Space Station Questions (new to the game)

[ComradeGoat]

The only real annoyance is the necessity to constantly refuel your station with gas from Kerbin. Once you have a ship that can get to orbit easily enough as a gas tanker, it kind of becomes a mundane chore to have to fly it every single time.

I'm hoping in the future we get a system of flight automation to make scheduled refueling without having to just perform the tedious 0km -> 100km -> 0km dance. The Capability Auditor mod is a close approximation for that though, it at least saves you the minutes just watching your rocket burning through atmosphere.

This is why my stations are just a pair of orange tanks with space for crew and docking ports. When they run dry, I deorbit them and send up a replacement.

[RawChicken]

I go for 160km orbit because you get 1 additional XTime for time acceleration, useful when docking.

Also, a space station can be used to assemble a huge mothership and send it to the Jool system, where you can then visit all the moons at once!

[CalculusWarrior]

You underestimate how many times I can launch a refueling rocket and then go "Did I check to make sure the target vessel wasn't completely on the other side of the planet? ... oh good. It is."

That is usually followed by hitting super time warp and then realizing I forgot to deploy the solar panels just after running out of battery power. It's a miracle I made it to the Mun, much less Jool.

That's essentially me, all the time. I also decide to go to another planet, work out all the phase angles ahead of time, and STILL launch before timewarping into position. I'm in a 100 km orbit, and then I realize that I can't go above 50x...

In the end, I built a ground-based ship that will be able to timewarp up to 10 000x for when I forget those things.

[Spatzimaus]

I've got a station in a 125km orbit, one in a 200km orbit, and one in a 350km orbit.

Any closer in than 120km is problematic; it's not just about time warp, it's also about not risking clipping the atmosphere on a docking attempt gone wrong. When I launch I don't try to circularize exactly at 70km, so most of my launches end up in a ~100km orbit by default. Transferring to a 125km orbit is easy from there, with enough of a velocity difference that I can do an intercept without too many orbits wasted.

My farthest station, at 350km, is designed for incoming vessels who need to get a little fuel before landing. It's also the easiest to dock with; further orbits mean less arcing of orbits, which means your approach burns are much more direct. This might not be a big deal at lower Kerbin orbits, but when you're approaching with a vessel that has no fuel left and only a trace of RCS, every bit matters.

My best station is at 200km. It might not be the most efficient spot to take advantage of the Oberth Effect, but pretty much any design can get to that altitude from either direction with ease. And the better time warp can be really handy, which matters more when your station is also acting as a mobile Kethane refinery.