Career Economics?

[Elroy Jetson]

I am thinking about trying to put a refueling station into orbit around kerbin.  

 

My question - I am guessing this will cost me a bit of money without any immediate payback.  Does the economy eventually start to pay better?  Will it become easier to be self sufficient or do I need to stick with the grind for now?  I'm assuming that the away planet and moon missions are where the money is?

 

i have about 500k in the budget for now, a few more parts of KSC need upgrades but none that are holding me back at this point.

 

 

[Laie]

If you care about grind, don't build a fuel depot. It will need to be refuelled, after all, and cheaply too -- this means you need a cheap and reusable lifter to top off the depot, and have to fly it every so often.

Simple discardable launchers are "good enough" to run a profit. If you factor in player time, recovering stuff usually isn't all that worthwhile. You'll rake in more funds if you quickly proceed with the next mission on a throw-away rocket. Which is still grinding, though.

If you cannot find a type of grind that suits you, you may want to look into different play modes: sandbox or science mode.

If you stick with career, the funds are in the more prestigious missions. Which may be to far-away places, or more difficult things to do at home. IIRC the easiest way to gain prestige is running tourist missions, especially VIPs.

Edited February 28, 2019 by Laie

[Elroy Jetson]

24 minutes ago, Laie said:

If you care about grind, don't build a fuel depot. It will need to be refuelled, after all, and cheaply too -- this means you need a cheap and reusable lifter to top off the depot, and have to fly it every so often.

Simple discardable launchers are "good enough" to run a profit. If you factor in player time, recovering stuff usually isn't all that worthwhile. You'll rake in more funds if you quickly proceed with the next mission on a throw-away rocket. Which is still grinding, though.

If you cannot find a type of grind that suits you, you may want to look into different play modes: sandbox or science mode.

If you stick with career, the funds are in the more prestigious missions. Which may be to far-away places, or more difficult things to do at home. IIRC the easiest way to gain prestige is running tourist missions, especially VIPs.

I don't consider any of it to be a grind yet, probably not my best choice of words.  I do like the idea of getting better at docking and running re supply missions sounds like fun for now.

 

im just worried about spending too much money on it and then going out of business?  Would hate to have some yuppity startup, crowd funded bunch of hippies move in on my action, so you get me those heaters and we'll talk, see?

[Laie]

2 minutes ago, Elroy Jetson said:

im just worried about spending too much money on it and then going out of business?

Don't you worry. As long as you don't blow so much cash on it that the next mission absolutely has to succeed, you'll be fine.

Cheap refueling missions necessarily requires SSTO spaceplanes, though, and losing one of these to an accident can be very costly.

Or, if you're in any way like me... you'll quickly find that your fuel depot is too small, too unwieldy, has the wrong type of docking port or whatever. So you need another one, and another. That way lies ruin.

My favorite approach is to not bother with depots. The next best would be launching a new one, rather than refuelling the old. I mean, you have to bring up a tank of X capacity in any event, don't you? Much easier to swap out the whole station in that case. It's up to you whether you want to make the old station recoverable. You'll find that all the recovery claptrap drives up part count and launch cost. You can still hone your docking skills by docking with the station for as long as it's any good.

Actually, I'd recommend trying a few throw-away stations to begin with, just so you can figure out what qualities it needs to work for you. And only then commit to your one true design.

[Aegolius13]

I agree with @Laie.  There is no real inherent advantage to sending up fuel separately to a depot, as opposed to sending extra fuel with your mission craft.  The delta-v requirements are the same. (Sometimes launching one bigger rocket can be cheaper than two smaller ones, sometimes not - depends on how you build).  However, he's also right that you CAN achieve better economies by using an SSTO cargo plane to send up the fuel, which your less-efficient rockets can later use. 

A fuel depot can be useful if you end up doing ISRU mining on the Mun or Minmus, and bring it back to Kerbin.  Since that provides free fuel, after the initial investment in the mining rig.  

If you do choose to build one, I'd try to snag a contract to put a station in orbit.  They can pay pretty well.  Even if you end up needing to include some extra parts to satisfy the contract, you should still come out ahead (and can always even decouple those parts after contract completion if you don't want them).

Edited February 28, 2019 by Aegolius13

[Zhetaan]

54 minutes ago, Aegolius13 said:

I agree with @Laie.  There is no real inherent advantage to sending up fuel separately to a depot, as opposed to sending extra fuel with your mission craft.  The delta-v requirements are the same. (Sometimes launching one bigger rocket can be cheaper than two smaller ones, sometimes not - depends on how you build).

@Elroy Jetson:

One potential use case is a depot as a temporary fuel dump while you're in a planetary neighbourhood.  For example, if you want to get many biomes' worth of science from Minmus, rather than use a biome hopper and end up carrying fuel down and partway back several times, you can send a fuel tank that you leave in orbit and get something that functions halfway between a craft with a large fuel tank and a depot.

Of course, you get much better fuel efficiency from a rover.

I can see a depot working reasonably well as a port of call for a multiple-use rocket, such as a twenty-seat passenger liner for Jool tourism that only needs to go there and come back (as opposed to Jool-V motherships and science missions and all that).  Once you have a rocket that can do the job, you can save some money by using it to do that job several times.  Of course, that's the same concept behind SSTOs, just writ large, so savings is generally dependent on your ability to sacrifice raw lifting capacity for lifting efficiency.  Reusability goes a long way for that.

For other financial advice, 500 kiloFunds is a good place to be for where you are in the game.  Don't build any 450 kiloFunds mega-rockets that will wipe out your savings if you crash them, and don't upgrade facilities more than you need to accomplish your immediate needs.  This means that you will likely want to get Mission Control to level three first so you can pick and choose from more contract offers, but you can do a lot with the twelve kerbals you get from the level two Astronaut Complex unless you're also staffing bases or completing a lot of long interplanetary missions.  You're probably not in a position to trade much of one currency for another, so you might not upgrade the Administration Building to even level two before you've upgraded everything else.  You should definitely upgrade the Tracking Station to level two as soon as you can afford it, but you don't need level three until you're either asteroid hunting or looking at a mission to Jool.  R&D is one of the last things you'll upgrade (mainly due to cost) but you need it at level two to have access to certain science experiments.  However, you can build a lot of useful rockets with the parts from a level two R&D before you feel a pressing need to go on to level three.

Edited February 28, 2019 by Zhetaan

[bewing]

Generally, I build my booster stages to end up in LKO with a little bit of fuel left. I build them specifically to have a docking port or three, a probe core, a couple of solar panels, a battery, and an antenna.

So, I end up with maybe 5 of these in orbit, and I dock them all together. One booster of leftover fuel may not be worth much, but five is a heck of a lot.

And any time I end up with some extra fuel just before I land, I dock with my booster tank farm and donate a bit more.

Once I have the ability to mine for fuel, I send a tanker in from Minmus to fill it all back up for free.

And then I have five fully fueled expendable space tugs that I can use for sending interplanetary missions off into the wild black yonder.

The one thing you have to be really careful of with a space fuel depot is that there are a lot of contracts (such as satellite contracts) that require you to have a new ship. Once you dock with a station, your craft is no longer new.

 

 

[Ratwerke_Actual]

37 minutes ago, bewing said:

.......... that require you to have a new ship. Once you dock with a station, your craft is no longer new.

 

 

Wow! I had no idea. TIL.