Parking and refuelling Spaceplane on KSC?

[m4rt14n]

With the new budgeting system, is it necessary/beneficial to park your often used SSTO spaceplane? Or do you get most of your money back anyway from using the recover button?

Do you make a refuelling vehicle to refuel the tanks for subsequent use. Anybody has a good suggestion where to park?

Edited November 26, 2014 by m4rt14n

[The_Rocketeer]

Not strictly necessary, but beneficial really depends on how you like to play the game. For some, establishing solutions to refuelling is a fait accompli worth working out.

If you recover from the Runway you'll get 100% cost recovery (minus fuel used). Other places, which I think includes the KSC, have reductions.

You could use a refuelling vehicle if you wanted to, but you'd still need to spawn/recover this vehicle. You don't need a mod to refuel (using klaws or docking), but if you want something a bit easier to do and more aesthetically pleasing I suggest trying the KAS mod, which includes fuel pipes and ports amongst other things.

A good parking zone is on the apron outside the SPH - off either side from the main taxiway there are empty areas of hard-standing, which is where I park my reuseables.

Edited November 26, 2014 by The_Rocketeer

[LordFjord]

There has been a nice challenge some time ago: affordable space program. You can find a lot of refueling tactics - IF you really want to do this. Back then there were no economy though.

Meanwhile, you can just land your SSTO @KSC and recover it, then you will get the cost of your craft (and unused fuel) back -> it is not really needed anymore to do a manual refuel, unless you really want to do it for immersion/roleplaying's sake

[KerikBalm]

I think due to an oversite with recovery transponder fitting... if you use that, you shouldn't recover.

You pay 100+ x % to launch, but then get only 100% back on recover... X% is lost for each recover (making it almost never beneficial to use, even if its a single stage craft that allows you to recover everything)

[m4rt14n]

Awesome stuff. Thanks

I wanna park up on the KSC helipad

[Wanderfound]

One case where it does make sense to park and refuel is when using the Kerbal Construction Time mod. You still get full recovery with that, but a decent sized spaceplane may take a month or more to build. It's handy to keep a couple of basic craft around for when you need one in a hurry.

[Hodo]

This is from that challenge mentioned before.

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You can see how I attached cargo to most of my SSTO cargo planes.

[Skorpychan]

It's a pain in the backside to refuel rockets on the ground, though. I've tried using a Kethane mining base with a docking port on top to land on, and it's practically impossible. It took me an hour of hovering around, knocking off solar panels, tipping things over, and bouncing off the edges before I got the hang of it. And LOTS of quickloads.