How do you reduce costs? (Redone)

[Wizard Kerbal]

I MESSED IT UP AGAIN!

Just count reuse as refueling 

Edited March 22, 2021 by Wizard Kerbal

[Spricigo]

For a normal carrer Cheap&Cheerfull designing is more than enough. You can easily make several times the cost of the rocket in mission rewards without bothering to recover/reuse.

[Kerbart]

I assume reduce costs is an issue with career.

Don’t reduce cost; enhance income. Take tourists on those science missions. Test parts while refueling stations, and so on.

[Wizard Kerbal]

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

Don’t reduce cost; enhance income. Take tourists on those science missions. Test parts while refueling stations, and so on.

That would be efficiency. 

[camacju]

Here are a couple of things I do to reduce launch costs as much as possible:

-Use SRB for the launch stage. Ideally one or two stages

-Use the Baguette tank, it's got a great fuel/cost ratio

-Gravity assists!

-Minimal mass upper stages. Command seat strapped to a tiny rocket

-Use probe cores rather than reaction wheel modules

Here are some low cost missions I've done:

 

[Guest]

1) The strategy (in the admin building) that reduces the cost of parts (aggressive negotiations maybe?)

2) Ditto reduced recovery costs. 

3) Basic "just get job done” designs.

4) Alt-f12 -> Cheats -> add 10000

[Snark]

"Reducing costs" really isn't a thing, for me.  I design the right rocket to carry out the mission, and it just costs whatever it costs.

The reason that I don't worry myself about the cost of the rocket is that the cost of the rocket is basically irrelevant.  Income from contracts is much higher than the cost of missions-- I just wait until there's a lucrative contract that's reasonably quick to do, and that'll pay for scads of missions.  If I just play the game, money flows in.  For example, "launch a new station on a solar orbit" contracts can pay well over 500K funds, for a craft that takes about five minutes to slap together from scratch and launch to an escape trajectory.  That'll pay for an awful lot of missions.

By far the major financial cost of the game is upgrading buildings (especially R&D), and that's a fixed cost so there's nothing there to reduce.