making money from mining

[Callmedave]

Just a theory, if i send out an empty mining rover, mine resources on Kerbin, and then recover craft, would i make money?

If the vehicle leaves with 0 fuel but returns with X amount of fuel, surely i can profit and repeat?

[NFUN]

Just a theory, if i send out an empty mining rover, mine resources on Kerbin, and then recover craft, would i make money?

If the vehicle leaves with 0 fuel but returns with X amount of fuel, surely i can profit and repeat?

Yes, technically, but probably not by much.

[Gaarst]

Yes you could, but considering the cost of the setup of the process (drill, converter, moving ore around...) you'll have to sell great amounts of ore/fuel for you to actually make money

[Greenfire32]

An interesting thought. Someone should test this.

However, I don't think you will earn a profit since I'm pretty sure the total "re-funded" cost with recovered crafts is taken from the "initial cost" values. I'd assume that you would just recover the craft as normal and any gained fuel would simply be lost.

There is also the task of weighing the actual cost of getting to the location against the total return. At some point, you'll stop making money as it'll take more fuel to get there to outweigh what you bring back.

But, again, someone (myself possibly) needs to test this.

[Jovus]

Should be fairly easy if you don't mind a bit of fiddling. Get your rig out there (somehow). Fill up a fuel tank. Detach the fuel tank and recover. Fly another (empty) fuel tank to the site. (Be sure to pick a site close enough that the refund from the fuel covers the loss from the tank). Rinse and repeat.

Double points if you rig up some loading crane so you can put the full tank in a vehicle to bring back to KSC for full recovery value.

[Sirrobert]

The easiest way would be to go the indirect route. Save money, instead of generating it.

Setup a refueling station in LKO, and supply that with a mining operation on the Mun, or Minmus. (it's really cheap to move large quantities of fuel between LKO and Mun/Minmus)

Launch your interplanetery ships empty. This saves you money in a number of ways. First, it's empty, so lighter, so easier to launch (cheaper to launch). Secondly, you don't have to pay for the fuel in the transfer stage.

Dock the transfer stage to your station, fill it up, and send it on it's way

[Kagame]

Maybe we're thinking about this the wrong way. Asteroids can be moved about the system, and they contain ore. So why not just move the asteroids to 72x72 LKO with ion tugs, then mine them with a developed-for-purpose station? You could easily bring up four of the small ore tanks at a time, each fitted with Seperatrons and 'chutes to deorbit. If you're using Kerbal inventory System you could easily loft eight or twelve at a time and attach the parachutes while in orbit. If not a profit, you'd at least make back the station cost on savings for repeatedly lifting fuel stations. Somebody really should test this out. I would, my career game just isn't there yet...

[Habalabam]

It makes sense that the Ore will not be valuable back on kerbin. The main value of Ore is that it is fuel outside the gravity well of Kerbin. To bring it down planetside would mean that it is just unrefined fuel.

That being said. I, for one, would like to see mining being expanded upon. Maybe three different resources. One for construction, at least one for energy/fuel (conventional and futuristic) and one to bring back for money/science. To set up a thriving infrastructure in the kerbal system is something I would like to spend a lot of time doing. Running it is also a decent backdrop for multiplayer. Deep space missions require little interactions. Running the "family business" together would be a better premise for player interaction than one going to Duna and another to Jool.

I also would like there to be more energy intensive stuff that would warrant a large solar array or nuclear reactor.

[dryer_lint]

Eh. You guys realize there's no need to move it? You can mine right on the launchpad

[Holyvision]

Sounds like room for a cool industry mod :-)

[josh__ab]

Yep, this would be a mod thing. Not even that hard, I might try it.

[magnemoe]

The easiest way would be to go the indirect route. Save money, instead of generating it.

Setup a refueling station in LKO, and supply that with a mining operation on the Mun, or Minmus. (it's really cheap to move large quantities of fuel between LKO and Mun/Minmus)

Launch your interplanetery ships empty. This saves you money in a number of ways. First, it's empty, so lighter, so easier to launch (cheaper to launch). Secondly, you don't have to pay for the fuel in the transfer stage.

Dock the transfer stage to your station, fill it up, and send it on it's way

This is the way everybody who used karbonite or kethane has done it. You save money by letting the ship arrive empty to orbit and fuel it there. You would also set up fueling stations on popular destinations.

[Shpaget]

With Minmus having those nice flats and being so cheap to take off, my plan is to have a mining/refinery rig there and have a tanker (couple of orange tanks worth of fuel) shuttling the go juice to LKO.

[Habalabam]

And, it's not a far stretch to go from a refueling station to a service station (doing repairs) into a space yard. Kerbal would be space engineers.

[Rath]

If you have resources on the launchpad you can mine them and the recover it for 100%

[Znath]

Something you could try is mining pods with a probe and a battery attached to the ore container. So when you fill the mining pod up, undock it and attach a new one to fill. It'd require a fairly complicated system is the downside to that. You could make trailers at the launch site and pick em up and then detach them later to "sell" each of them later.

I'm having trouble mining without the drill instantly overheating and basically gaining no ore.

[Nahim]

Sounds like room for a cool industry mod :-)

Yes... And for dynamise the contract structure of the game!

Eastern Indie Trading Kompany-like mod!

[Wjolcz]

I really would love to have my own Xenon-based industry in KSP. Would be fun to obtain it from atmospheric bodies and haul it back to Kerbin for profit.

Also no Xenon in Kerbin's atmosphere for obvious balancing reasons.

[322997am]

Not worth it. By the time you get real money like this it will be more profitable and more fun to just do contracts.

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I could picture a machine that sucks in air and spits out xenon. What if bill looks in the intake.

[magnemoe]

And, it's not a far stretch to go from a refueling station to a service station (doing repairs) into a space yard. Kerbal would be space engineers.

I do this using KAS and KIS, Plugged an small station on to an huge transfer stage and is now used both for refueling and do repairs or upgrades to ships like replacing solar panels or adding more batteries

[UnusualAttitude]

I recently started a sort-of-career game in the Alternis Kerbol system where I've modified the resource .cfg files to make ore pretty rare around the system (especially on Kerbin) and I've multiplied the cost of fuel by x10. Oh, and no contracts. At all. I imagine an innovative prospection/mining company in a resource-starved world, with no-one left to pay for the science.

This makes mining ore (converted to fuel) for profit actually feasible, and also significantly increases the cost of launching. Side effects are that it actually introduces something that is a bit like a real budget, in that my income depends on the fuel flowing in at a steady rate, rather than the go-there-do-this-get-x-funds of stock contracts.

To avoid excessively tedious mining operations, I think big...

...and this Mk4 monster hauls in 22,000 units: that's about 180k funds over a period of about twenty days.

The scarcity of ore around the system also makes ore-rich asteroids much more valuable. I'm in the process of bringing in a class-E, which should hopefully leave me with more than 1,000 tonnes (or several million funds worth) of fuel into LKO.

[TheXRuler]

if you use EPL right (I think it works together with USI) you can mine ore, on e.g. minmus, refine it there and build entire spacecraft in orbit.

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You could also build expensive parts in orbit and sell them at KSC for a profit

[Snark]

Yup. RTGs, for example, are worth ~$300K per ton. If you don't mind high part counts, gravioli detectors are even more lucrative per ton.

[Combatsmithen]

On 5/1/2015 at 6:07 PM, Shpaget said:

With Minmus having those nice flats and being so cheap to take off, my plan is to have a mining/refinery rig there and have a tanker (couple of orange tanks worth of fuel) shuttling the go juice to LKO.

Way back in .21 before science or money was a thing, I had my most successful world. I had a station in LKO with escape pods and everything, not a huge station, but a station nonetheless. I had a base on the mun complemented with a super small compact 2 man rover that weighed like .5 tons. Then I had a pretty big station around minmus and a minmus base. The station was designed to travel all the way to duna and orbit there, then send down a lander to land where my rover I sent previously landed. Minmus was simply a fueling up area for the station. I finnaly got the lander out to the minmus station after it launched from kerbin, and everything was ready to go, the miner was docked, the lander was docked, solar panels out, tanks full of fuel, and I plan my transfer to begin my epic voyage to duna and beyond. And as I was a newb I didn't know that docking ports flexed so much. So when I applied the accelerator the lander and miner both ripped themselves off and I got so sad. And there was no way to fix it because KAS was barely a thing, and you weren't able to place struts from EVA yet. So I would basically have to relaunch the ENTIRE station with quantum struts on it....... So I gave up. The last time I ever have been to another planet was when I sent that rover to duna. I haven't been to another planet since..... Now most of my time has been spent inside of the Kerbin SOI and now that im playing with realism overhaul I guess I will eventually leave the Earth's SOI and send a manned mission to Mars, close enough right?

[Admac]

Probably more fun and rewarding to install MKS and hunt for rich seams of Exotic Minerals and Rare Metals. A 50 ton crate of those can be worth tens of millions, and in my last save the only rich seam I could find was on Moho. It was a pretty fun way to make some Kerbucks!