What do your Orbital Fuel Dumps look like?

[Hotel26]

I went through every place I quoted "33t" payload.  I meant 33,000 units, which is 165t.  I think this contributed to some confusion.  Please pardon me.

Edited January 2, 2018 by Hotel26

[Jimbodiah]

Not so much a fuel dump as an orbital manufacturing station that also has some fuel storage. It's my end-game EPL factory.

[Dfthu]

Here is my Duna Fuel and Crew Station, focusing on LF for Nerva's, and a very bad miner.

And here is my Mun Station, which is still in progress

.

[ave369]

I never make them that big. My typical "disposable fuel depot" is a single orange fuel tank equipped with a probe core, Vernors and a docking port. Such a depot can be tossed to the orbit of any planet to make missions there easier. When the fuel is over, I just erase the craft, hence disposable.

[Archgeek]

Another thing that can help is to be careful with the number of active docking ports you have.  Unless it's been improved, to facilitate docking magnets, every active port in a scene runs through every part tree every physics frame to find other docking ports and check their positions and orientations to itself.  This can make for massive loss in framerate.  I'd suggested a fix in the bugtracker back when,

Spoiler

have the active craft scan every part on scene load and add active docking ports to a list with their positions, then have each port update its position in the list just once each physics frame, and have active ports on the active vessel just scan the list for anything in range before checking orientation as usual

but I do not know if anything like that implemented before the A-team's dev contract ran out.  Also, by active, I mean ports that are both open for docking, and, in the case of the three animated ones, physically open.  The shielded port, the in-line port, and mk2 port can all open and close, and do not scan for other docking ports when closed (though if I recall correctly the mk2 actually stayed active when closed due to a bug, but that may've been fixed).  So, you can actually save some performance at the expense of a little mass by using closable docking ports to reduce scans through the scene's part list.  Or perhaps a lot less if they did get that optimized a bit.

[Jarin]

23 minutes ago, Archgeek said:

Another thing that can help is to be careful with the number of active docking ports you have.  Unless it's been improved, to facilitate docking magnets, every active port in a scene runs through every part tree every physics frame to find other docking ports and check their positions and orientations to itself.  This can make for massive loss in framerate.

Good to know, thanks. I'll definitely make sure some mod-based "Welding" docking ports are a feature of my next big station and see if that helps performance.

[MaxwellsDemon]

I've gone back and forth between basing the ISRU on Minmus or putting it in orbit...  not sure what I'm going to do this time around.

• Putting it on the surface means you ship the refined stuff up, so you're not paying to ship the whole thing of raw ore.
• Putting it in orbit means you *only* have to ship raw ore up, and can refine into different fuel types without having to have specialized tankage for each kind of fuel.

Both have their headaches, but as I think about it now, I think it's simpler to put it in orbit.  One less thing to do (land it) and more flexible.  And Minmus isn't terribly expensive in terms of fuel to land and take off from, so the fact it's going to be ore shipments is not so big a deal.

[Rune]

This may help the OP regarding autrostutting and 'the shakes'. Long story short, double-docking into a sturdy arrangement works:

Each fuel module is connected to at least two others in a grid, and that makes things much sturdier. Mind you, I still use a judicious amount of autrostrutting to keep the whole thing from going wrong when I have lots of other stuff docked to it, usually on the docking ring attached to it, and to the heaviest part. In general, 'the shakes' appear when you have lots of parallel dockings (think a lot of things docked on one end to the same central thing, free to wiggle around like the fingers of a hand), I think because you hit a regime where the oscillations feed into one another instead of dampening. In any case, promptly 'freezing' the physics with timewarp can save your stations from RUD as you experiment with autostrutting it, and I have yet to find something I couldn't keep somewhat together, eventually, with enough of them in strategic places.

As @Wcmille, I mostly launch the fuel in the form of ore, 'cause it's cheaper and more  versatile, not to mention much more compact (ore is dense), and also I do a lot of mining when far from Kerbin. Still, it helps to have some refined, and I also need to feed engines and such, sometimes. In any case, I built a couple of tanks that had the same form factor, and since I gave them side docking ports, I can now stack them to my satisfaction, and still have the whole thing be sturdy without autostrutting. Each fuel/ore thingy is only 5 parts, so I can afford to have lots of them on screen at the same time, too, and by offsetting them properly, you can do that nice hexagonal arrangement on two 'stories', or a more boring 3x3, or very simple a 3x1... or pretty much any other shape.

 

Rune. Note every piece of the space station was launched inside a Mk3 payload bay.

Edited January 17, 2018 by Rune

[Corona688]

This is my Minmus fuel depot.

The orange tank on right is a "banana tank", a self-motivated shipping container.  They're reliable and efficient, also well-balanced enough to land on my mining vehicle.  I tend to send them where I want them instead of vice versa, making the station more of a crossroads than a dump.  That may change if I have to build anything especially large.

Edited January 18, 2018 by Corona688

[RizzoTheRat]

I design my landers to tow or push an orbital fuel dump which will allow them to do several landings.

In an earlier game this had enough fuel to get to Minmus, land in every biome (refuelling on ever 2nd or 3rd hop I think), and then push the fuel dump on to the Mun for another landing there

In my current game this was my first big mission to Duna

The fuel dump itself is a half length Rockomax with 5 tweakscaled LF tanks, plus a couple of TCS tanks, remote guidance unit, comms (I use RemoteTech so my fuel dumps are also comms nodes), 2 x 2.5 and 2 x 1.25 docking ports.  The Mk1-2 pods are return vehicles capable of getting the crew back to Kerbin from low Duna orbit, and lander in the middle towed the whole lot to Duna orbit, using about 2.5 of the LF tanks in the process.

I'm trying to use Nukes as much as possible, they're heavy but it's a huge reduction in the amount of fuel you need to lug around.