Building out Kerbol 38: The difference between a station and a ship
Bob: We're sticking to 15% throttle to keep the unbalanced load from spinning us, but we're off to the edge of the SOI.
Sangan: We survived the big burn, looks like it'll be much easier switching planes.
Bill: We have some time to kill, so let's work on clearing out some contracts.
Gene: We're about to lose those fins.
Bill: Doesn't matter, we're above the soup and we weren't recovering the booster anyway.
Gene: So what is it?
Bill: Our first ion probe.
Bill: These engines take a ton of charge to run, so we're playing around to see how long of a burn we can manage between our panels and batteries. Looks like 2 minutes drained about a quarter of our charge even in the dark.
Bill: Here's our biggest burn so far. And one contract down.
Bill: And now to move on to the next contract.
Bob: And we are now polar and ready to properly service the surface exploration.
(Editor's note: The difference between a ship and a station is all in your mind. A ship is about the trip, a station is for the destination.
Munholme's new orbit lets it pass over essentially everywhere on the Mun's surface twice a munar day. The hope is that with my current rover's fuel reserves it should be doable to hop to anywhere on the surface from the mining rig and recover at the station if needed without doing any major plane changes, which is what made the last surface mission so iffy.
I just eyeballed it but the station should spend about half its orbit in a high orbit and half in low orbit with the transition over the poles. So, in theory, I can grab readings from both high and low orbit over every bit of Mun's surface from that orbit.
I've basically come to feel that there are two kinds of stations: Up stations and Down stations.
Up Stations are for missions going up and out of the gravity well. You want those to be equatorial so they'll have plenty of launch windows for travelling to distant destinations, which should mostly be on or near the equatorial plane. Staging a bunch of modules for an interplanetary ship? Until you light the engines that's an Up station.
Down stations are for exploring the world beneath them. Those should be polar so that they can be accessed relatively cheaply from any latitude and so that they pass over every part of the surface below. Sending Jeb up to park in orbit until he gets crew readings over every biome? Until his recovery burn he's in a Down station.
And if you have both Up and Down stations in equatorial and polar orbits, it makes sense to have your mining operations be on the equator. That way both kinds of station can easily reach or be reached by your mining and refueling systems.)
