Best place to build a gateway in the Kerbol System?

[RedPandaz]

Just now, NSEP said:

Looks pretty flat to me.

I had to abort because it was all hills, tho I may try to build my base in those flats

[NSEP]

17 hours ago, juanml82 said:

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.

Going to Dres in general takes up quite a bit of Delta-V, there are no Moons with gravitational pull or atmosphere to slow down easily. But once you get there, your in for a treat.

2 minutes ago, RedPandaz said:

I had to abort because it was all hills, tho I may try to build my base in those flats

The hills never gave me problems, but sometimes its hard to pinpoint land on Minmus because of its spin.

[RedPandaz]

2 minutes ago, NSEP said:

Going to Dres in general takes up quite a bit of Delta-V, there are no Moons with gravitational pull or atmosphere to slow down easily. But once you get there, your in for a treat.

The hills never gave me problems, but sometimes its hard to pinpoint land on Minmus because of its spin.

I tried landing, fell over, [repeat 2x] , then gave up and flew back to Kerbin

 

[Tyko]

On 10/10/2017 at 1:22 PM, RedPandaz said:

I tried landing, fell over, [repeat 2x] , then gave up and flew back to Kerbin

 

You're lander is really tall for the width of your landing legs. One option that many use would be to split your giant fuel tank and use smaller ones with a center tank surrounded by 3 or 4 attached symmetrically. Then put the legs on the outside of the 3 (or 4) side tanks. This shortens your craft a lot and broadens the landing leg spread a lot.

[RedPandaz]

29 minutes ago, Tyko said:

You're lander is really tall for the width of your landing legs. One option that many use would be to split your giant fuel tank and use smaller ones with a center tank surrounded by 3 or 4 attached symmetrically. Then put the legs on the outside of the 3 (or 4) side tanks. This shortens your craft a lot and broadens the landing leg spread a lot.

Well now I landed, and I'm testing a rocket for sending base parts out there

Huge rocket, building "Gateway Station"

Do you know how to reduce lag? cuz my battery modules have a lot of batteries

 

[Tyko]

16 minutes ago, RedPandaz said:

Well now I landed, and I'm testing a rocket for sending base parts out there

Huge rocket, building "Gateway Station"

Do you know how to reduce lag? cuz my battery modules have a lot of batteries

 

congrats! two things I've found that increase lag are high part-counts and lots of lighting. My first stations had tons of parts attached and lots of lighting (because...cool!). I found that reducing lighting and choosing higher capacity parts (one big battery instead of lots of small batteries) both helped significantly

[RedPandaz]

Just now, Tyko said:

congrats! two things I've found that increase lag are high part-counts and lots of lighting. My first stations had tons of parts attached and lots of lighting (because...cool!). I found that reducing lighting and choosing higher capacity parts (one big battery instead of lots of small batteries) both helped significantly

MY problem is that the 2.5 meter batteries are really thin tho

 

[Tyko]

7 minutes ago, RedPandaz said:

MY problem is that the 2.5 meter batteries are really thin tho

 

Not sure I'm following you..why is a thin battery a problem?

[RedPandaz]

Just now, Tyko said:

Not sure I'm following you..why is a thin battery a problem?

Cuzz you gotta stack a lot of them to be the same length as the crew cabins, leading to a large part count

 

[Tyko]

2 minutes ago, RedPandaz said:

Cuzz you gotta stack a lot of them to be the same length as the crew cabins, leading to a large part count

 

Not trying to be obtuse here I guess I'd have to see a picture of your craft to understand why the battery stack has to be as high as the crew cabin

[RedPandaz]

Just now, Tyko said:

Not trying to be obtuse here I guess I'd have to see a picture of your craft to understand why the battery stack has to be as high as the crew cabin

I'm having rovers with docking ports at each ends, in cylindrical shapes, like corridors. If I want to make squares and stuff, and just to look better, they gotta be the same length

 

[Tyko]

I just realized we are totally usurping this thread...sorry 'bout that...

(back to regularly scheduled program...)

I've tried various locations for gateways / refueling. My favorite is now to park a big asteroid in Kerbin orbit and mine it for fuel. My ships launch only with enough fuel to dock with the asteroid and then top off their tanks there. This keeps my launch weights down and gives me a set altitude that I can plan my launch windows for. I tried lunar refueling and a few others. Just found that keeping launch weight down was a bigger advantage (i try to keep my lifters from being too Kerbalized)

Edited October 11, 2017 by Tyko

[RedPandaz]

1 minute ago, Tyko said:

I just realized we are totally usurping this thread...sorry 'bout that...

*shrug*

 

[Xyphos]

Minmus is the "travel center" for the whole Kerbol system.
it is rich with ore, low gravity and no atmosphere makes it a very attractive place to setup a mining outpost.

However, if you were to put a mining outpost anywhere else, I highly recommend having a refuel depot around Eve and hauling fuel or ore to it from Gilly.
Eve's 8k delta-v requirement to get to orbit (of which, 3400 is orbital speed IIRC) is very taxing, and if you manage to make an SSTO for Eve return, it's likely to run out of fuel by the time you get to full orbit.
Setting up an Eve fuel station would be an ideal preparation measure for the Grand Tour mission/challenge

[Azimech]

I agree with Minmus. It's been years since I've built a base, I feel like doing one now. But no, gotta finish other projects first.

[Freshmeat]

I have recently rebuild my Minmus base, all my interplanetary missions get their fuel from there. I have a handy spreadsheet that tells me when to launch for correct initial inclination on the way up, and when to escape Minmus SOI for a given ejection angle from low Kerbin PE.

[Atkara]

Since I perform all of my transfer maneuvers in LKO, I initially used a surface miner to haul ore from Minmus, dock with the outbound craft and fire up the ISRU. Nowadays, I haul fuel straight from Kerbin with a spaceplane, then call in a fuel drone to pick it up and dock with the craft in question. It's a bit more work, but takes less ingame time to get the job done.

But as far as the outer solar system goes and if one's into asteroid mining, Dres would be the place to set up a gateway, in my opinion.

[RedPandaz]

On 10/11/2017 at 3:19 PM, Tyko said:

I just realized we are totally usurping this thread...sorry 'bout that...

(back to regularly scheduled program...)

I've tried various locations for gateways / refueling. My favorite is now to park a big asteroid in Kerbin orbit and mine it for fuel. My ships launch only with enough fuel to dock with the asteroid and then top off their tanks there. This keeps my launch weights down and gives me a set altitude that I can plan my launch windows for. I tried lunar refueling and a few others. Just found that keeping launch weight down was a bigger advantage (i try to keep my lifters from being too Kerbalized)

I tried asteroids with Hyperedit but they're way too small for anything substantial

Edited October 13, 2017 by RedPandaz
.

[jhousen]

other, all the above

[Pthigrivi]

 

Here's my current set up. Im sure it will be efficient if it ever pays for itself. I've got reusable landers for gathering science and crew training and busses that aerobrake back to LKO. Im using USI-LS, so fuel and fertilizer is harvested at Minmus and the fuel is dropped back to Kerbin in an aerobraking tanker. All equipment is delivered dry by an SSTO tailsitter, and crews are ferried up by an SSTO shuttle. Everything meets up at the station in LKO orbit. The first Duna windows are opening up so I've got a 6-crew mothership under construction there.

https://imgur.com/a/I6vT4

Also whats up with imgur albums?

Edited October 26, 2017 by Pthigrivi

[Atkara]

28 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Also whats up with imgur albums?

Looked it up too. They don't seem to be working the way they used to.

[Pthigrivi]

womp womp.

[KerikBalm]

Since orbit is basically halfway to anywhere, in stock or RSS, the best "gateways" are going to be in orbit of Kerbin/Earth, and thus Minmus or the Moon/Luna.

My revamped system swaps Mun and Minmus, and make minmus more convenient as a "gateway" to other places because the transfers to it are shorter, the inclination is no longer a problem (for the escape trajectory, its not a problem for reaching it), and since its orbital period is shorter and the time from escaping it to kerbin PE (where the ejection burn from the system takes place) is shorter, its easier to time departures during the right transfer windows.

In the process it makes Mun a better analogue of the Moon/Luna, and Minmus has no analogue anyway:

(3x rescaled, stock size is too easy, and there's never a real need for ISRU in stock anyway)

Aside from that, I also use a mod that lets me do ISRU for Xenon when atmospheres are present, so I use Duna for that...

but if I'm playing my RaldSpaceProgram mod, I use Ike

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