Orbital fuel stations

[Rylant]

Hey all. So I have been progressing through my career mode and I have hit some of the mid To end parts? I have been to and back from Duna and Ike, Eve and Gilly (obviously didn’t land on Eve and return), to Dres and to Jool but haven’t returned yet. I am thinking about setting up some orbital fuel stations not only to help with interstellar travel, but to take on a big project which might be fun. 
 

So obviously a Kerbin orbital fuel station would be a good idea. For then, would you mine the Mun or Minmus to restock or? Or would you just tanker more fuel up from Kerbin?

 Also, is an orbital Duna station helpful? Or Eve? Or Jool? I was thinking it might be fun to set up stations throughout the system. Duna mining probably takes a lot? Might be better just to mine Ike to restock? Or else you might have to leave a team there to keep resupply going including an engineer to repack chutes?

A station in the Eve system might be goofy. Obviously you can’t mine Eve well. Mining Gilly would be doable but the lol gravity…

And what about in the Jool system? Which moon would be the best to moons there?

 Overall I am looking for something that is seriously helpful for travel, but also something really big that would be fun to undertake. 
 

Rylant

[bewing]

For the Kerbin system, if I'm trying to do things the easy way, I prefer to mine on the Mun. The reason I prefer that is because of the round-trip time. You can mine, refine, repeatedly send a mini-lifter up to LMO, gradually fill up a tanker, send it to Kerbin, offload it to a station, and return to the Mun to repeat the process every 3 days if you try. Trying to do anything of that sort via Minmus ends up with a lot of timing problems and delays.

The thing about mining any other CB is that you generally only go there once. It's not all that hard to bring along some drills and a converter, but if you do then you have to visit a moon first, drop off the mining equipment (and probably an engineer), then visit your real target, then go back again and recover the kerbal later. Unless you are using a rocket to land multiple times (in multiple biomes), the extra fuel does very little for you. The only real exception is the Jool system. It takes a lot of fuel to fly around Jool and visit all the moons. So having a refueling station on Pol or Bop makes a lot of sense.

 

[FleshJeb]

The ridiculously small size of the solar system and celestial bodies in KSP doesn't provide a good use case for orbital fuel stations. In the majority of cases it's cheap enough to travel to and land at mining station nearby. This also reduces the amount of player time and shuffling of craft.

Kerbin options that I've used and enjoyed:

• Launch to LKO and use the onboard fuel to go to a mining operation on Minmus flats.
• Launch fuel from Kerbin on reusable boosters to an orbital station, then land the booster. It's very convenient from an operational perspective.
• Catching asteroids and bringing them back to Kerbin orbit to be mined is also an amazing amount of fun, and a good challenge.
• Low Kerbin Orbit is relatively expensive to rendezvous around, unless you get into aerobraking, so it's not really worth mining and bringing fuel back from the Mun or Minmus.

Places where I might put an orbital station:

• Low Eve orbit, if I'm returning from the surface: Fuel would come from Gilly. Keep in mind it doesn't necessarily have to be a permanent station. Many times I'll just use a space tug that hangs out for the duration of the surface mission, and then drags them both back somewhere to refuel.
• Laythe orbit: Refueled from Pol or Vall mining. Pol is slightly cheaper to run fuel from, Val is more convenient. Temporary tugs can hang out over Tylo. There's also a good use case for mining Laythe surface and refueling an orbital station with airbreathers.
• Dres orbit: Grab some asteroids. (I actually haven't been to Dres since version 0.25)
• Moho orbit, refueling from Moho: If I were going to do more than one mission to and from Kerbin to the surface, it makes sense to break up the massive delta V cost of that mission there.

Places where I would just surface mine:

• Duna: It's cheap to get to and from. MAYBE mine Ike and refuel on the surface. Don't bother repacking chutes, the air is too thin to bother. Just land propulsively.
• Mun: Same reason as Duna.
• Eeloo: Unless you're going to build a full colony there, don't bother.

In any case, I hope you have a lot of fun, and you should do whatever inspires you. The small size of the system ALSO means very few solutions are actually terrible, so experiment as much as you want.

Edited May 12, 2021 by FleshJeb
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[18Watt]

Shuttling fuel to an orbiting depot can become tedious, at least for me.  So I prefer to just include ISRU equipment on pretty much everything I send beyond Kerbin’s SOI.

If I ever need a ship where ISRU equipment would be impractical, that’s no problem because 95% of the ships I’ve left scattered around the solar system do have ISRU.  The oddball ships I send out with no ISRU are never very far away from a ship with ISRU that can top them off.

Another thing to consider is the difficulty of docking big ships with an enormous tanker orbiting Kerbin or Minmus or wherever.  It’s fun and rewarding the first time you do it, after that it’s just tedious.

Between Bop and Pol, I’d personally pick Pol due to it’s inclination being  closer to Jool’s other moons.  Bop’s high inclination can make maneuvers frustrating, until you figure out how to use Tylo to adjust your orbits.

Either refueling or keeping a depot at Mun or Minmus will be more efficient than constantly hauling fuel back down to Low Kerbin Orbit.  However, it is really nice getting to orbit around Kerbin, and realizing there’s already a tanker full of fuel waiting for you...