I "finished" my Minmus mining base!
I have never done any mining before so I am kind of learning as I go along.
It consists of 3 modules so far. The mining module itself is the core and it defined the frame that I am going to base the next modules on (vertical 2x2 structural plates with medium rover wheels and landing gear).
The hardest part was the solar panel tower, which came with another launch and had to be landed on top of the mining module. It seems a bit over the top for 6 miners but I wanted it to be able to run around the clock and I do not have access to the large fuel cells yet so i had to go with a ton of solar panels and a ton of batteries.
Landing the tower on top of the mining module was an absolute pain in the ... but I got it in the end and learned a lot about about controlling RCS and main engines at the same time. The top of the tower was attached to the bottom of the sky crane in the background with a single docking port, so you can imagine how wobbly it was.
Another problem with the tower is that during the middle of the day, the top solar panels block the lower ones so only 2 out of 10 panels are actually generating power during those hours because my mining site is practically on the equator. I did realize this while testing on Kerbin and built a version where the panels are placed like steps on a circular staircase to avoid this issue. I only just noticed that it was the wrong version when I was landing it on the miner, and there is no way I am going to do that again.
Fortunately I am only sending one module at a time, so the next module I add can cover for the previous modules´ shortcomings, so I added some solar panels and a TON of batteries on the refining rig when I brought that in. When I built the refinery module i decided to attach the batteries on the fuel and RCS storage tanks, which seemed like a great idea. It was, but the genious here sort of overdid it by... covering the tanks completely in batteries. So here I am with a ton of electric power capacity and a bunch of fuel tanks that are super super hard to acces... Great.
But the whole setup is functional and can run the 6 miners around the clock, which is what I was aiming for. It must have taken me 12-15 hours to do this but I am very satisfied with the result.
Next step is building the hauler to take the fuel into minmus orbit, but I will be using KAS for that, so it should be fairly easy.
