Power of mining station in Jool system

[royying]

I want to make a mining station in Jool system,

but solar panel are useless in Jool system and the mining station need lot of electrical power,

so how should I power the station? Attach few dozen of RTG seems unrealistic.

[Kryxal]

With a good enough engineer, banks of fuel cells are very useful ... the engineer is because the drills need the help to get enough ore to make enough fuel to keep up with demand for the cells.

[Biggen]

The Gigantors should still provide some power even at Jool, right? I still use 1x6 solar panels on all my sats in the Jool system and they work fine.

Fuel cells would still be required for night mining id imagine.

[Loren Pechtel]

3 hours ago, Biggen said:

The Gigantors should still provide some power even at Jool, right? I still use 1x6 solar panels on all my sats in the Jool system and they work fine.

Fuel cells would still be required for night mining id imagine.

My ScanSat probe heading for Jool is festooned with gigantors just to run the scanners.  Trying to run a mining rig on them would be a major exercise in base building with KIS/KAS in order to mount the vast forest that would be needed.  I doubt you could land anything that could do the job.

[Kryxal]

Out at Jool you're looking at about a 1:30 ratio on your solar panels ... the 1*6 are enough to keep a probe running, but not much more.  My Scansat probe out there runs off a pair of RTGs, mostly.

[Cubfan]

3 hours ago, Loren Pechtel said:

My ScanSat probe heading for Jool is festooned with gigantors just to run the scanners.  Trying to run a mining rig on them would be a major exercise in base building with KIS/KAS in order to mount the vast forest that would be needed.  I doubt you could land anything that could do the job.

I've gotta disagree with you. I have a mining operation on Pol. It runs just fine with 8 gigantors (on 2 separate modules) and 2 fuel cell arrays for nighttime operation. I don't use any mods. Just standard base-building with a rover.

[Loren Pechtel]

2 hours ago, Cubfan said:

I've gotta disagree with you. I have a mining operation on Pol. It runs just fine with 8 gigantors (on 2 separate modules) and 2 fuel cell arrays for nighttime operation. I don't use any mods. Just standard base-building with a rover.

I strongly suspect your fuel cells are running during the day also.

[Aegolius13]

I would go fuel cells.  The drain on LFO is pretty minor, and besides the weakness of sunlight at that distance, it's just easier not to have to worry about running electricty at night.  I would include either an RTG or a few solar panels to supply the ship during travel and trickle-charge, though.  A couple other thoughts:

-The cell arrays are way better than the individual fuel cells.  You get more electricity per ton, and more electricity per LFO consumed.  Plus they keep your part count lower.

-Assuming you're bringing an engineer, you probably don't need more than 2 big drills and 1 big ISRU.  You can mine pretty darn quickly with that rig.

-You might want add a small fuel tank and set it to "don't use," just as an emergency reserve.  All the more so if you're going nuclear and thus not carrying a lot of oxidizer.  It sucks to run out of fuel when you're dependent on cells.  If you have backup power you can probably restart mining, but it may take an annoyingly long time (especially since the equipment performs poorly before warming up, and your batteries will deplete fast without a big power source).

-Don't be like me and forget about the ore tank until you've landed on the target body.