe with the place where you need to burn for your interplanetary injection.

[regex]

10 minutes ago, juanml82 said:

Is Dres worth it? Transfer windows to and from Dres don't happen as often as they do with the inner planets and since it has no atmosphere nor a heavy moon to help with capture you need plenty of fuel to capture into Dres orbit.

Transfers to Jool are quite cheap and braking from Dres doesn't take much, so it's good for low TWR electrics but overall I find no good reason to have a refueling base in the first place. Anywhere. Aside from maybe destinations and even then it becomes defunct when you're done gathering the science. But if I do use one Dres makes more sense to me than anywhere else with OPM installed.

And sure, you have to brake there but it's nothing compared to Moho and the SOI is big enough so that even electrics have plenty of time. As far as an atmosphere I would never subject an interplanetary tug or its payload to the rigours of aerobraking so I'm going to be braking at my destination no matter what.

[Aegolius13]

I prefer the Mun myself.   The short orbital period and zero inclination make it very easy to set up interplanetary burns accurately. Also the quick travel time to/from Kerbin is helpful if you need a last minute crew delivery or something. 

Minmus does have the advantages of being further out in the gravity well and easier to mine fuel from.   But it's not exactly hard to mine at the Mun, and it's still effectively free. 

[Pthigrivi]

7 hours ago, regex said:

As far as an atmosphere I would never subject an interplanetary tug or its payload to the rigours of aerobraking so I'm going to be braking at my destination no matter what.

Do you generally find that carting around a heatshield isn't worth the savings from aerobraking?

[regex]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Do you generally find that carting around a heatshield isn't worth the savings from aerobraking?

No, I find aerocapture (sorry, used the wrong term originally) to be pretty unrealistic unless we're talking about something encased in an aeroshell, although realism isn't the only thing guiding my decisions; my tugs generally aren't configured to use a heatshield anyway since I prefer rear-heavy pushers with the payload up front. There's also the fact that getting around Kerbin system is pretty easy to begin with and I don't see a need to design for such things unless I'm exploring a concept (like an aeroshell).

[Ty Tan Tu]

On 10/8/2017 at 4:05 PM, regex said:

Dres because I've been playing with OPM. In stock I find precisely zero reasons to make a gateway station because Eeloo is so easy to get to. An Eve station for Moho visits might make sense, though.

I just sent a resource scanner to Dres to explore the possibility. To date I have been using Minmus. I have the direct flight from surface to space station down, so I can transfer fuel very efficiently. You have the large flat terrain which allows me to be sloppy and use solar powered rovers to transfer fuel from miners to fuel transfer shuttles. It is really a no brainer.

I have been toying with an asteroid in a  geosynchronous orbit above Kerbin just ahead of the KSC. If you could launch directly to the asteroid space station, knowing it will be in the exact same place every time, you could perfect your launch to it, and do it whenever you wanted. It would simply some things. But asteroids really do not provide all that much fuel.

I thought about Gilly. Because it is a permanent body in the game, I am assuming it would have infinite ore to extract for fuel unlike asteroids.

If I could figure out how to do a space elevator - I would just use Kerbin. 

[juanml82]

Or you can capture Dresteroids and forget about landing. It takes very little dV to reach them or to lower them to a low Dres orbit.

Gilly has infinite ore, but it's a pain to operate there: high inclination, plenty of dV to and from Low Eve Orbit, Eve itself is inclined, terrible warp rates (without the warp control mod or whatever it's called), awful terrain for landing, bad roving terrain due the minuscule gravity and the unevenness., very small SOI. It's useful to refuel for Eve and Moho missions, but I wouldn't choose it as a primary gateway to the rest of the system.

[B-STRK]

Trying to establish my station at Minmus as one. But that's partly as a consequence of nearly exclusively building my heavy deep space/interplanetary vessels there as well. Granted, I'm doing sandbox, so refuelling from Kerbin and from Minmus, taken in isolation, are pretty much either-or. And if I need to pick something up from Kerbin before setting out, and it's too heavy to send to Minmus, the ship involved would swing by LKO, and most likely launch from there as well. Grabbing the Oberth advantage for me isn't too much of a priority (again, sandbox, but I'd probably exercise the same philosophy in career as well by the time I go IP) as I tend to overbuild on the dV side of things for safety, and for some reason I'm somehow boobing up my multiple Pe-kicks, and all that practice at little greenie's getting me used to adjusting for inclined launches, so whether from high LKO or Minmus orbit I'd rather just do one long untangential burn out. Premises considered, DSGing at Minmus (but emphasizing a lot of Kerbinside support as well) supports these considerations for me.

Out on the other planets, probably Dres as an IP pit stop if needed. I tend to save local moons for local systems, makes the ops less intensive there and consequently makes it easier to design the required vessels. 

[RedPandaz]

On 10/8/2017 at 7:26 AM, NSEP said:

What is in your opinion the best place to build a gateway/outpost for other spaceships to refuel and go explore the rest of space?

In my opinion Minmus is the best, its rather close, fuel efficient to get to, and has low gravity for easy and efficient escape and landing. Minmus also has a Flat Landscape wich makes base building much easier, and since Minmus is located near the edge of Kerbins SOI, its cheaper to get to other planets. And don't let its orbital inclination fool you: its very easy to acces Minmus.

Minmus is all hills!

[NSEP]

40 minutes ago, RedPandaz said:

Minmus is all hills!

Looks pretty flat to me.