Making Fuel

[Woj]

I started a new game recently and started using tougher setting than i have in the past. So the need to try to conserve funds and become efficient has surfaced. My plan is to make fuel at the moon to power "transfer barges" that i will assemble in space. These ships will be used to attach to vessels that are headed to other bodies. These ships will detach once the transfer burn is complete and they will then return to an orbital station around Kerbin where they will wait for their next assignment. I plan on building a frieghter that will transfer fuel from the moon to the station around kerbin so that the transfer barges can refuel.

Ive perfected my launch rocket systems which return to the launch pad after transporting vessels into orbit which has saved me a bundle. If i can pull off the scenario i described above it will save me even more.

My question is this: I have never tried mining or making fuel and have no idea if this is even possible. Has anyone else tried this or something similar and is it possible? If its possible, is it practical?

[internetrules]

go into sandbox make a mineing testing rig then use debug menu to go to the moon and test it out for you self

yeah its probably practical cuz you dont have to pay for fuel you only have to pay for the infrastructure

[internetrules]

Originally posted by RoofCatA:

Its like booking a hotel for the night when you go to visit your neighbours :)

i think there are alot more cost effective ways to visist your neighbours that do not involve booking a hotel

[Bubba Fett]

The refueling part of what you're proposing is pretty straightforward.\
First you'll need to put a satellite in a polar orbit of the mun with a scanning module to map the ore on the mun.
Then you'll pick a spot with a decent concentration and send down a lander to scout the site. If it's flat enough to land your mining ship and a tanker, plant a bunch of flags to mark out your landing spots.
Plan on a tanker and a large mining ship or multiple smaller ones. You need drills, ore storage, a converter (unless you want to do that in orbit) power generation, power storage, and an engineer.

You'll probably want to use a few mods for this as stock will require you to do it all in 1 ship or dock on the surface.
I normally use:
Kerbal Atachment System. Use pipes connected during EVA to join seperate ships into a large mining base.
Mechjeb. DeltaV info, suicide burn countdown, automatic descent rate control. Makes landing within 10m of another craft much easier.
Docking port alignment indicator. A nice visual indicator of your alignment for docking.

You also need to be able to do precision landings and be good at rendezvous and docking.

The idea is to mine on the surface and convert to fuel while filling your tanker. Once it's full, it goes to orbit and dumps it's load into a much larger tanker. It then lands back at the mining base and waits for it's next load.
When full the large tanker would take it's load to LKO and offload to a refueling station there.

A little tip for you, you probably won't be able to areabrake in kerbins atmosphere to save fuel. That was the idea behind this ship. The problem is that the COM is too far behind the drag of the heat sheild and it tumbles till it explodes or stabalizes retrograde.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=849085845
You'll probably have to just suck it up and burn fuel for the orbital insertion at kerbin. And it's going to be a lot of fuel for that mass. Not much deltaV, but a lot of volume.

Anyways, with a bit of work the mun to LKO refueling circut is pretty simple to set up. I'm not so sure about your idea of using transfer tugs though. I've never heard of anybody doing that before. You might get your ship launched fully fueled, but at the expense of a lot of extra effort. I guess the first couple of times might be fun to see if you could, but after that most people would probably go back to just making a bigger ship in the first place and skipping the tugs.

[john1352]

If you're trying to play "quickly" in kerbal time, Mun would be better as you spend less time travelling, otherwise I'd suggest Minmus for the tiny gravity.

My approach to a Minmus refuelling operation would be: Send up a combined mining base and orbital refueller. The low dV to Minmus orbit makes it unnecessary to have a separate miner and refueller.

When launching an interplanetary mission, I'd use a two stage to Minmus launcher, which will have it's second stage near empty when arriving in Minmus orbit. Refuel in orbit, then escape and set up a low (70-100km) periapsis on the appropriate side of Kerbin. Perform the transfer burn at periapsis to maximize the escape velocity while minimizing fuel use.

P.S. Use action groups for drills and anything else that will need regular state changes. Saves a fair bit of time when you have lots of them.

[Corvus]

It's a lot simpler than you would think, actually.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=838374264

I just put one of those things on every non-atmosphere planet and I get all the fuel I will ever need. Effective SSTO to everywhere, easy.

[Yuki]

I did not only try it, it is one of the backbones of my income. It does however require some investments before. Time especially.
My suggestion for you however would be to NOT use Mun, but Minmus to use it the way you described.
You dont want to dock too often i dare say, but build a fuel freighter that directly goes Mining Station <-> LKO (most cost efficient, dont bring anything further than LKO with the "fuel brought on the ground").

Its much more easy (and cheaper) to build heavy freighters that can start and land on minmus, and Delta-V wise its even a tiny bit cheaper than Mun. Heavy translates to convenience thereby, so having to dock that thign once will transfer enough fuel for several other missions. Additionally Minmus shorter days make powering the mining operation more easy again.
And building it can usually easily be "cross financed" by contracts.

There are a few considerations and tricky parts, like how "minmus ground" will look like.
If you are using stock only it might be better to have a mobile "oil rig".
Essentially combining the fuel-freighter and the mining station simply for convenience to not have to dock something on the ground. Shipping all your mining equipment around does however cost more funds upfront of course. (The fuel will be free anyways once that thing begins mining).
If you use KAS you will get a fuel hose, at which point refueling your freighter only needs you to land close to the mining station and do a single EVA to plug it in. It is of course more cost efficient and modular, thus allows you to upgrade mining rig and freighter independently. And you may want to do so later on.

I currently have such a split setup with a large Minmus mining rig, a fuel freighter that goes Minmus <-> 400km Kerbin Orbit, and a shuttle for personal.
The shuttle is NERVA driven and thus can easily land on Mun, land on Minmus (refuel) and return to the Kerbin station in one go. Convenient.
Tourist missions and even some rescue missions, those excluding getting the wreck as well, can be completed at the cost of launching the necessary seats to 400km orbit. Running very funds positive even on tough commercial settings- once the infrastructure is build, even without a spaceplane. (Going for nerva and mining i did not yet have the science points left. That will be one of the later upgrades)

The way i play building infrastructure is actually the main game. While you can build crafts to fulfill certain contracts even on outer planets in one go....why not bring a mining rig with you? And lets be honest, why send someone there if you aint planning to stay?
That way you can accept and fulfill every follow up contract at an unbeatable cost efficiency. Someone stranded in Jool orbit? Well, you have your space station around laythe and next time the interplanetary personal shuttle arrives in the Jool system you can simply pick them up and bring em back. Cost for such a rescue: none. There will be a free seat on a return vehicle in Kerbin orbit from some astronaut you just send to somewhere, and you bring them there at no additional costs. But cash in for total. 100% profit.

[Woj]

You guys are the best! I appreciate all the replys and great info contained in them. Ive played this game more than a couple of hours so i do know a lot about the things i typically do in game. Up until this point, my focus has been modular ships and parts, i would build bases to fulfill contracts but never messed with that aspect much. Now im looking for a new twist and and my thoughts were to try to do as Yuki has described.

One of the best games ive ever encountered, and the mods and ease of installation are top notch as well. Man i can remember struggling to mod games back in the day. Copy paste is so much better :).

I had a LOT of trouble docking early on in this game and would only attempt docking if a lucrative contract was involved. Now that i understand how to do it (and have mechjeb to help me match the orbit then the velocity) , docking is a breeze so attempting this sort of activity is back on the menu for me.

Anyway i was looking for a new challenge and wanted to know if this was feasable before i began and it looks like it is. I will take the advice of using minimus even though my scouting of the mun has found some great spots on the boundaries of two or more biomes for mining i understand the reasoning behind using minimus. The proximity and time was also a concern of mine but if i size these ships right i should be able to have a couple 2 or 3 freighters so that im not waiting 20 days for 1ship to make the trip back and forth.

Again thanks for all the advice, ill post some screenshots if i successfully pull this off :)

[Bubba Fett]

I figured I mention one other thing about the concept of using transfer tugs.
I recently had a mission to expand a space staion in LKO and another one to put a station in orbit of the Mun. I figued I'd complet them both in the same launch so I docked the Mun station with the Kerbin station then docked a tanker for the fuel capacity and completed the station expansion contrace.
When I undocked the Mun station and moved it to the Mun's orbit, it was no longer considered a new vessel and I couldn't complete the contract. It was built after both contracts were accepted but having it docked to an older ship made the game consider it to be an older ship. Or completing another contract that it was part of did.

Either way, that makes me wonder if something similar would happen using transfer tugs.
It might be worth some testing before making a lot of effort to build the infastructure.