kulkan1

Already seen a few of these threads, but they keep getting ignored. I like what I see.

What exactly does the contract ask of you? Does it sound like this: "- Mine x amount of ore from Minmus" "- Have x amount of ore in craft" "- Landed on Kerbin" Or is it simply "- Orbiting Kerbin"? I have seen a lot of contracts that just requires you to be in orbit for a ore return contract. Even though it's named "Return ore to Kerbin", it might just ask you to deliver it to orbit. But if it sounds like the criterias I listed, then it shouldn't be a problem. I have a stationary mining base on Minmus, and for the "return ore to kerbin orbit" contracts, I just have a designated ore lifter which I send out of Minmus SOI, and then right back after being in Kerbin SOI for 10 seconds. Not sure if it works in a special way because I have the vehicles docked while mining, but I think I remember it working after transferring the ore over too.

As long as you keep your base near the equator, it shouldn't be too hard. All it takes is a little practice to get used to the planets rotation and such. Minmus isn't that big and the gravity is weak, so if you miscalculate, it shouldn't require much to fix it.

Today I did a bunch of stuff, but as with yesterday, I played for too long to remember it all. I did some flying to visit a couple of anomalies on Kerbin, specifically the desert pyramids and the other space station. Man, flying distances on Kerbin is boring. x) I also did a couple of orbital stations around the sun for some easy cash flow. Got the science-for-funds strategy at 90%. I only lack a couple thousand science to complete the tree, and I still have lots to explore on the Mun and other planets, but meh. Transfer windows are far ahead, and biome jumping gets boring. I got a contract for bringing a sun station with 5000 ore, 7500 electricity, lab, ISRU and eight kerbals. Spent some time on that one, it was fun. Really heavy, and I didn't want to spend too much money on unrecoverable stuff. Contract itself paid about 1.3 mill or so, so it was worthwile. Also sent a couple of probes to Moho, and a rover, but I didn't really think through my plan. I'm afraid they will arrive with so much velocity that they will need 5k deltaV just to orbit. Oh well, they were cheap. Lastly I built some planes, messed around with a flying saucer, and finished with making a light mk2 craft that is very agile and fast. Don't have the stats in my head, but it goes 1.2k m/s at sea level (until it starts to explode, haven't tried with cheats yet). Very fun to fly by KSC at mach 2.5 only 10 meters from the buildings. No pics though, KSP keeps crashing from time to time.

My drills are having an efficiency of 0.071259 per drill which is above 16 times as much as yours. O.O That gives me about 0.14 ore/sec. I'm using two engineers with three stars aswell has having found a very good spot though. I don't know the exact number I got from my narrow band scanner, as I had it destroyed after I was done with it. As for other numbers, all my tanks are full, so I won't be able to see how long it takes to fill up my tanks yet. I could crunch the numbers, but meh. One thing though, the time you use on rendezvousing is time lost due to nothing happening. If you were to have a miner and tank on the ground, that would be able to continue drilling until you came back, speeding up the process a little bit more. I don't use MechJeb to rendezvous or dock. I only use it to land. I've actually never tried MJ's docking or rendezvous autopilots, so I have no idea how they work. I usually do this kind of fine tuning myself. However, if I put a kerbal on the station, he could make the KAS winches work, and you wouldn't have to dock at all, just be within a 50 meter radius. That would also speed things up a lot, I suppose. My orbit station is in a very stable orbit, making it easy to get to. When I want to back to the surface again, I just target the miner and the landing autopilot takes care of the rest. It seems like you're using a lot of time on the flying part. That's fine, but it would be more effective for fuel/time if you had a bigger transfer ship.

Actually it makes sense. The drills aren't just drilling ore, it is also refining said ore and throwing waste away. That's how you can get 1/1 ratio between ore mass and fuel mass. So the higher concentration of ore you have, the less power is needed to "clean" the ore, and you use more power on simply drilling. If that made any sense.

Today I played for a really long time, so long that I already forgot most of the stuff I did. I'm playing moderate career, and have fully scraped Minmus clean for science. Missing a few top nodes, but nothing I really need yet. If I do, I still got some biomes on Mun. I continued working a little bit on my Minmus mining op. Landed a fuel tank next to the miner for some stationary storage space. I'm working with KAS, so resource transferring has become a walk in the park. I also filled up and launched my 900t SSTO (idea from another thread) from Minmus and it is currently orbiting Minmus, waiting for a transfer window to Duna. There it will land and fill up the tanks again. I also did a rescue run to the Mun and Minmus to pick up some Kerbals I had forgotten about. Bill and a white suit came home after being stuck in a poorly equipped science lab around the Mun for three years, producing almost no science. The same ship also picked up another white kerbal from the surface, before it took off and headed home. The fuel ran dry with the periapsis above Kerbin at about 500k. Bill EVAd and pushed it retrograde until it came into suborbital trajectory. Jeb got picked up from the surface of Minmus a couple of days later, where he has been stuck on a "Plant Flag on Minmus" mission for three years. Finally, every orange suit is back, except Bob, which is in the 900t SSTO (I think). Oh, and I landed a miner on the Mun, just for the sake of ore contracts. Probed it a little bit, and thought I landed at an okay spot. Somehow my drills are really bad compared to the one on Minmus. The % is a little bit lower, but not by much. The drills are only 1/4 as effective, give or take. :S I'm not really sure what I did before dinner today... The clock is almost 7 AM, and I should really get to bed. Will get better at taking pictures!

(Fudge me, I wrote this entire post, then pressed "F5" to save. Now I have to do it again. Took me about 15 minutes more. ) I already posted this in another thread, but here goes: I'm a big fan of surface operations. My mining op currently consists of a fuel station in orbit over Minmus with 2 medium Kerbodynes, a couple of monoprop tanks and some xenon (before I remembered that xenon can't be mined). It's not a lot of storage space, but that can easily be fixed by bringing more. The rest can be found on the ground. The very idea that you have to fly up and land your miner every time you fill it up seems a bit stressful to me. Instead I have a dedicated position on the ground where I keep my miner landed. The location is optimal, and it is very easy to enhance the base by bringing more equipment. My miner is poorly equipped, with only 2 drills, but it works wonders still. I don't have any numbers on the efficiency, but for me it works like a charm. I mostly do other stuff while the tanks are filling up, and suddenly they are full. That's why I brought up a bigger tank to the ground base, so that I can store more before having to ferry it up. That way I can do many trips in a row efficiently, instead of waiting every time. My lander/fuel shuttle consists of a medium kerbodyne tank and monoprop tank with four engines/tanks on the side. The engines/tanks provides more than enough deltaV to ferry the fuel to the orbital station and down to the ground again, where it fills up. Keep in mind that I'm using MechJeb and KAS. MechJeb is used to ease the landing, as landing on Minmus several times is nothing but tedious. KAS is used to ease the fuel transfer. Having winches and pipes to stretch between two vessels really makes it easy and smooth, and isn't unrealistic at all. If nothing else, it should be stock. If I were to do it without KAS however, I would just put some wheels and a claw on my stationary fuel tank. Problem solved. It only requires a bit more managing. Another thing that comes to mind as to why surface operations is pretty good opposed to orbital refineries, is that once the orbital refinery is out of ore, nothing more will be produced until it gets more. But on ground refineries, it will continue until all the fuel tanks are full (which is especially good in a situation like mine, where you have storage on the ground aswell). Btw; what is the drill ore load like for you? How much are you getting each second? Just curious.

As you might see, I edited my post 1 minute after you posted this, so I was already trying to fix it. The reason why I did poorly the first time is becaue I was in a rush. And thanks! Updated album with a couple more pics. Also made a 900t SSTO rocket that can make it to Minmus and mine its own fuel, which then makes it able to visit almost any body (borrowed idea from another thread), so my setup hasn't been used yet. It also made me realize that big rockets need a lot more fuel than my fuel station can store atm.

Ground base with fuel lifter, attachement rover and miner. Note that I'm using KAS for easier resource transfer, hence the little rover for extra 50 meter radius. The miner itself is poorly equipped with 2 miners and an ISRU. Will probably land a bigger setup later. Am already building a bigger fuel depot for more storage on site. Orbital fuel station, above Minmus. Also KAS, for easier fuel transfer (although that requires EVA, and I forgot to put kerbals on it).

Are you using any mods for this? Would you mind sharing the .craft?