Reusability worth it?

[Cloakedwand72]

I finally got the skill to learn how to make a fully reusable Falcon 9 and something similar to the original BFR.  And curious if so what settings would be good in career mode to make reusability more important?

[Blaarkies]

The harder the difficulty, the more important reusability becomes to save fund (or profit more from contracts).

For each mission, funds are used/gained to accomplish a few contracts. In harder difficulties, the Funds Rewards multiplier is lowered. This makes the rocket launch cost become a significant part of the total cost. Recovering most of this cost via reusability makes a huge difference in harder difficulties, but less in easy difficulties.

On max difficulty, you only receive 10% funds rewarded by contracts. This means that some contracts are needed just to break even on launch cost, paying to get a craft into orbit. This craft can then complete some more contracts for actual profit.

Doing this is quite easy after the first few tries from the Desert Launchpad

 

Edited March 24, 2022 by Blaarkies

[KerikBalm]

I just started a 6.25x rescaled career* game, with stock parts**... 

Every launch requires getting the payload to orbital velocity, which is just shy of 6,000 m/s. Then to go anywhere, the payload needs 2.5x more dV.

The payout multiplier is 1x. Without reusability, it would be very hard to make a profit from any contract.

* Its a custom career, I edited my file to give me funds and science to unlock/upgrade everything, and then re-edited my funds to have just 25k funds, and 0 science. Then I realized that I forgot to upgrade the mission control center

** Well, stock at the start, I'm using KRnD, so the science I do earn goes into buffing the stats of the stock parts (more fun, IMO, than just using the science to funds "strategy").

Still, I make sure that my launchers work with 100% stock parts (I'm getting >40 tons to orbit with 100% recovery - just fuel and payload fairing costs), and the upgrades are just gravy/save time by allowing me to do in one launch what previously would take 2.

[Second Hand Rocket Science]

In real life, totally. Elon Musk can't afford to be sending millions or even billions of pounds worth of fuel-filled metal containers for them to just explode on re-entry or sink to the bottom of the ocean. Not sure how quickly he would go bankrupt, but it's gonna eat through his money like a hot knife through butter.

In Kerbal... not really. Sure, if you can, and you want to, you can do it. But it's not really plausible until you get higher and more sophisticated parts on the tech tree. Want that booster to come back to Kerbin in one piece? Okay, that's half your dV in parachutes and your entire credit budget! Also, it requires incredible skill; robots probably do all the work for Mr Musk, but you gotta control that upper stage ALL THE WAY to the surface. And even worse, on a stock playthrough, who knows where you will land? Most of the time you'll end up in the ocean which is fine, but you could end up on Kerbin's highlands. That's not fun for landing 70t+ of highly volatile space steel in, trust me. Never try to land something in the Highlands unless you're ready for either Kraken attacks or explosions galore.

TL;DR - Not unless you got a massive budget and have 95% of the tech tree unlocked. Or you're ready for pain.

Edited March 10, 2022 by Second Hand Rocket Science
Added more detail

[K33N]

Yeah, its the best way to beat career mode on the hard difficulty imo. You can do it reliably at tech level 6, before that is a big challenge. The payoff is insane though, once you get a reliable re-usable rocket you are drowning in cash.

One thing to note though is if you want it to work without mods you need to build you rocket + payload as an SSTO.

[10_Points]

Unless you plan to do non contract stuff it is not needed. But you can if you want it does help. Especially if you use RS 25  Engines. SRBs are cheep so no on them 

[KerikBalm]

On 3/12/2022 at 8:08 PM, K33N said:

One thing to note though is if you want it to work without mods you need to build you rocket + payload as an SSTO.

Not exactly, I have managed to make 2 stage systems work... but they require getting the 2nd stage to orbit before the first stage falls too far back into the atmosphere.

I find SSTOs on stock kerbin are plenty easy, that the added complexity of 2 stage designs is not worth it.

On scaled up systems though, I often go the 2 stage route.