Poll: would you rate "asteroid harvester depletes asteroid mass while ore tank capacity is already full" a gameplay bug?

[Hotel26]

If you leave drills running on an asteroid to supply ore to a long-running refinery operation to fill fuel tanks...

...and the drills are outpacing the refiner...

...you may find your asteroid has shrunk a lot in a disgracefully wasteful fashion.

I think it's operating as intended but is a "bug" in gameplay.  Fixing it wouldn't break anything either.

As is, one must keep coming back to tend the operation by switching on the drills long enough to fill the tanks and then shut them down again.

Conceptually, expensive/sophisticated mining equipment should automatically suspend/resume operation when there is no available tank capacity to store the product, like e.g. fuel cells do.

Please vote!  (Squad: please fix it!)

Edited November 10, 2021 by Hotel26

[AHHans]

Considering that this isn't the behavior that I observed in the versions that I played extensively (1.7.x, 1.8.x, 1.9.x, 1.10.x) I would indeed consider that a bug.

But is that indeed what is happening, or do you have the small convert-o-tron installed? (Which discards 90% of the ore it processes, and converts 10% of the ore into fuel.)

[FleshJeb]

Is it these?

https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/5250

"When the ore tanks are full and your craft is drilling and converting (via ISRU) at the same time, the drilling proceeds at the maximum rate, even though the utilization of ore may be slower than the extraction of ore. The excess ore is not stored and is simply wasted. This can become a big problem when mining asteroids due to their finite ore. This issue is independent of time warp."

https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/10125

Partially related to Bug #5250 - the fix left some related issues unaddressed

When ore containers are filled, the actual ore depletion of the asteroid now matches the amount of ore actually being stored (and then processed), however the asteroid drill continues to report 100% (or whatever limited by other factors) load, which also gives full heat production and power consumption way beyound the actual work done by the drill. Even if the drill is actuallly producing nothing, when the storage is full and the converters are off.

In comparison, surface drill reports actual load (and has its power consumption and heat production scaled to it) limited by the ability to store the ore in such situations with full ore tanks, that is being limited by ore conversion rate if ISRU converters are active and completely stopping if no ore is consumed.

I'm big into conservation of mass/momentum in my physics sims. This is one of the many reasons I answer the KSP2 surveys as "Will not buy." I think I mentioned it to you privately, but I'm so done with dealing with poor performance and bugs that I haven't opened KSP since April.

[Hotel26]

10 hours ago, AHHans said:

or do you have the small convert-o-tron installed?

Large...

59 minutes ago, FleshJeb said:

https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/5250

Does sound like this one.

[Superfluous J]

Yes that's a bug. Didn't even know it happened, though I tend to not do a lot of asteroid mining. It's a cool concept but not really time efficient when the profits from a satellite deployment can buy more fuel than contained in any asteroid.

[AHHans]

10 hours ago, Hotel26 said:

Does sound like this one.

Which version do you play? As I mentioned I haven't seen this behavior when I was playing. (I don't care much about heat generation - radiators are cheap - but I'd like to think that I would have noticed if my dV calculations were significantly off.(*))

(*) Unmined asteroids are rather efficient fuel-tanks. For many asteroids the fuel to dry-mass ratio is better than that of the stock fuel tanks.

[Hotel26]

18 hours ago, AHHans said:

Which version do you play?

1.11.2

This is easy for me to go recheck.  (As someone suggested maybe it's just the real-time display and if you come back later, the asteroid isn't really getting depleted; not in 1.11.2).

I do remember coming back to asteroids days/months/years later, a long while ago in much earlier versions and finding my whole asteroid was just about gone -- that's why I have this deep impression about it.

Stay tuned.  I'll try this more scientifically and report back here.

[Hotel26]

On 11/12/2021 at 3:14 PM, Hotel26 said:

I'll try this more scientifically and report back here.

The keywords being, 'more scientifically'.  I am happy (and sorely embarrassed) to report that this is NOT a problem as of 1.11.2.  We'll have to put this down to "too much whisky" being enjoyed in the cockpit. 

I tried this a) watching it fill up the tanks and stop consuming asteroid mass and b) letting it run, note the asteroid mass and then return to the Space Center, warp 6 hours forward and then return and notice that consumption had halted (while not being watched) with only a slight extra depletion (as expected).

As a happy KSP user, I wish now to extend my gratitude and appreciation to Squad for fixing this bug so fast!  It seems like only the other day that I reported it!  Nice going, Squad. 

(Which just goes to prove that Squad thought this was a bug, too.)

Edited November 13, 2021 by Hotel26

[Hotel26]

OK, thinking about this...  I think I may have seen the drills were running, the ore tanks were full and the asteroid mass was still dropping.  But I probably still had the refiner running with available capacity for LF/OX.

Which means some ore was still being consumed but instantly replaced.  And this whole pipeline would have halted once the LF/OX tanks were full.  And the whisky... 

[AHHans]

20 minutes ago, Hotel26 said:

I think I may have seen the drills were running, the ore tanks were full and the asteroid mass was still dropping.  But I probably still had the refiner running with available capacity for LF/OX.

Ah, yes. This happens. It is also the supposed behavior. As hinted to above: with the big convert-o-tron and no fuel/oxidizer/monoprop consumption the total mass of the craft should not change. It'll just convert asteroid mass to ore to fuel.