Resource Mining - Impressions and Questions

[Bobe]

First of all, I get it's the second day of release and I'm sure many hotfixes and content updates will come in the near future, however I wanted to address my impressions of resource mining.

Like many others, I enjoyed using Kethane as a way to create some purpose in the game and tackle the challenges of extraterrestrial refueling. When I heard Squad was introducing this concept into KSP, I just assumed they would essentially incorporate Kethane into the game.

There are a few things I thought weren't as they should be, as compared to Kethane;

Kethane orbital scanners survey the planet in real time, assessing each cell in a grid for deposits. KSP's scanner simply turns on and magically the whole planet is scanned.

Kethane had parts of various sizes for different jobs. For instance, I liked to set up a station in Mun orbit that had fuel and kethane tanks, as well as a large converter. Meanwhile, my lander had a few small tanks and a small converter, so it could top up before ascent. This system allowed me to efficiently ferry kethane from the surface where it could be converted into the station's storage tanks, allowing passing ships an easy way to refuel.

Stock KSP only has a large converter, making this system near impossible, as the lander needs to be much larger to compensate for the extra weight. The drills themselves are fairly bulky as well, but I guess that can't be helped, they do look pretty cool.

It doesn't make sense to me that the overlay is only visible when controlling a spacecraft with a scanner module or from the tracking station. Sure, this makes sense in real life, but this is KSP. Kethane's overlay toggle is simple and it works.

Regarding this next one, I'm not sure if it's something weird with Squad's implementation or if I'm just doing something wrong. I scanned the Mun and found quite a dense deposit, above 70% or so cutoff. I landed, deployed my two drills and got to work. It took them two whole years to fill a single large ore container. Their information showed something like 97% overheat, 2-3% load and a rate of maybe 0.001. Was this because this particular landing site wasn't actually above an ore vein, or were the drills actually overheating, causing them to slow down?

[anarkhon]

Just delete all the stock resource parts,use ScanSat and Karbonite.

[KerikBalm]

Kethane had parts of various sizes for different jobs. For instance, I liked to set up a station in Mun orbit that had fuel and kethane tanks, as well as a large converter. Meanwhile, my lander had a few small tanks and a small converter, so it could top up before ascent. This system allowed me to efficiently ferry kethane from the surface where it could be converted into the station's storage tanks, allowing passing ships an easy way to refuel.

Stock KSP only has a large converter, making this system near impossible, as the lander needs to be much larger to compensate for the extra weight. The drills themselves are fairly bulky as well, but I guess that can't be helped, they do look pretty cool.

This isn't Kethane, I don't see the problem. The mass ratio on the Ore tanks is great, Ore converts to LF/Ox in a 1:1 mass ratio (which is OP, IMO... unless ore is something like pure water ice)

If you want to land and haul ore up to orbit, then do so. Its too much to be able to do ISRU with no conversion equipment at all, or a tiny mass penatly.

IMO, they need to at least double the mass of the ISRU converter. Its only 4 tons, ie, it weighs as much as a 3 person command pod. 3 person command pod lander, or a ISRU lander controlled by a probe core-> almost the same mass.... too easy!

Kethane orbital scanners survey the planet in real time, assessing each cell in a grid for deposits. KSP's scanner simply turns on and magically the whole planet is scanned.

Yea, I think something like scan sat would be pretty sweet, but... this is OK. A polar orbit would give you full coverage of the object (except when orbital period matches rotation period) eventually. This just removes the need to wait and timewarp - and for that I won't criticize it.

Regarding this next one, I'm not sure if it's something weird with Squad's implementation or if I'm just doing something wrong. I scanned the Mun and found quite a dense deposit, above 70% or so cutoff. I landed, deployed my two drills and got to work. It took them two whole years to fill a single large ore container. Their information showed something like 97% overheat, 2-3% load and a rate of maybe 0.001. Was this because this particular landing site wasn't actually above an ore vein, or were the drills actually overheating, causing them to slow down?

I had a very similar problem.

I landed in an area above 90%, I used the surface scanner, and found my location was basically perfect. I start drilling, it starts fueling, I time warp, it all goes well... then suddenly stops. I tried this a few more times, and it seems to be at a certain point, the heat builds up, reaches 100%, and the ore mining basically comes to a halt.

Its as if it produces a whole lot of heat, but no actual ore. I found if I shut it down, it rapidly cooled down, and then I could restart and drill for a while at a good rate of ore/time, until it overheated again...

to maximize ore/time, it seems I had to manually stop and restart, time warp until over-heat - manually stop and restart, timewarp... and so on.

I don't understand what is going on, or how I can have a more consistent oreflow rate....

[Akinesis]

I personally feel that the stock resource system sits itself nicely between Karbonite and Kethane. This is good because it means a different niche is filled and so gives the players a different option. The one-click to scan the entire planet is no bad thing (not that the OP every said it was a bad thing) as it allows players with little time and/or little interest with ScanSats approach to mitigate this waiting period. However, it still 'forces' the player to use a scanning satellite (or ship) first to locate the richer deposits. With Karbonite, there is also a sensor (albeit VERY compact in comparison to the new stock) that will also scan instantly, but it isn't focused on rich/sparse deposits since hotspots were removed (unless I've missed something...) so the player can just land anywhere.

I suppose the stock resource system (with its large bulky parts) is more suited to a surface-base processing plant with a tanker shuttling fuel to the orbital station, rather than the orbital station itself being the one to convert the resources into fuels.

Personally, I like it and will be converting to stock. I like the quick scanning and will enjoy the challenge of the bulky parts.

My summary:

Kethane - Hard

Depletable deposits, slow scanning with polar orbit required*, deposit variation.

*for full planetary coverage

Stock - Medium

Large parts, heat management, bulky but instant scanning in polar orbit only, deposit variation, non-depletable (unless potatoroid).

Karbonite - Easy

Small parts, infinite deposits, compact equipment, instant scanning from any orbital inclination, even deposit distribution, can harvest the resources from almost anywhere (surface, oceans, atmospheres, sun particles, empty space!), karbonite-powered engines (no conversion equipment needed if fitted).

This is off the top of my head, so apologies if I have bad information.

Edit in response to above post:

Roverdude said that solar panels also act as thermal radiators, so adding more of these (and bigger ones) should help keep the equipment cool.

Edited April 28, 2015 by Akinesis

[NFUN]

The drills were actually overheating. You need to manage heat very carefully to do ISRU effectively, and for that one needs large solar panels (radiators) and parts with high mass that can absorb a lot of heat.

[andruszkow]

I think the implementation is nice, simple and elegant really, and the weight of the converter adds to not making it "too easy".

The instant scan of the Survey scanner is a VERY welcome feature for me. There's no point in "real time scanning", a.k.a. timewarping to get the exactly same job done. The Survey scanner only gives you one thing as well: An overview of ore concentration.

Now, the Narrow Band Scanner delivers much more detail (ie. Terrain detail), and only for the ground below you. That's your real time alternative

[magnemoe]

I find karbonite harder than kethane, might be as I have more experience with it, however i handled them different, kethane has limited resources but pretty fast mining so here I combined miner and tanker. Typical 5 x 1440L tanks four drills and converter. Send to Minmus, mine and return to LKO, send an new one.

Karbonite unlimited resource but slower mining who worked while not in focus made it more relevant to use mining bases and dedicated tankers.

This is probably more relevant for 1.0 too as the tanker has to survive aerobrake to LKO.

Note that Karbonite limited resourses are not realistic, yes mines and oilfields are limited however capacity is measured in million of ton not orange tanks. Having the dots on the kethane map beeing an individual resource node who say held 3-20 orange tanks would be realistic however, after mining it dry you had to move some km.

[RoverDude]

First of all, I get it's the second day of release and I'm sure many hotfixes and content updates will come in the near future, however I wanted to address my impressions of resource mining.

Like many others, I enjoyed using Kethane as a way to create some purpose in the game and tackle the challenges of extraterrestrial refueling. When I heard Squad was introducing this concept into KSP, I just assumed they would essentially incorporate Kethane into the game.

There are a few things I thought weren't as they should be, as compared to Kethane;

Hey! I can answer a few questions, and maybe provide some insight. Usual full disclosure, I authored the code for Karbonite, it's back-end framework (Regolith), as well as the stock. Also note that these are my opinions as a designer of a game system, and in no way reflect the official opinion of Squad, etc. etc.

Kethane orbital scanners survey the planet in real time, assessing each cell in a grid for deposits. KSP's scanner simply turns on and magically the whole planet is scanned.

This was a very conscious design choice. My experience wit Kethane was, to quote another forum user, to start scanning and go make a sandwich. In my opinion, from a game design standpoint, that was not fun. Having to optimize what warp speed you can use to mitigate the pain of a long scan process was not fun.

Now, if we take SCANSat as a comparison (and it's awesome for scanning - it's why I recommended it for Karbonite), the mechanic is different. Background processing for one, full time warp for another. Just get into a polar orbit, and hit time warp for ten seconds and you're done.

So when I made the stock system, I looked at both of these. And in both cases, players generally used timewarp as a gameplay mechanic to circumvent 'un-fun' bits and get to the fun things. And I don't blame them. So I left in the hard part (getting to a polar orbit), added a cost (power and data transmission that varies based on the size of the body you are scanning), but took out the not fun part.

Also - the stock scanner is significantly less accurate than the Kethane or SCANSat/Karbonite - by design. The reason is that we have a secondary scanner (the narrow band scanner) that gives you high detail, but operates realtime (more for landing planning).

So in short, I stand by the design choice to not (in my opinion) punish players and provide a scanning mechanic that everyone tries to circumvent anyway because it is (for most players) not fun.

The beauty of the stock resource system tho, is that if someone wanted to slap a Kethane grind in... well, they could

Kethane had parts of various sizes for different jobs. For instance, I liked to set up a station in Mun orbit that had fuel and kethane tanks, as well as a large converter. Meanwhile, my lander had a few small tanks and a small converter, so it could top up before ascent. This system allowed me to efficiently ferry kethane from the surface where it could be converted into the station's storage tanks, allowing passing ships an easy way to refuel.

Stock KSP only has a large converter, making this system near impossible, as the lander needs to be much larger to compensate for the extra weight. The drills themselves are fairly bulky as well, but I guess that can't be helped, they do look pretty cool.

This was another design choice, and one where I intentionally did not do what Kethane and Karbonite do. Real ISRU is hard. The stuff is heavy, the stuff is bulky. It imposes design constraints, and I think this is a good thing. What I find interesting as an outside observer is seeing, on the one hand, folks complain that refueling is OP, followed by folks complaining (to paraphrase) that the equipment is imposing engineering challenges. In my book I chalk that up as a win

It is completely by design that you can't make little fuel hoppers. But it's also by design that you don't have to move around much as resources do not deplete (other than asteroids). So it's a balance consideration.

It doesn't make sense to me that the overlay is only visible when controlling a spacecraft with a scanner module or from the tracking station. Sure, this makes sense in real life, but this is KSP. Kethane's overlay toggle is simple and it works.

Incorrect. Without the scanner, you can view the overlay either in map view or in the tracking center. To access it in map view simply double click on the planet and you will see the knowledge base option light up that will allow you to cycle through resources (one for now - Ore - but I look forward to seeing what modders add to the system).

Regarding this next one, I'm not sure if it's something weird with Squad's implementation or if I'm just doing something wrong. I scanned the Mun and found quite a dense deposit, above 70% or so cutoff. I landed, deployed my two drills and got to work. It took them two whole years to fill a single large ore container. Their information showed something like 97% overheat, 2-3% load and a rate of maybe 0.001. Was this because this particular landing site wasn't actually above an ore vein, or were the drills actually overheating, causing them to slow down?

The cutoff is dynamic and it is relative. So if the planet averages 0% - 15%, a cutoff of 70% will just show things that are (roughly) 10% or greater. Each planet is random in each save, so I have no idea if you landed on a good spot. Also it's going to have a lot of variance, hence why you generally want to do a ground scan to unlock higher detail for that biome before using a narrow band scanner to zero in on your final landing site. Stock has a significantly more involved scanning and resource location process than Kethane in that regard, which may be why the scanner above caused confusion. The orbital scanner is just the very first step in a more involved prospecting process.

Overheating wise - did you have an engineer on board? Probe based drills are going to be horribly inefficient (by design). After all, this is Kerbal Space Program, not Drone Space Program And one thing I have tried to do with the new systems is always put the Kerbals front and center.

Drill heat will kick in inversely proportional to your deposit level, so a lousy deposit without a good engineer will be slow.

Also - regarding the long extraction times. Remember that stock can continue drilling unattended. So go run other missions, etc. and when you come back to your mining station, you may well be brimming with ore This was also a design choice because watching drills is not fun, and artificially increasing the drill rate to compensate for a lack of an unattended processing mechanic is, IMO, not the best design choice.

[anarkhon]

Hey! I can answer a few questions, and maybe provide some insight. Usual full disclosure, I authored the code for Karbonite, it's back-end framework (Regolith), as well as the stock. Also note that these are my opinions as a designer of a game system, and in no way reflect the official opinion of Squad, etc. etc.

This was a very conscious design choice. My experience wit Kethane was, to quote another forum user, to start scanning and go make a sandwich. In my opinion, from a game design standpoint, that was not fun. Having to optimize what warp speed you can use to mitigate the pain of a long scan process was not fun.

Now, if we take SCANSat as a comparison (and it's awesome for scanning - it's why I recommended it for Karbonite), the mechanic is different. Background processing for one, full time warp for another. Just get into a polar orbit, and hit time warp for ten seconds and you're done.

So when I made the stock system, I looked at both of these. And in both cases, players generally used timewarp as a gameplay mechanic to circumvent 'un-fun' bits and get to the fun things. And I don't blame them. So I left in the hard part (getting to a polar orbit), added a cost (power and data transmission that varies based on the size of the body you are scanning), but took out the not fun part.

Also - the stock scanner is significantly less accurate than the Kethane or SCANSat/Karbonite - by design. The reason is that we have a secondary scanner (the narrow band scanner) that gives you high detail, but operates realtime (more for landing planning).

So in short, I stand by the design choice to not (in my opinion) punish players and provide a scanning mechanic that everyone tries to circumvent anyway because it is (for most players) not fun.

The beauty of the stock resource system tho, is that if someone wanted to slap a Kethane grind in... well, they could

This was another design choice, and one where I intentionally did not do what Kethane and Karbonite do. Real ISRU is hard. The stuff is heavy, the stuff is bulky. It imposes design constraints, and I think this is a good thing. What I find interesting as an outside observer is seeing, on the one hand, folks complain that refueling is OP, followed by folks complaining (to paraphrase) that the equipment is imposing engineering challenges. In my book I chalk that up as a win

It is completely by design that you can't make little fuel hoppers. But it's also by design that you don't have to move around much as resources do not deplete (other than asteroids). So it's a balance consideration.

Incorrect. Without the scanner, you can view the overlay either in map view or in the tracking center. To access it in map view simply double click on the planet and you will see the knowledge base option light up that will allow you to cycle through resources (one for now - Ore - but I look forward to seeing what modders add to the system).

The cutoff is dynamic and it is relative. So if the planet averages 0% - 15%, a cutoff of 70% will just show things that are (roughly) 10% or greater. Each planet is random in each save, so I have no idea if you landed on a good spot. Also it's going to have a lot of variance, hence why you generally want to do a ground scan to unlock higher detail for that biome before using a narrow band scanner to zero in on your final landing site. Stock has a significantly more involved scanning and resource location process than Kethane in that regard, which may be why the scanner above caused confusion. The orbital scanner is just the very first step in a more involved prospecting process.

Overheating wise - did you have an engineer on board? Probe based drills are going to be horribly inefficient (by design). After all, this is Kerbal Space Program, not Drone Space Program And one thing I have tried to do with the new systems is always put the Kerbals front and center.

Drill heat will kick in inversely proportional to your deposit level, so a lousy deposit without a good engineer will be slow.

Also - regarding the long extraction times. Remember that stock can continue drilling unattended. So go run other missions, etc. and when you come back to your mining station, you may well be brimming with ore This was also a design choice because watching drills is not fun, and artificially increasing the drill rate to compensate for a lack of an unattended processing mechanic is, IMO, not the best design choice.

Scanning and drilling is fun for me,but the stock one cut my hands - i cant make a fast flyby survey and need to wait to mine ore.

[-RanZ-]

being able to 1000x time warp and have it completely ignore heat and fill tanks is kind of silly, there really is no incentive to let it mine, you can land, time warp, and fill tanks in a flash. That could use some adjusting

[Khazar]

Someone mentioned in some other topic that there is a part called precooler tank (or something). I guess this might be involved in drill heat reduction. I play carrer mode only and didn't reach resource gathering phase yet.

[r_rolo1]

@Roverdude

You can't defend the magical instant planetary wide scan with the "you could make a coffee while it scanned the planet in Karbonite" and then say that the ore refills slowly , but that you can go do something else and then when you come back, bam, ore tank full Either you can wait, or not ...

[NFUN]

Someone mentioned in some other topic that there is a part called precooler tank (or something). I guess this might be involved in drill heat reduction. I play carrer mode only and didn't reach resource gathering phase yet.

The engine precooler just acts as an air intake and liquid fuel tanks. It doesn't actually cool the craft.

[RoverDude]

being able to 1000x time warp and have it completely ignore heat and fill tanks is kind of silly, there really is no incentive to let it mine, you can land, time warp, and fill tanks in a flash. That could use some adjusting

I'll take a peek - probably catching it before it warms up.

@Roverdude

You can't defend the magical instant planetary wide scan with the "you could make a coffee while it scanned the planet in Karbonite" and then say that the ore refills slowly , but that you can go do something else and then when you come back, bam, ore tank full Either you can wait, or not ...

You're misquoting me a bit The scanner is behaving as designed. When you look at how people have been doing resource scanning for years - the number one complaint was that it took too long, and was not fun. That's why folks like SCANSat since you can just scan at warp. And I agree, but just cut out the middle man of the warp bit since once you're at a ten second warp anyway, the progressive scan adds nothing. Also as noted, it's just one in a series of prospecting mechanics.

Background ore processing is a whole different kettle of fish. It's generating a tangible resource, and where you will be spending the lion's share of your time. And logical that once your infrastructure is set up, it could operate in the background.

The analogue to scanning would be to have background progressive scanning. And people would just warp through it anyway (no value) as it is a one-time and relatively short event. Ore harvesting is an ongoing process (there is no end), so unattended ongoing processing makes sense.

In any case, I'm comfortable with the mechanic as are many users.

[Bobe]

Ok it looks like there's a lot more to this than I expected. After all, it's finally 1.0 and I guess I didn't really anticipate things to actually start working as one might envision.

The various levels of scanning makes sense, I'll play around with that some more. And the one-time scan I can understand. After all I did the same thing by just time-warping until the scan was complete, so there's nothing lost there. About viewing the overlay, I must have missed the button to show it, I was changing targets, double clicking on planets, opening the side panels, but nothing.

I didn't expect thermal absorption to actually be a real factor, but I found it strange once I noticed the heat overload that there were not parts to compensate for it (ie. radiators). I didn't know solar panels could be used as radiators, does that work in real life? In any case, I did have two Gigantors on this thing, but I guess even that's not enough.

Also, I had no idea the kerbals themselves would affect performance. I had always just used unmanned probes, because who wants to spend their entire life just going back and forth between a moon and a space station (actually I would probably sign up to do that for free).

Looks like I'm going to have to completely rethink the way I approach ISRU. Thanks for the input guys.

[-RanZ-]

I think the scanning portion of resources is pretty decent. The orbital scan is fast and gives you a high level overview and then there is the narrow band scanner which gives more detail on a smaller area. It would be hard to please everyone on this and time warp makes time based scanning moot anyway

What is the ratio of lf/mono/ox you get from ore? When I was doing some testing using time warp it seemed that you got lots of fuel from little ore... not sure if that was a time warp bug or intentional but I would think the ratio should be less than 1 to 1 as that would not be realistic at all.

[micha]

@RoverDude: Wrt scanning - will it be possible for SCANSat to override and replace the stock "Insta-Scan" and perform background scans like it does with Karbonite? Yes, people could always timewarp, but they could also run other missions until the scans were complete.

Your explanation of getting the player to do the difficult stuff (getting the scanner into a polar orbit) and cutting out the boring stuff (waiting for the scan to complete) could also be applied to mining itself - the difficult part is landing the mining rig on a decent concentration, the boring bit is waiting for the extraction. So why speed up one aspect (scanning) but not the other (mining)? Seems a bit inconsistent to me.

In either case; great stuff getting ISRU into the stock game!

[RoverDude]

I think the scanning portion of resources is pretty decent. The orbital scan is fast and gives you a high level overview and then there is the narrow band scanner which gives more detail on a smaller area. It would be hard to please everyone on this and time warp makes time based scanning moot anyway

What is the ratio of lf/mono/ox you get from ore? When I was doing some testing using time warp it seemed that you got lots of fuel from little ore... not sure if that was a time warp bug or intentional but I would think the ratio should be less than 1 to 1 as that would not be realistic at all.

It's 1:1 mass-wise, the assumption is that some rudimentary sorting takes place during excavation. Yes, for realism there should be a loss factor. However had to compromise for gameplay reasons on this one (so in that regard, it's closer to Kethane (which is nearly lossless) than Karbonite (which is very lossy).

- - - Updated - - -

@RoverDude: Wrt scanning - will it be possible for SCANSat to override and replace the stock "Insta-Scan" and perform background scans like it does with Karbonite? Yes, people could always timewarp, but they could also run other missions until the scans were complete.

Your explanation of getting the player to do the difficult stuff (getting the scanner into a polar orbit) and cutting out the boring stuff (waiting for the scan to complete) could also be applied to mining itself - the difficult part is landing the mining rig on a decent concentration, the boring bit is waiting for the extraction. So why speed up one aspect (scanning) but not the other (mining)? Seems a bit inconsistent to me.

In either case; great stuff getting ISRU into the stock game!

But we did speed up mining - you get full unattended processing And it's pretty brisk if you are on a good spot. Thing is, that requires using the prospecting tools to find a nice spot. Also as noted, have an engineer on board.

- - - Updated - - -

(Side note) I've been watching streamers, etc. play with the new systems and there may be some slight adjustments (from a config standpoint, not a mechanics standpoint).

[r_rolo1]

@Roverdude

Well, you also see as the map information about resources as a tangible resource , and let's be honest, most people would both warp the ore generation and the scans if they both were not instant ... but that is the fault of the game lack of real support to using more than one ship at a time, that is something that you could obviously not do anything about at this time of the show.

Anyway, TBH, while I do understand your design choices ( some people really dislike waiting for scans and stuff ), you have to admit that the same arguments will be stacked against ore collection: the same people that don't like to wait for scans will rip their hairs out waiting for ore ( simply because their stock of patience is shallow ), and the people that would be OK with the long time ore collection will be puzzled by the instant scanning of a planet , even when the scanning device could not even see one of the sides of the planet, due to its quasi-magical nature ( and the fact that the game treats the other geographical intel as national secrets that have to taken away from it by force makes the whole thing to look even more disjointed, but again, not your fault on the biomes subsystem ). I was just pointing out that , by using that solution that at your eyes it is a compromise one, you are opening yourself to flak from both sides

[SlabGizor117]

So, @RoverDude, what should I do then? I mean this kinda makes sense with your explanation, but I'm still kinda having a hard time getting it all figured out in my mind. What is the best way to start mining in a way to figure things out and get a feel for the system? There aren't really any tutorials yet since 1.0 is so new but I was hoping we would get a paragraph or two on how to do it. What should I look for when I'm scanning? How do I keep my drill and converter from overheating? Etc.

Basically, how do I resources, in a small paragraph

^{I have no idea what @RoverDude does but I'm assuming it's the same as doing /u/roverdude on reddit ._.}

Edited April 28, 2015 by SlabGizor117

[micha]

But we did speed up mining - you get full unattended processing And it's pretty brisk if you are on a good spot. Thing is, that requires using the prospecting tools to find a nice spot. Also as noted, have an engineer on board.

So why not also have "full unattended scanning" ? Either a game process takes in-game time or it doesn't (whether or not the player time-warps past to reduce the impact on player time). Currently one part of ISRU takes no time, and the other part takes time - just, IMHO, inconsistent.

EDIT: Ah.. should've read r_rolo1's post before replying; basically what he said.

EDIT2: I'm in the camp that's happy to wait for background processes to complete. I'd be rather unhappy having to watch while some process worked though (even if time-warped).

Edited April 28, 2015 by micha

[RoverDude]

@r_rolo1, I don't think you are actually reading what I am writing. Comparing scanning to harvesting is like comparing apples and tractors, especially in light of the very different mechanics that follow that first scan

(edit) and @micha - because the orbital scan is a very short one time event, and a relatively small part of the process (see below). I expect folks are trying to draw 1:1 comparisons between Kethane/SCANSat and stock, and it really is a different beast.

@SlabGizor117 - here it is in one paragraph

Do an orbital scan. Get a feel for whether the stuff you want is even on this planet. Find an area that appears to have a lot, understanding that the orbital scan is really vague.

Land a Rover or a Probe. Use the surface scanner to do a detailed analysis. This unlocks more map detail.

Do flybys with a ship equipped with a narrow band scanner. This gives you high-res detail and terrain information. And you can hover over it to get precise concentrations in that biome (note that biome info is shown, also note that I had you previously ground truth to unlock detail for a biome).

Once you find a choice spot, land your drilling rig. Use the surface scanner's included GPS function, or use a narrow band scanner to find your way and get to that ideal deposit. Side note - flags will show up on the NBS display.

Drill, the ore goes into your ore tanks. Make sure you have an engineer on board (more stars is better) for maximum efficiency and to delay overheating. Use solar panels as passive radiators or anything with a lot of thermal mass to soak the heat.

Once done, use the ISRU to convert to fuel products.

???

Profit.

[SlabGizor117]

Ok cool! Thanks for replying. So where do I go to see all the scanning info and ore percentages, and how well do solar panels work as radiators/how many would I need to keep from overheating to the point of halting mining and conversion?

[RoverDude]

Ok cool! Thanks for replying. So where do I go to see all the scanning info and ore percentages, and how well do solar panels work as radiators/how many would I need to keep from overheating to the point of halting mining and conversion?

You will get planetary details in map view. You will get extreme detail on the NBS (but it only covers an 8 degree square). Solar panels are semi-ok (they help but are not perfect). You will get more mileage by attaching your drill or plunking your ISRU on something massive like your fuel storage or ore storage tanks in my experience.

[r_rolo1]

@Roverdude

I read what you said and I'm not disagreeing with your decisions per se . I might be disagreeing with your assessment that the two things are so different as you paint them, though ( I do see information as a exactly as tangible resource as the fuel count in game context, so I could live exactly as well with a slow forming map as with leaving a ore mining drill slowly working to fill my tanks. Others would not, I reckon, but those are points of view differences ... ), and I am definitely disagreeing with your implicit premise that people will see those two things as different in the same way that you do