how to use orbital resource survey

[king of nowhere]

my newest mission requires resources from a surface. I am using some mods, so there is more than just ore, and i actually need to find 4 of them: ore, water, nitrogen, uraninite. All of them above 2%, it's the minimum level that the drills can mine.

But I don't think that makes any difference in the M700 scanner, except that you get a list of resources and you click on the one you want - and the narrow band scanner does not work. So I ask here instead of in specific mod subsections.

the problem is, i did an orbital scan, but it looks just plain wrong. in the end i cheated a probe on the ground to get a sure reading. here's what i found

here i landed at random, i found 8% water and 2.5% uraninite. nitrogen is not visible here, it needs a drill to be detected, anyway it's 0.5%.

and now the uraninite scan (the impromptu probe is marked as a relay)

according to this, there's no uraninite where i landed

and the water scan. Supposedly, there's also no water

and finally the nitrogen. according to this, there should be nitrogen everywhere.

so, the one resource that should be there is not. And the two resources that are supposed not to be there are there - in one case, quite plentiful.

 

The special combination of resources required needs a careful choice of the landing site. i was hoping I could aquire it with orbital scanning, but it looks a crapshoot. will i have to land a rover and scan the biomes one by one on the ground? is there any way to gain useful, reliable data from the M700 scanner?

P.S. I've seen many people talk about "refining" data or finding "localized" resources. seems a myth to me. I've run over ten thousand kilometers on various rovers, virtually every time i looked at the resources, and i never found any significant change within the same biome.

EDIT: as a further proof of that, i moved a bit to the southeast spot marked with high abundance of both uranium and water

and here are the results

the amounts of water and uranium are the same to the last decimal. sometimes they change by as much as 0.1%, which is irrelevant anyway.

Edited June 21, 2021 by king of nowhere

[bewing]

The M700 scanner detects biomes that have a particular resource. Except that the scanner only has a vague idea of where the biome is. It shows a smeared out map of the approximate average concentration in the biome. If the spot is near the edge of a biome, it shows the average of the biome averaged with the average of all the other biomes around it.

An increase in the detection level only shows you where the center of the biome is. It most certainly does not show a relative increase in ore density. Although, the intensity at the center of the biomes can be compared with the intensity of the centers of the other biomes to perhaps gain some insight into which biome is the best.

Once you have used the M700 scanner to detect which biomes are most likely to contain the ore in question -- if you want actual concentrations, you only have 3 choices, drill, use a surface scanner, or use the narrow band scanner. Adding interesting random variations to the ore concentrations is entirely up to whatever mod added the ore type.

Edited June 22, 2021 by bewing

[king of nowhere]

9 hours ago, bewing said:

The M700 scanner detects biomes that have a particular resource. Except that the scanner only has a vague idea of where the biome is. It shows a smeared out map of the approximate average concentration in the biome. If the spot is near the edge of a biome, it shows the average of the biome averaged with the average of all the other biomes around it.

An increase in the detection level only shows you where the center of the biome is. It most certainly does not show a relative increase in ore density. Although, the intensity at the center of the biomes can be compared with the intensity of the centers of the other biomes to perhaps gain some insight into which biome is the best.

so, if i land in a spot of high concentration, i should at least be guaranteed to land in a biome with the resource?

[bewing]

It depends on the shape of the biome. Imagine Minmus' "slopes" biome. The biome is a bunch of skinny lines. If you land in the geographic center of the biome, are you still in the biome? Nope.

But for most biomes your suggestion would work.

[Admiral Fluffy]

If you turn off advanced tweakables, you might be able to mine. This might not work, given that I have no experience with mods.

[king of nowhere]

Just now, Admiral Fluffy said:

If you turn off advanced tweakables, you might be able to mine. This might not work, given that I have no experience with mods.

even if I could trick the game into letting me mine where there are no resources, i wouldn't want to do it anyway.

If I wanted to cheat, I could just go edit the saved file to manually alter resource values.

 

By the way

On 6/22/2021 at 4:35 PM, bewing said:

It depends on the shape of the biome. Imagine Minmus' "slopes" biome. The biome is a bunch of skinny lines. If you land in the geographic center of the biome, are you still in the biome? Nope.

But for most biomes your suggestion would work.

i found a good biome in the polar crater, there's plenty of water, but the survey shows none over the crater.

In the end, my solution was to cheat a probe in place to check the resources on the ground. that's how i found that polar crater was good.

 

And I don't see that as cheating. I have a quirky, but strict concept of what's acceptable. Mining resources that don't exhist? totally off limits. But gathering informations on where to find resources? as long as i think that I should have access to those information, i have no problems with it. also, I could land a rover and drive to all biomes, it would only be a matter of time.

[bewing]

6 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

there's plenty of water, but the survey shows none over the crater.

There might be a bug in the mod, so the resource doesn't display properly.