Recently I have been studying a new concept of “reusing”, let me explain that.
When we say a craft is reusable (or partly reusable), we mean that most of the craft can be “recovered” after it is used (or at least part of it). But that is not satisfying, since you do not actually ”reuse” it. You are only scrapping the remains and get say 90% of the money to launch a new one.
So you probably have guessed, the new way of reusing I am talking about gets rid of that “recover” button. You just launch a craft to the world and it stays there as long as it still works. And when you need to use it to fulfill a contract, you launch a module specially designed to fit the reusable craft and attach them to each other. Normally the module is much lighter than the whole functional craft, so by this new way you can save a lot of launching fee.
Now let’s talk about the contracts. When I completed Ocean Delivery for the first time, I launched a 1.1M cargo plane and got 25M reward. I was happy at the moment until I realized that the launching cost at Ali runway is around 2M. Then I came up with the idea of the new reusing. I slightly improved my plane, reducing half of the price and added a docking port on it. Then I designed a container module to be attached to the plane. So every time I need to complete the same mission, I only launch the container and then pick it up by the plane. The inconvenience is that the picking requires much effort, and every time the good is delivered, I need to fly the plane back. Also, recharging is needed, but that is small problem compared to the former… But the good thing is that there is no more width and height restrictions to the plane since they only decide where you launch, not where you land. So, I landed my plane on Juno Village runway and parked it next to it. Finally I can enjoy launching the container on Juno runway with much lower cost. I don’t think it’s possible to launch a plane from Juno Village directly to complete Ocean Delivery since the height is restricted to 4m(If you can, tell me ),but the new way of reusing makes it possible.
After I slightly improved the plane again it turned into a tilt rotor ( a propeller able to VTOL) and is capable of Ground Support missions. Then I kept switching between Ocean Delivery and Ground Support. Now I have only launched 3 planes, but the number of deliveries counts to above 20. The reward of a single mission has dropped to 5M but it’s still very profitable to me. So now you might ask: why not launch GNSS satellites instead? The answer is: I love the feeling of arranging the planes existing in the world and never retrieving them back. It’s like I’m really running an air transportation company. When you send a rocket to launch satellites, after its job is done it’s gone. Of course you can choose to leave some crafts in the world and even build space stations, but that is the sandbox mode way. In career mode, leaving crafts in the world seems useless and is not encouraged. The career mode always asks you to launch a new craft, in my point of view, it reduces the kind of fun I just mentioned. But my way of reusing may bring some of this sandbox fun back to the career mode.
If you want to try out, here’s the plane. I will write a manual for it when Mk.5 is ready… if I get 5 upvotes.

Tags
Idea

3 Comments

  • Log in to leave a comment
  • Profile image

    @wzr1 I had the money so... Didn't really had a problem with that

    one year ago
  • Profile image
    301 wzr1

    @unimaginablekatana Saw your post. Impressive but way too expensive.

    one year ago
  • Profile image

    Well u can launch a 4m high plane form juno village with its landing gear closed and tail pointing downwards instead of upwards. Atleast thats what I did

    +1 one year ago

3 Upvotes

Log in in to upvote this post.