Mining asteroids without klaw

[Palaceviking]

Guys, help a brother out.

I've got a hugely over-engineered monstrosity mid burn(29min) for a jool intercept, however due to steering losses, instability and all sorts of other shenanigans I'm going to get there with about 500m/s in the tanks if I'm lucky. 

I've got a possible dres intercept on the way, so does anyone know if I can mine the dresteroids without a klaw?

Oh and my miner module only has twr for bop, pol, minmus etc so no landing on dres

[Foxster]

Just tried it with this...

No luck though. The drills extend/clip into the surface but I couldn't get the option to start them. 

 

[nascarlaser1]

Tip: Get to Dres orbit, then send another slightly better mining module. Then just transfer the fuel from that, leave the new one behind, and maybe set up a mining factory later on in your game for future use.

Edited November 13, 2016 by nascarlaser1

[Plusck]

56 minutes ago, Palaceviking said:

... jool intercept, ... about 500m/s in the tanks if I'm lucky. 

...

Oh and my miner module only has twr for bop, pol, minmus etc so no landing on dres

Can't answer your main question, but with a good Tylo gravity assist throwing you straight down and back out to Pol's orbit, you should be able to circularise at Pol for about that amount of dv, no? Or at least put the mothership on a resonant orbit while your mining craft takes the remaining fuel to circularise and land on Pol.

Dres needs much more than that just to capture, so I'm not sure that it would be a rational option even if it were possible to mine without a Klaw.

[bewing]

And it takes a good long time hanging out at Dres before any Dresteroids start showing up anyway.

[Aegolius13]

Can you land on Dres itself and mine there?   Sounds like your TWR might not be high, though.

[Ultimate Steve]

I'm just going to say here, at Dres it takes a TON of Dv to circularize. I had to do a 3km/s burn (and the a 7km/s burn to rescue another ship, but that's not important) on a recent mission. Now, if you go to Jool, if you set it up right, you can get a gravity assist from one of the moons and get into Jool orbit for basically no Dv.

[Palaceviking]

Thanks guys, I think I'm going to push on to Jool with my 0.5 degree thrust offset and badly made ship.

2 hours ago, Plusck said:

Can't answer your main question, but with a good Tylo gravity assist throwing you straight down and back out to Pol's orbit, you should be able to circularise at Pol for about that amount of dv, no? Or at least put the mothership on a resonant orbit while your mining craft takes the remaining fuel to circularise and land on Pol.

Dres needs much more than that just to capture, so I'm not sure that it would be a rational option even if it were possible to mine without a Klaw.

This, cos of having no Klaw, even thinking of doing some crazy 6 way ship split at jool then somehow landing the drilling rig and rescuing the other bits of my ship afterwards, although the new comms system makes this very complex and I have a lot more command seats than pods.

And yes this was the worst planned Jool mission ever, it was intended for eve, then minmus, then changed my mind cos hey, contracts are boring anyway.

Thanks again, PV

[Geschosskopf]

5 hours ago, Palaceviking said:

I've got a hugely over-engineered monstrosity mid burn(29min) for a jool intercept, however due to steering losses, instability and all sorts of other shenanigans I'm going to get there with about 500m/s in the tanks if I'm lucky. 

Well, if you've only got 500m/s in the tanks, forget stopping at Dres.  Even with an ideal transfer trajectory, it usually costs 1200-1500m/s to capture there.  If you're just happening to meet Dres on a trajectory going to Jool, your Dres intercept will be far from ideal and capturing will cost WAY more.  So basically, you won't have a chance to figure out how to mine Dresteroids without a Klaw cuz you'll never be able to capture there.

So......  500m/s is not enough to capture at Jool BY THRUST ALONE, either.  However, if you've got the inflatable heatshield, you can aerocapture at Jool.  If you don't, then you just need to tweak your arrival in the Jool system so that you can gravity brake off Tylo or Laythe as come come through the inner system.  You can get enough dV off this to capture in Jool's SOI, but the result will probably be in an elliptical orbit that crosses the orbits of 1 or more of the big moons.  This is unstable---eventually you'll get an encounter with a moon that will alter your trajectory, possibly throwing you back out of the Jool system.  So you can't just leave the ship there.  Instead, you need to follow it around and use subsequent moon encounters to tweak you into a stable orbit that doesn't cross any moons.

But to answer your question in the general case.....   I would suspect that no, you can't mine asteroids without a Klaw.  Asteroids are not planets and have no gravity---the game treats them as ships.  Thus, as far as the game is concerned under the hood, mining an asteroid is just transferring resources from 1 ship to another.  And the only way to do that is if they're docked.