part recovery and store room inventory

[Capt Snuggler]

So I was thinking, career mode will have money and missions eventually right, and you will spend money to buy parts. you can also recover parts where possible. so will/should there be part inventory?

for example: you launch a ship and the boosters splash down and are recovered but rather than just getting money back for the recovered parts, should they go in to a store room to be used again?

this would also allow parts to be given as mission rewards. eg: "take the CEO of Kerbin Petrolium on a suborbital flight above 100,000m and receive $100,000 and 4 jumbo fuel tanks for your inventory".

also they would not contribute to mission budget as they are already paid for so it could make a contact just that little bit easier. parts would also act as money in the bank as you could sell them at any time if you need just a little bit more cash.

I think this would help to reward good ship design and careful planning.

[Jimbimbibble]

One problem I see is that anything flying in the low atmosphere more than 2.3km away from the active vessel is immediately destroyed, so it would be largely impossible to recover your parts even if your design should be capable. You would need to do ssto to return the lower stages. Also, if you can just sell inventory for cash and use cash to buy whatever you want, what would be the point? I think that a cash budget accomplishes the goal well enough, but if the game can be changed to make recovery a viable option, I think recovery for cash is a great idea. Maybe the game could continue simulating any parts detached from the active vessel during that flight scene?

[tetryds]

I suggested once that if any debris or ship got inside atmosphere, the game would stop timewarp and show a hint, allowing you to switch to it.

Then, all not-landed ships that are on the atmosphere would be processed.

That is pretty much a MUST HAVE, because, as said, recovering boosters is pretty much extra profit.

A sort of warehouse would be required for that, and it can even have limited room.

I also belive that when you recover you may have three options:

Standby - simply brings the ship or recovered part to the warehouse, for the recover cost.

Ready - recovers and readies the ship for launch, re-building the launching stage and refueling, costs the recover cost, the missing parts cost and a small extra cost for checkup. (still cheaper than building a new one)

Disassemble - recovers the ship then disassembles it, it's parts gets remanufactured for a cost and they sum up as brand new on the VAB/SPH.

Ofc, you can only ready a ship if more than a certain ammount of it's parts is recovered.

And all of them sum up the recovery cost.

If its not worth to recover the lander, you could just "pay a taxi" for the Kerbonaults to go back to KSC, and leave the lander there.

[Capt Snuggler]

well if a part has a chute and its deployed when it leaves the 2.2km physics simulation range or warp range, the game can estimate if its going to survive touch down by combining the drag to weight ratio and average impact tolerance. (or something to that effect)

[Atoning Unifex]

An inventory does make some sense. If we assume that recovery of a craft returns, say, 80% or less of the original cost (because they are used) then it would make sense to keep those parts and use them again, to save money.

On the other hand re-using items would then necessitate the introduction of some kind of wear and tear, otherwise parts could be used indefinitely.

There also remains the issues noted above relating to recovery of boosters. The simplest solution might be as Capt Snuggler says, to predict safe touch down, another solution could be dedicated 'recovery' parts that are basically chutes but guarantee the recovery of parts when they leave physics range, without the need for predicting a touchdown.

[Dave Kerbin]

Keep in mind that in real life most space stuff isn't reusable simply because of safety issues - it costs hundreds of millions of dollars for a launch and lives are on the line, do you want to risk it all to a part that has been smashed through the atmosphere at Mach 20 with 1500°C flames of plasma whipping at it? (and then probably banged around by a recovery helicopter and gunked up with desert sand or salt water)

The space shuttle was something of an oddity and while part of the blame can be laid on military and congressional requirements (like the huge delta wing needed for covert military missions) it was never really economical - you could literally buy a completely new rocket for less then what it ultimately cost to refurbish the shuttle for each launch (for example over 30,000 heat resistent tiles had to be inspected and replaced by hand since even a single worn tile could easily cause a Columbia like disaster).

The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft all landed and where recovered except Liberty Bell 7 but never flew again because there was no economical way to ensure everything was good for another mission. In space you can't call for a tow, everything has to work or you die. Even the Soviet Union, who right or wrong gained some reputation for stretching safety and being short of dollars (post-Soviet Russia has been especially hurt in the budget department) didn't reuse the Soyuz capsule after recovery and so was essentially throwing away several million dollars worth of hardware.

[nholzric]

My personal prediction is that the recovery of parts will not be as important as we expect. Recovery of Kerbals will likely be important for reputation, and it seems like recovery of hardware is primarily motivated for budget reasons. But the primary reason (I think) for having a budget is to constrain rocket design; now you need enough fuel to get to the Mun and back but as you're ditching unspent fuel right before landing you're thinking about how you could build a cheaper launch vehicle next time. (Note: the tech tree already does a little of this by constraining the size of the parts available - maybe you play differently but I found myself naturally building smaller more efficient rockets due to the parts available.)

Hardware recovery is a reasonable avenue to pursue when creating rockets, but I don't think it's necessarily even necessary for efficient rocket design. (I'm hedging because IRL we have few if any examples of reusable spaceflight hardware being unequivocally more efficient than disposable.) I suspect a budget will incentivize us to build less extravagant rockets without making it necessary (or even worthwhile) to recover some, any, or all of the pieces.

The one aspect of KSP that already hints at recovery is the popularity of SSTO's and other space plane designs. Even if NO money was refunded, the low fuel cost and low part count of many space planes would probably still give them a sizable budgetary advantage, more so if a portion of the cost of the pieces (minus spent fuel) were refunded whenever a pilot-able (crewed or powered with probe) craft were recovered.

[tetryds]

I don't think KSP must take the super realistic way of dealing with disposal crafts, if a battery is intact, why not re-use it?

Instead of a "life per part" gets added, then, repairing that part damage would cost, and if it's too damaged it's worth to trow it away (heatshields should behave like this at least).

But if that thing is not added, the only difference between a refueled lander which came from orbit and a just spawned lander on the launchpad would be their placement on the planet, so Why create an imaginative damage to that part which will make it's reuse not feasible if that damage is not even there?

It would be worth to use "today I build a rocket" methods to pick an used lander and stick it to the launching stage and you good to go.

Or just allow us to recover it and reuse/dismantle/discard/store it as we wish.

Putting a used probe that is not worth reusing on a museum would give reputation, that sounds cool.