Recommend methods for getting fuel into orbit

[Fearless Son]

Salutations,

I find myself in a lot of situations where I need to get fuel into orbit for the purposes of refueling craft. Particularly, I find occasions where craft returning from other planets run out of fuel in high Kerbin orbit and need to have a refueling craft get out to them. Or in my present case, getting an asteroid redirect craft to finalize its push into a parking orbit around Minmus, which requires several fueling trips (the return orbit was rather high and needs to be aligned.)

So to get to my question, I want to know other people's favored cost-effective methods of getting fuel into orbit. Smallish launch vehicle rockets do well enough, but I worry about price-per-launch over multiple launches. I can get small spaceplanes into orbit, but I find anything carrying excess mass it is not using (like cargo fuel it will not burn) makes it run out of fuel before leaving the atmosphere.

What do you typically do? I am looking for some inspiration.

[GoSlash27]

I use a standard spaceplane to ferry fuel to orbit. Cost is $43 per tonne of fuel to LKO, since the tanker itself is 100% recovered at KSP.

I have 2 LF tankers in my fleet, 1 that does 6t per mission and 1 that does 12.

Best,

-Slashy

[Laie]

Recent threads where people have shared their tankers:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107933-What%E2%80%99s-cheaper-refueling-in-orbit-Or-launching-everything-at-once

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/108276-What-s-your-average-cost-per-ton-to-orbit

Both deal mostly with large deliveries; Slashy was chimed for presenting his spaceplanes when the OP wanted to lift 100t or more. For your scenario, running out of fuel in high kerbin orbit, 12t would probably go a long way already.

However, the "smart" way is to have a large fuel depot in orbit that you top off only every once in a while (hence the interest in moving lots of stuff in one go). Most of the time, missions are launched with near-empty tanks, replenish their tanks at the depot, and are on their way. For your problem, you'd also need a small tanker, little more than an orange tank plus engine, that delivers fuel to the stranded ship.

[match]

I only started doing spaceplanes lately, but if you are dealing with fiances in this game, you probably will be happy with the results once you get your designs down. The first few times I recovered a fully recoverable craft, I thought there was a bug or something. No way should I be getting this much back!

Then I really started paying attention to the prices and found fuel is just so cheap! Staging off spent assets is just so darn wasteful. Just need a bit of patience to keep both your altitude and airspeed climbing at a steady level.

[tsotha]

Anything with a lot of extra dV can be a "tanker", though if it's special purpose you should probably make it pretty big.

Incidentally, you should never run out of fuel in Kerbin orbit returning from other planets if you're playing stock. Since the atmosphere is thick and there isn't any reentry heat, you can just plot a collision course with planet and you'll be fine.

[FlyingPete]

I built a vertical SSTO that I found quite useful as an orbital ferry. Make one version with crew cabins, another with a fuel tank instead and you're set for taking stuff to/from your space station. With a fully-reusable craft, you don't have to lift a great amount in one go.