jool push

[bjerrang]

So ive sent my fist probes in and building a comnet.

Looking for the best plantet/mun to setup a space station and ore production.

Last time i went to duna and did the same job i missed out on the effect of solarpanels.

Im guessing jool needs even more panels and for the ore mashine , what solutions do you use there. 

Pictures appriciated. 

[bigcalm]

The best choices in the Joolian system for an ore extraction and refinery base is either Pol or Vall.  Pol is a little far out to be truly convenient and is very hilly so you have to build your landers accordingly though it does have a tiny gravity well.  Vall is situated wonderfully, is reasonably flat but has a high gravity well - roughly equivalent to Moho or Duna.  Laythe is out unless you are superb at building planes, Tylo has a vast gravity well, and Bops inclination makes it annoying as a fuel generation place.

In terms of power, the biggest solar panels you can muster, and lots of them.  Alternatively, install a mod pack that includes nuclear reactors (MKS, Near Future Electrical, probably others) - that will allow you to power your refineries.

[Spricigo]

If your mining base is also the refinery you may consider using fuel cells to provide the energy. 

As for the ideal location for ore production. The quick answer is where you get better yield (higher ore concentration). However a closer look will tell that a initial high 'efficiency' will quickly become moot if you need to transport it vaste distances deltaV to where it will be used. So we are usually looking for low gravity celestial not far from where the fuel will be used, but for places where we will land/liftoff a lot producing the fuel locally may be the best solution.

 

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

This is my hodgepodge base on Pol. It looks kinda crazy cuz it was built to complete a few different contracts before it landed to complete the "build surface base on Pol" contract. I actually forgot to put an antenna (a bad habit of mine) on the base, so that's why the little ship is connected upside-down to the Mk1-2. I also attached the landing legs to the landing engines, so I wasn't able to decouple them. Which makes the whole thing look even crazier. This was one of my first bases, so I didn't really know what I was doing at the time. It actually works really well, though, The rover on the right put the station together, and is now the refueling rover. The fuel shuttle is in orbit. I've used it to refuel quite a few errant missions in the Jool system.

The fuel cells are for continuous operation at night.

 

 

I always built my bases in separate modules, and then connected them together on the ground with a rover. I got tired of sending so many different vessels and having to do so much work to put a base together, so for my base on Bop, I sent the whole thing as a single vessel. 

 

 

Here, the solar panels are retracted to see it better. This one looks crazy as well, but it was purposeful. In order to launch it from Kerbin, I had to try to balance out the weight as best I could. It worked out pretty well. The huge refueling rover in the background is obviously overkill. I just wanted to use the giant wheels for something.

 

 

None of this stuff is even necessary, really. I just built them to complete contracts and, mostly, for fun. It'll at least give you an idea of some of things you can do. Which is pretty much whatever you want. Jool is a great place to build bases.

 

[bjerrang]

Awsome photos kerbalcrush!

Im not that skilled that i build base yet. 

1 ore ship that connects to a spacestation. 

The guy above states that Laythe is impossible , why ?

What mun would you choose for this.  Ill put the spacestation in the same mun`s orbit.

[Spricigo]

1 hour ago, bjerrang said:

The guy above states that Laythe is impossible , why ?

not impossible, but the amount of deltaV needed to get into orbit make it less desirable.

[bjerrang]

So pol is the best option ?

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

3 hours ago, bjerrang said:

So pol is the best option ?

Honestly, once you can, it would probably be best to have one on each of the moons (if only just for fun and the challenge of it). I even have a very small one on Tylo. That one is only useful for Tylo landers, though. Not refueling operations. Laythe is the same way. It would almost be like having refueling operations on Kerbin (which people certainly do). It's entirely doable if you're good with spaceplanes (which I'm not), but it would really only be useful at Laythe. However, it costs so much to operate around there (as @Spricigo mentioned) that it might be worth it if you end up spending a lot of time there.

As @bigcalm said earlier, Vall is in a great spot, but it costs more to operate there. It leaves a choice a lot like at Kerbin. Kerbin itself (Laythe), Mun (Vall), or Minmus (Pol, Bop). With those choices, Pol, I really think, is the best option for your first base at Jool. You can launch a huge fuel shuttle off of Pol easily, and use it anywhere in the system. Even if it only has a little fuel left to transfer (subtracting what it needs to take off, get where it's going, and then get back), it still does the trick. When you're returning to Kerbin, you usually don't have much of a ship left. This means you don't need a lot of fuel, you just need a quick fill-up to get home. Combined with the free-capture at Jool, you can make your ships quite a bit smaller, and even make them "one-way" so-to-speak, since they can refuel before heading home. If your ship has some fuel left (but not enough to get back to Kerbin), you can have it stop off at Pol on the way home to refuel. It also really provides a great safety net for your early Jool operations; when you're not too sure what you're going to need. I highly recommend beginning at Pol.

You'll notice in my pic above that I also have an operation on Bop. It was built to complete contracts, of course, but also because I take a lot of contracts at Bop even now. The money is always good, but mostly because I just like Bop. I wouldn't recommend it for your main operation, not just because of the inclination (as Bigcalm also mentioned), but because landings there happen in slow motion (a lot like Gilly) and can be infuriating if you're in a hurry.

Edited October 27, 2017 by Cpt Kerbalkrunch

[Zhetaan]

1 hour ago, bjerrang said:

So pol is the best option ?

Pol is a good option, yes.  The only real drawback for me is that it has a small number of biomes; Vall has more variety, which sometimes gives better chances for higher concentrations of ore.  However, you can scan both and pick the one that's best-suited to your purposes; it certainly doesn't cost much in the long-term.  Pol's other problem is that it is so far out, but that's less of a problem than many would think because transfer windows from Pol to the inner Jool system recur approximately every inner-moon orbit.  Don't forget that Tylo gives many opportunities for a lot of gravity assists to help adjust your transfers, too.  However, that's not the only problem with Pol being so far out:  every moon of Jool is tidally locked to it, which means that Pol's rotational period is as long as its orbit.  Since Pol's orbit around Jool is substantially less than Jool's orbit around the sun, this means that effectively, Pol's orbit about Jool is approximately equivalent to its solar day.  Pol has a 41-day sidereal rotation period, which means that if you're planning on using solar panels, think again.  You'll need many, many tonnes of batteries to run your equipment through the 20-day night and at least three times as many solar panels as needed to run your equipment (one set for the ISRU and two sets to charge the batteries before the sun goes down again).  Consider alternatives to solar power.

Laythe takes a lot of delta-V to take off from because it has an atmosphere.  Also, I believe that ore does not appear in any ocean--though that may only be true of Kerbin's oceans--but if it's true of Laythe as well, then there's simply no point to refining fuel there except to provide for a permanent Laythe-based aerodrome.

Tylo is as massive as Kerbin but it has no atmosphere; it's actually the most difficult place to land in the stock game because of this.  Don't bother setting up a refinery there; any fuel tug you send will use most of its fuel to reach orbit and will have to keep most of what's left to get back down again.  Worse than that is that if you start in Tylo orbit, you lose the gravity-assist advantage that Tylo offers, so you waste what little fuel is left.  Seriously, don't bother.

Bop is too inclined with respect to the rest of the system and has the same low-number-of-biomes problem as Pol; you spend so much fuel realigning planes so that you can get anywhere that it cancels the advantage of low gravity.

Vall is a very good choice: it has a lot of surface area, reasonable gravity, and a large number of biomes that offer a lot of chances for a good ore concentration.  The gravity is .235 g, or about 1.4 times that of the Mun and .8 times that of Duna.

[bigcalm]

My landers on Vall with the base in the background.  They can carry 1500 ore into orbit, dock to something, refuel it, and then land again before refuelling themselves again.  They can also carry 8 crew, are powered by nuclear reactors rather than solar panels, and they can also take other resources to or from orbit using the lander leg tanks.  Note:  These are multi-purpose vehicles - a pure ISRU + drill + ore and fuel tanks would be significantly smaller - it wouldn't need to carry supplies (which I need for MKS), or so much habitation, life support capabilities, etc.

My refueller onLaythe - can transport 1500 ore back to Laythe orbit and then land again.  As I'm not that great on building SSTO planes, it's terrifying to land but otherwise performs reasonably as a plane and SSTO generally.

Though the next pictured vessel is on Dres, I have a clone on Vall as well.  This is a more pure focused vessel without crew facilities, designed to mine ore and get it back to orbit ready for refuelling.  Nuclear powered, and with a use-it-as-a-90-ton-rover and docking machine option.

 

 

 

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

13 minutes ago, bigcalm said:

 

 

 

 

I like that Dres miner. That's even more of a crazy-lookin' hodgepodge than my base on Pol. I see some mods there: do they speed things up when drilling without an engineer? I play stock, so I've only tried an unmanned driller once. It took over a year for the ship to refuel itself on Duna. Ever since, I consider a 4 or 5 star engineer to be absolutely essential for any mining vessel.

[bigcalm]

13 minutes ago, Cpt Kerbalkrunch said:

I like that Dres miner. That's even more of a crazy-lookin' hodgepodge than my base on Pol. I see some mods there: do they speed things up when drilling without an engineer? I play stock, so I've only tried an unmanned driller once. It took over a year for the ship to refuel itself on Duna. Ever since, I consider a 4 or 5 star engineer to be absolutely essential for any mining vessel.

Oh god no.  I generally set a Kerbal Alarm Clock to call me to the site again 50 days or more after once the ISRU and drill have got up to temperature (depends on the ore content at the site).  I do have a "manned" version of the wheeled miner-rover, but because I play with MKS + Life Support, I really need to give my Kerbals nice accommodations and plenty of snacks to keep them going, and hence it's not particularly practicable except in emergency situations.  Hence the larger multi purpose vehicles above - a single 5* engineer it can refuel itself and fill up the ore tank in around 10 hours ready for the hop to orbit - and the on-board life support and supplies mean that the engineer will be happy for up to a year.

Edited October 27, 2017 by bigcalm
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