Theseus, Barbara Return, and a Lesson in Math

Theseus on Station, Pre-Deployment

So, you may recall our last project, in which we landed a kethane workhorse on the Mun. Now that it's got a nice belly full of Kethane and reconstituted Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer reserves, it's time to bring it home.

Munar Ejection

Now, Barbara is equipped with a shielded version of the Clamp-O-Tron docking port, which was designed for the 1.25 m rockets. Anyone vessel with similar docking arrangements could theoretically be refueled by Barbara directly.

Barbara and Theseus

That's not really practical for a number of reasons, not least of which is that a number of missions will very likely be using much larger vessels than the 1.25 m platform. The other reason is that Barbara's full kethane payload is a piddly 8,000 units, and conversion to fuel from Kethane is very far from lossless.

Retracted Solar Arrays and Port Radiator Fin

Consequentially, I wanted an on-orbit station that would serve as a depot for raw Kethane, with a conversion facility that would process the substance in situ for whatever was needed to fuel whatever ships were docked to it. That was going to need empty Kethane tanks, a conversion unit, and multiple docking ports of different formats. The conversion unit was going to need power, and I was going to need some way of keeping it on station and getting it to orbit. Thus, Theseus was born, being constructed almost entirely out of kethane pods and docking adapters, save for the fission reactor, crew capsule, and radiator fins.

Another kind of 'Fin'.

Now, normally, if I was working on a design for a Theseus-like orbital fuel depot, I would not man the station, but KSP has some limitations and Interstellar Pack, which added the nuclear reactor, requires a kerbal to shut down the reactor on spacewalk, so I decided to crew the ship with Bill and Bob Kerman, two of the Great Invincibles. Now, nuclear reactors do have their limited lifespans, but that's neither here nor there.

Now, returning Barbara was a pain in the ass, not for the least of reasons that I learned the hard way her radiator fins won't survive aerobreaking, and that the original design didn't have the docking port module on it. Even so, after several trips, the personal best return was about 150 units of Kethane, having used the rest for fuel along the way.

With such a small return-per-journey, it was decided that I would redesign the munar kethane probes, and so I de-orbited Barbara into the atmosphere to phenomenal effect.