ISRU-Converter - how does this work?

[Bogeyman]

Being new to the mining - How does it all work with drilling up stuff, putting it into these raw materials tanks - then it must probably somehow be transferreed to this ISRU converter who in turn makes fuel out of raw material... Right?

How does the workflow go, which parts do I need?

Thanks in advance Chris

[Forty21112]

I'm new to this mining stuff, so take my words with a grain of salt.

To see ores densities, you will have to send a probe to a 60km (min.) stable polar orbit. The probe in question must have the survey machine, which is located in the Science tab. An antenna to transmit data, and a lot of power.

If all goes well, you should see color overlapping the celestial body. Different colors mean different density of ores.

After that, you need a craft with at least these 3 things.

The Drill, a Holding Tank (2 variants of it) and the ISRU converter.

Find a suitable place (anywhere, even in the launchpad itself) and activate the drill. If all goes well, you see a new button appearing in the right-click menu. It might be start Surface drill or something along that line.

The drill automatically "pump" ore into the holding tank, ready to be converted. Right click the converter and you see 4 (correct me on this) buttons. Convert to LFO, LF, O, Monoprop should be those buttons. Again, it maybe something along those lines.

One more thing, you can drill anywhere, but you will harvest more ore which are in more denser packets.

Tell me how it goes.

[Bogeyman]

Thanks for your answer.

One more question: If I converted to fuel, for example, I guess I also need to put a tank to my mining craft into which the ISRU can dump it?

[Taki117]

That is correct. You must have some sort of storage tank for the refined product.

[Bogeyman]

Ok, and, guess what? Here comes another question: Can you let the ISRU run continuously and, for example, do some other mission while the ISRU produces fuel or do you have to be with it all the time?

[Cebi]

Yes you can...you will produce fuel even if not in focus.

[KerikBalm]

At the moment, ISRU is just a heater... the convertor rapidly overheats and stops producing any resources... but continues to produce heat.

I would not recommend using it, unless you are willing to manually start the thing, stop it to let it cool down, restart it.... for a very very very long time until your tanks are full.

It needs to be fixed.

[Bogeyman]

I have read that solar panels also function as radiators, so if you use plenty of solar panels it could be cooled down?

[2nwyka]

The ISRU is effectively a heater, as KerikBalm has mentioned.

For my first attempt I built a mining ship based around a MK3 component set with, from bow to stern, a MK3 cockpit, monopropellant tank, large cargo bay, small cargo bay, long rocket fuel fuselage, and a Skipper.

I nestled one inside of a MK3 cargo bay and shielded it as best I could with both dead space and engines. I was able to run it producing monopropellant for nearly an hour (compressed) before it began to finally heat up. It took a while for it to cool back down.

Keep it out of the sun and it will produce fuel longer.

Solar panels can function as radiators, but I've only found them to work like that while they're shaded. I put four XL Arrays spaced around the MK3 fuselage and rolled the ship around to shade them and they tended to cool off the ISRU faster than when they were fully exposed.

After having played 0.23 and 0.91 for so long this new realistic heat engine is taking some getting used to.

[Violent Jeb]

It's probably producing so much heat because it is inside of a cargo bay. In my tests, I was able to convert 150units of ore into lf+ox in approximately 1/4 kerbin day. Using this metric it will take me apx 1 full day to produce 600 units, which means approximately a week to convert enough ore to fill an orange jumbo.

On kerbin, My solar components produced ~5-8 units of electricity per second optimally, using 10 1x6 solar panels

the ISRU drew something like 30.

Because of this, I could only sustain the converter for a few minutes before having to turn it off and wait for battery charge to accumulate. The drill is much less intensive on resources. Testing has also shown that the ISRU does not need to be directly connected to the processed fuel tank, so it works somewhat like monoprop

My design uses 2 cubes (-) to keep the engines and ox/lf [] tanks physically separated from the ISRU

[]-[o]-[]

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Either i've gotten lucky or my tests haven't revealed the same overheating issue as you guys have been experiencing - only electrical. I am wondering if your shut-offs are due to losing electric power. I have also experienced the issue where I can warp so long as i'm not out of electrical power, and the ship will fill/convert infinitely, while my available charge does not change during this time (day or night).

I will be launching this mining rig from kerbin to the mun this evening so I will come back and share my findings.

[Vectura]

Also, for scanning to find ore:

1) Use the big dish scanner ina polar orbit to get the basic planet overlay

2) Use the surface scanner in a high-density area to 'map' that biome (I think it does the whole biome)

3) Use the narrow band scanner to get a map of the area showing where the percentage of ore in the ground around you

[Laie]

Does it still run hot? I was preparing my first ISRU attempt and relied on the last changelog, where it said the production rate would be limited by engineer skill, not heat.

If it still generates heat, can you throttle it somehow? Or is it necessary to constantly switch it on/off?

(I seriously consider turning heat generation off -- thank god HarvesteR there are enough toggles and slider to do this)

[phunk]

I think they may have reduced the heat output, I didn't try it until 1.0.2 but it didn't seem to heat up at all.