How efficient is your Minmus mining operation? Share your pics

[vej]

I finally got my Minmus mining operation setup and I'm not too thrilled with the efficiency of it. I have an orbital refinery with two Kerbodyne S3-14400 (largest stock) tanks, a FL-RC1 RCS Fuel Tank (largest monoprop), and a Small Holding Tank for storing ore for conversion to fuels on-demand (e.g. more LF for nuclear, more monoprop when getting low). I have a medium-sized miner lander with 3300 ore capacity powered by a Poodle and the large Rockomax X200-32 fuel tank. I net about 2200 LF and 2600 O2 per run but each run takes 15-30 minutes. The re-docking takes up a lot of that time.

Here are some photos:

Filling up those refinery tanks is taking much longer than I expected. What's more concerning is I have been planning to launch a large tanker I designed that can carry several times more fuel than the refinery for parking in LKO. These are all preliminary steps toward my goal of a grand excursion to the Jool system where I will have miners, a refinery station, a tanker, science rovers, landers, etc. Without some improvements to my process, KSP feels like it will become a mining grind game where every big mission must be preceded by a few hours of repetitive landing, drilling, orbital insertion, rendezvous, docking, processing, repeat.

Yes, there's the big debate about whether one should be doing orbital refining or refining on the surface. I'm still very open to both options but what I have now is an orbital setup so I'd prefer to fix what I have rather than redo it all.

I'm wondering if I should create a bigger mega-miner, use the claw for faster docking, use more auto-pilot features to speed up the process, redesign my miner to use the nuclear engine, move to some form of surface refining with maybe a big landable tanker and a rover that can do the resupplying, or something else.

I'm hoping some of you guys can share some numbers and other specifics about how efficiently you're able to fill up your orbital refueling station, all things considered. Share your photos too!

Edited May 15, 2015 by vej

[kulkan1]

(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:

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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.

Edited May 15, 2015 by kulkan1

[vej]

Very cool stuff. Yeah, KIS / KAS seem perfect for stationary refining. That roving fuel line connector is a neat idea.

I have virtually no experience with MechJeb but I'm starting to think it's an inescapable tool. Do you also use it for docking with your orbital refueling station? How much time does that take approximately? I play career and haven't yet unlocked the 550 science Advanced Unmanned Tech node to get the MechJeb docking+rendezvous module. I guess I could install the mod that obviates the need for the craft-mounted part.

I did another mining run and took down as much information as I could. It was honestly probably my worst run yet -- even worse than my first I think -- but it's realistic to expect some of them to go poorly. This is kinda my worst-case benchmark.

[TABLE=width: 500]

[TR]

[TD]Total time[/TD]

[TD]45 minutes[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Time to undock, land and finish mining[/TD]

[TD]8 minutes[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Time to rendezvous[/TD]

[TD]25 minutes[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Time to dock[/TD]

[TD]8 minutes[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Final refinery housekeeping[/TD]

[TD]4 minutes[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD][/TD]

[TD][/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Monopropellant used[/TD]

[TD]100[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Liquid Fuel used[/TD]

[TD]690[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Oxidizer used[/TD]

[TD]863[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Net LF gain[/TD]

[TD]1928[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Net monoprop gain[/TD]

[TD]77[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Net oxidizer gain[/TD]

[TD]2378[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Ore leftover after filling station[/TD]

[TD]275[/TD]

[/TR]

[/TABLE]

My rendezvous took so long because I screwed up my orbital insertion by accidentally over-burning and tried to find a intercept without circularizing an orbit slightly lower than my station. This also wasted a little fuel.

Assuming my best-case run would be 30 minutes and an average run of 37 minutes, it would take me 4 hours to fill up my refinery if it were empty. The fuel tanker I designed can hold a little over twice what the refinery can, so it would take 8 hours to fill up alone. That's 12 hours for the tanker and the refinery combined. You can see why something ain't right here! I can't be refueling vessels frequently with this setup. Honestly, launching fuel from Kerbin would probably be better considering how slow this is.

To answer your question about my drilling, this run had an ore rate of 0.004449/sec with 100% load on my 3 drills. No overheating issues. This is a screenshot of where I landed this time around:

I have a narrow band scanner onboard but frankly I think it's meant more for long-term stations and rovers. It would probably take me way longer to skip around to find the perfect drilling site. With time acceleration it isn't so much an issue. I forgot to check the narrow band scanner's details for where I landed this last time.

I think I'm going to try to design a mega miner with nuclear engines and figure out how to use MechJeb for expediting the process. Any other tips would be greatly appreciated!

Still hoping others share pics and efficiency details of their mining operations!

Edited May 15, 2015 by vej

[kulkan1]

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.

Edited May 15, 2015 by kulkan1

[SDEngineer]

I have virtually no experience with MechJeb but I'm starting to think it's an inescapable tool. Do you also use it for docking with your orbital refueling station? How much time does that take approximately? I play career and haven't yet unlocked the 550 science Advanced Unmanned Tech node to get the MechJeb docking+rendezvous module. I guess I could install the mod that obviates the need for the craft-mounted part.

MechJeb is in fact quite awesome for nearly completely automating these types of routine missions. However, since you haven't unlocked the rendezvous module yet, you may want to watch a tutorial on rendezvous procedures. Your docking time doesn't seem too out of line for a completely manual procedure, but your rendezvous time is really really high, suggesting that you may be missing a few key points on how to do an efficient rendezvous. From orbit, it should probably take no more than 4-5 min for a rendezvous to <100m, particularly around Minmus, where your orbits are so low that a fast Hohmann transfer orbit is cheap from a dV perspective.

Scott Manley as I recall has an excellent rendezvous tutorial, I watched it and pretty much instantly halved my rendezvous time, and have been refining those techniques ever since.

MechJeb can probably cut the entire ascent->docking procedure down to about 4-5 min total with time acceleration.

I think also, as someone else above pointed out, your mining ship may be a bit on the small side. It's Minmus after all - get a honking monster of a mining ship out there so that you can fill the ore tanks and take a huge load of ore up to the processing facility. Your efficiency will skyrocket if instead of spending 80% of your mission profiling travelling, you are only spending 25% of it travelling, and the rest of the time filling your gargantuan ore hold with rocks.

Edited May 15, 2015 by SDEngineer

[vej]

MechJeb is in fact quite awesome for nearly completely automating these types of routine missions. However, since you haven't unlocked the rendezvous module yet, you may want to watch a tutorial on rendezvous procedures. Your docking time doesn't seem too out of line for a completely manual procedure, but your rendezvous time is really really high, suggesting that you may be missing a few key points on how to do an efficient rendezvous. From orbit, it should probably take no more than 4-5 min for a rendezvous to <100m, particularly around Minmus, where your orbits are so low that a fast Hohmann transfer orbit is cheap from a dV perspective.

Scott Manley as I recall has an excellent rendezvous tutorial, I watched it and pretty much instantly halved my rendezvous time, and have been refining those techniques ever since

I'll go back and re-watch that video. 4-5 minutes from orbit does seem about right for me, tho. What happened this last run is I took off from the mining site with an apoapsis of 7500m, cut the engines, then accidentally hit Z while I was in map mode and didnt realize it immediately because I didn't see the engines firing. Long story short, I had to do two more adjustments of my orbit before I was able to find a successful intercept. Once I get a ~1km separation intercept maneuver in place, I can get within 100m very efficiently by getting my target marker to face retrograde by burning both toward offset prograde and offset retrograde vectors. I'll try to find a video of a MechJeb rendezvous tutorial too.

I think also, as someone else above pointed out, your mining ship may be a bit on the small side. It's Minmus after all - get a honking monster of a mining ship out there so that you can fill the ore tanks and take a huge load of ore up to the processing facility. Your efficiency will skyrocket if instead of spending 80% of your mission profiling travelling, you are only spending 25% of it travelling, and the rest of the time filling your gargantuan ore hold with rocks.

Yeah, it's totally too small. I am working on Mark II of it now that's enormous but I'm flailing with the design to get its ÃŽâ€V up to the 2000-2500 range. I think I have maybe made it too big!

I'm really hoping to see someone's details of a high-yield mining operation with a full round-trip time of 10 minutes or so. If I can figure that out, I'll start preparing a mothership to go to Jool!

Edited May 15, 2015 by vej

[xtoro]

Just started mine but it's going well.

Here's my manned lander which brought the 2 kerbals onto the surface to run the mining rig:

The lower garage housed a rover. There's ladders in the back to get back in to return home. The top part above the garage separates to leave the garage behind when going back to orbit. On reentry to Kerbin, the lander can decouples revealing a heat shield underneath. Drogue and regular chutes are on top of the can.

Then there's the mining rig:

Yes, it's a VTOL and works great with the low gravity of Minmus. It is also a rover so I can drive around to the best drilling spots. And if I happen to land on a slope, I can drive to a flat spot.

With all the XL panels, I can run all 6 drills AND the ISRU converter during sunlight hours. If that's not enough, the service compartment inside the cargo bay holds fuel cell arrays for more juice. During the night, I can run 3 drills all night long.

In less than 1.5 Minmus days I can have everything filled, mono, fuel, and the ore tank.

1500 Ore

850 Monoprop

5602 LF

6847 O2

Then I fly up to my orbital refuelling station, dock, transfer, convert the rest of the ore to fuel, and keep just enough to land again. The big engine on the back is from Atomic Age, it's the lightbulb nuclear engine and is very efficient for lugging this full ship around orbit. Also made it easy to get from LKO to LMO by burning little fuel, but still having decent TWR.

Speaking of the refueling station:

The station holds 19440 LF and 23760 O2. I still have to send up a monoprop tank to attach to one of the docking ports, and maybe a xenon tank. But the station itself is simple.

And finally, the little rover I brought up with the 2 Kerbals. I landed a few KM away so that both ships weren't loaded at the same time and drove over. It also has an ore surface scanner to find a high concentration on the way.

[vej]

xtoro, that mining operation is sick! So many great ideas. I love seeing what creative things people come up with to solve these kinds of problems. It's the essence of why KSP is so excellent. The VTOL super rover with integrated refinery is awesome -- and that Atomic Age engine definitely helps there. I haven't unlocked those big rover wheels or heavy aerodynamics stuff yet but I'm thinking I may get them sooner rather than later. Do you fly everything manually?

[RocketPilot573]

This is my setup. Remember that a high level engineer will speed up the drills! Also having 22 drills , 4 ore converters, and 30+ "Gigantor" solar panels helps.

There is a fuel tanker for delivering mostly liquid fuel and some oxidizer to LKO.

Once I realized that aforementioned tanker has literally no RCS storage I made a Monoprop tanker.

I noticed that many people seem to be flying their drills up to orbit and converting it at a space station... However solar panels and drills tend to be very heavy, so isn't that wasting profit?

Edited May 15, 2015 by RocketPilot573

[xtoro]

xtoro, that mining operation is sick! So many great ideas. I love seeing what creative things people come up with to solve these kinds of problems. It's the essence of why KSP is so excellent. The VTOL super rover with integrated refinery is awesome -- and that Atomic Age engine definitely helps there. I haven't unlocked those big rover wheels or heavy aerodynamics stuff yet but I'm thinking I may get them sooner rather than later. Do you fly everything manually?

Thanks! The real challenge was getting the vtol rover/lander into kerbin orbit to begin with lol, but I managed:

This is what's inside the fairing:

I have MechJeb installed, and I can fly manually but for the tedious stuff, I'll use it just because it gets repetitive. I do however do everything manually about a dozen times to perfect it before getting MJ to do things for me. I also use Davon Throttle Control for the VTOL because it balances out the engines thrust based on where the COG is automatically. I tried so many designs to get it to balance regardless of how full the tanks were and decided to go the high-tech NASA route

[SDEngineer]

I'll go back and re-watch that video. 4-5 minutes from orbit does seem about right for me, tho. What happened this last run is I took off from the mining site with an apoapsis of 7500m, cut the engines, then accidentally hit Z while I was in map mode and didnt realize it immediately because I didn't see the engines firing. Long story short, I had to do two more adjustments of my orbit before I was able to find a successful intercept. Once I get a ~1km separation intercept maneuver in place, I can get within 100m very efficiently by getting my target marker to face retrograde by burning both toward offset prograde and offset retrograde vectors. I'll try to find a video of a MechJeb rendezvous tutorial too.

It's faster to get a match (and you can usually start much earlier) by burning target retrograde at the closest intercept node to null your relative velocity, then burning direct at the target (not target prograde) until the intercept node hits minimum and starts increasing again, and then repeat when you again get close to the intercept node until you get an intercept of <100m. Even in Kerbin orbit, I can start washing the orbits this way at 15km+ separation and have a 100m intercept within 3-4 burns.

Edited May 15, 2015 by SDEngineer

[Sky_walker]

This is my setup. Remember that a high level engineer will speed up the drills! Also having 22 drills , 4 ore converters, and 30+ "Gigantor" solar panels helps.

http://i.imgur.com/iJDprLH.jpg

That's the spirit!

The bigger you build at the beginning the more time you save in a long run.

[oglommi]

Heres my mining/refinery rover and fuel tanker. The tanker is very efficient, capable of hauling a least 350 tons of fuel and mono to orbit,

[Geschosskopf]

I finally got my Minmus mining operation setup and I'm not too thrilled with the efficiency of it.

.......

I'm hoping some of you guys can share some numbers and other specifics about how efficiently you're able to fill up your orbital refueling station, all things considered. Share your photos too!

That's an impressive creation and I hate to criticize it, but since you asked..... At least it was good practice .

A refining operation within the Kerbin system just isn't efficient to begin with. It's more efficient (in all respects---fuel, money, time, and hassle) just to launch from Kerbin with sufficient fuel to start with. Where refining is worth the trouble is at other planets. Then you can make fuel for the return trip, which means you don't need to send out such fuel-heavy payloads, which means more mission-related payload and/or the initial lifters can be smaller and cheaper, etc. Also, if you plan on a long-term occupation or even thorough exploration of some other planet or moon, which will consume a lot of fuel, you can again keep yourself supplied that way and not have to send so much out from home to start with, or send resupply tankers later.

After that, efficiency is all in what you need the fuel for and how much for how long.

If the fuel is for space-going ships that will never touch the ground, then you set up shop on a convenient, low-gravity, atmosphere-free moon. If the fuel is for use on the surface of (including departures) a high-gravity and/or atmosphered planet, then you need a refining system on the ground there.

Within these broad categories, you have low-volume, infrequenty use (say for initial exporation) and high-volume, long-term use (for thorough explorations and permanent colonies). If the former, then you don't need much if any efficiency. Then you can have the drills, reefer, and tanks all on 1 ship. Otherwise, you need to split these functions up to some extent. Refining on the ground is more efficient than in orbit. The reefer can drill, too, perhaps. But what takes the fuel to space needs to be nothing but tankage and engines to avoid wasting product lifting unnecessary mass.

That's about it.

[Jarin]

That's an impressive creation and I hate to criticize it, but since you asked..... At least it was good practice .

A refining operation within the Kerbin system just isn't efficient to begin with. It's more efficient (in all respects---fuel, money, time, and hassle) just to launch from Kerbin with sufficient fuel to start with..

How do you figure? Refueling at minmus, or even just in LKO, is 4000-5000dV profit. That's a lot of added flexibility for longer trips or bigger ships.

[Geschosskopf]

How do you figure? Refueling at minmus, or even just in LKO, is 4000-5000dV profit. That's a lot of added flexibility for longer trips or bigger ships.

How you figure? . This has been hashed and rehashed for years by people contemplating first Kethane and then Karbonite. The questions/tutorials forum is full of such threads, and they all say the same thing. Do not bother with a refueling system within Kerbin's SOI. Ore is no different.

It boils down to several things. First, there's the sheer time and hassle of it all compared to just launching what you need to start with. But on the fuel side, it's also cheaper to do that, too. This is because the heavier a ship, the more fuel it needs to generate a given amount of dV. Thus, moving large quantities of fuel (and thus a heavy ship) consumes more fuel than you save save by putting the remainder into another ship.

Consider a fuel depot in LKO supplied from Minmus. For this run, your tanker doesn't even need landing gear so is just tankage and engines. From LKO out to Minmus surface is 1300-1400m/s. This is done with no cargo so doens't need all that much fuel. Coming back from Minmus surface and rendezvousing in LKO with the fuel depot can takes anything from 500-1000m/s depending on how well you aerobrake (and more if you don't aerobrake), but this time the ferry is heavy with fuel so the amount of fuel consumed is actually rather greater than what it needed for the outward trip even with dV on the low end of that scale. Plus whatever mono the tanker uses during docking. On top of this, unless you're adept at launching straight to a rendezvous, whatever comes up from Kerbin will have to spend about 300m/s on top of its launch cost to rendezvous with the station (plus mono for docking) to use any of the fuel from Minmus. There is also the sunk cost of setting up the whole operation, which will require many uses to pay off. So the end result is, you consume more fuel and spend more money, plus take a lot more time, doing all this than just flying out from Kerbin.

There's also the question of what you'd use an LKO refueling station for anyway. Anything going interplanetary is cheaper to launch with enough fuel for the outward trip than it is to bother with refueling in LKO. Use the refining stuff at the destination so you don't need to pack fuel to come home with. And even with SSTOs that can barely make orbit to start with and need to refuel to do anything else, it's still cheaper to send the fuel up from Kerbin than bother with the whole Minmus-LKO tanker system.

The only way a refueling system in Kerbin is actually worth doing is if you luck into abundant ore next to KSC. That means you can build rockets with empty fuel tanks and fill them up for free on the launchpad prior to launch. Sure, you have to buy the rovers to do this but that will pay off finacially in a few launches, although it does cost time and effort on your part.

[Mister Spock]

It may well be less efficient to set up a mining & refining operation on Minmus, but I want to try it anyway, cuz it looks fun. And it will be good practice for mining on distant worlds.

For those of us who don't use MechJeb, is it feasible to land multiple vessels on the same surface spot? I've done it once or twice, but for me it's harder than an orbital rendez-vous.

[kulkan1]

For those of us who don't use MechJeb, is it feasible to land multiple vessels on the same surface spot?

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.

[xtoro]

For those of us who don't use MechJeb, is it feasible to land multiple vessels on the same surface spot? I've done it once or twice, but for me it's harder than an orbital rendez-vous.

For a low-gravity moon, I suggest you overshoot your target with reference to your orbit path. Since the gravity is low, you can burn retrograde straight at the horizon to slow down your horizontal surface speed until you're falling straight down right next to your intended landing spot. With practice, you'll get the hang of burning at the right angles to slow your horizontal and vertical speeds simultaneously to land at the right spot

[Mister Spock]

Thanks for the replies. I'll try that!

[vej]

Lots of replies to make!

RocketPilot573, I think you win the Kerbin SOI fuel mini-game. I have no idea how you assembled that thing on the ground like that with docking ports. Did you align them so you just drive up next to them and the tolerances are tight enough that they snap together? Well done, sir! Fantastic pics.

I have MechJeb installed, and I can fly manually but for the tedious stuff, I'll use it just because it gets repetitive. I do however do everything manually about a dozen times to perfect it before getting MJ to do things for me. I also use Davon Throttle Control for the VTOL because it balances out the engines thrust based on where the COG is automatically. I tried so many designs to get it to balance regardless of how full the tanks were and decided to go the high-tech NASA route

I had the same thought -- I'll force myself to do the docking and rendezvous manually until I feel like it isn't challenging anymore, then I'll consider ways to automate it. MechJeb would do the job excellently but I've also started looking at kOS too. A fully automated mining operation in the Jool system sounds so epic even if it's probably an overkill. Would be a fun project to take on someday! BTW, I also had never heard of Davon Throttle Control either -- great tip!

That's an impressive creation and I hate to criticize it, but since you asked..... At least it was good practice .

A refining operation within the Kerbin system just isn't efficient to begin with. It's more efficient (in all respects---fuel, money, time, and hassle) just to launch from Kerbin with sufficient fuel to start with.

I agree that for many missions you don't need to refuel near Kerbin. As I mentioned in my OP, this is mostly preparation work for a mining operation in Jool. I learned so much from this and it would have been too stressful or wasteful to figure this all out so far away from Kerbin. That alone has justified it for me and plus it was fun! I am one of the folks who bought the game post-1.0 so everything is new and interesting to me.

I do think there are some spacecraft designs that could benefit from a Kerbin refueling station, though. For example, (and maybe I'm just an naive newbie about this) an interplanetary Laythe-bound SSTO spaceplane. Or maybe another interplanetary craft that can get into Kerbin orbit with its expensive Rhino+Kerbodyne stage still available but almost empty; you could top it up and use it to its fullest potential, maybe even all the way to your next refueling station. Or maybe a Minmus + Mun + Kerbin science hopper for quickly collecting science from all the biomes. I'm also intrigued by the idea of a permanent Duna shuttle that can leave Kerbin SOI full on fuel, get to Duna, send its returnable lander out for maybe a few landings, then return back to Kerbin for refueling, ready for another mission without anything else required except a crew change. I do think if a refueling station is used like this it would save a lot of money, especially considering I only spent maybe 350kish so far on mine.

----

I find it kinda funny no one with an orbital refinery has posted pics yet. Maybe it's not as common of an operation as I thought!

To offer a progress update, I think I'm pretty happy with my untested bigger, badder miner.

It can store 18k ore, a lot of fuel, an engineer, has 4 drills, science experiments for transmitting data from biomes I land in that I haven't hit yet, a claw for more efficient docking, plus some other miscellaneous improvements. I'm going to hold off on launching this though until I finish some science missions and get some more cash.

Edited May 16, 2015 by vej

[Admac]

I've switched to Munar mining since it's a lot shorter round trip, but back in the good ole days I had a lot of different Minmus miners.

Tips;

Scale it out!

Aim for at least 200+ tons of fuel. With 5m SpaceY parts I was running a 600 ton(full) landing tanker. With a bigger ship it's less of a deal to have bigger engines, and better acceleration, like at least 4 or 5 M/s/s full.

Keep it simple

I have done it with a surface mining operation and dedicated orbital lifter, and a dedicated space fuel tug, but that's a lot of hassle, and for the 20% or so efficiency boost I'd say not worth it.

The best system I had was a single vehicle that did everything and then loitered at like 1500 km Kerbin orbit when it was full. That's a good height since it's where a 45 km aerobrake leaves the ship, and a cheap circulization. later adding 500ish M/s of fuel to mission ships is pretty cheap.

Make it agile

Get the RCS build aid mod and make sure your normal and dry COMs overlap, and then make sure your RCS is balanced, makes docking heavy fuel ships with mission ships vastly easier.

That system added about 10 -15 minutes to my mission ships to move to the tanker, and the tanker only needed to be filled up ever 2-5 interplanetary missions. or every single colonization mission, but those were 1000 ton ships!

Oh the Goodspeed fuel pump is a super handy mod to automate the actual refueling.

[Ninjahgoblin]

*drools over awesome looking bases* I wish to be this cool some day. I have barely started assembling Stations. I like the ideas I see here. *stores images for reference later*

I am playing Career mode so it is taking a while.

[BurningLegion]

I actually do have an orbital refinery! It's honestly not very efficient and only has to process 600kg of Ore at a time, but putting it together as a permanent comprehensive Lower Munar Orbit (32 x 32 km) station is a good exercise in how to dock things.

A picture:

I really like the idea of a comprehensive all-in-one vehicle that fills its own tanks while mining. It would solve my current issue that can be stated as "Using more fuel than I gain". In the above pictures is my permanent Munar station, with a one-seat mining lander & two-seat science lander. The primary point of the mining here is to finance multiple science landings without launching more rockets from Kerbin, and the secondary point is to comprehensively test the ISRU for future use on missions to Gilly & Moho.

[Jesrad]

I just grabbed the first mining contract ever, and am now designing a Minmus mining operation. Plan ahead is the name of the game, eh.

Here's what I intend to do: I'll deploy a regular mining op, reasonably scaled, on Minmus ; then with the experience from it I shall deploy a similar operation on Ike for fueling many future Duna missions.

The how: I shall adapt to KSP the method devised by Hop and neatly explained on his blog for bootstrapping space exploration from Earth to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

1) a mining rover (drills and panels on wheels) on Minmus' ground. Dockable (might need a Klaw).

2) an ore shuttle. Large one.

3) a refinery / fuel depot that will be in the L2-analog to Minmus & Kerbin: I shall place it on the very same orbit as Minmus, but just outside its SOI (probably on the trailing side since the fuel is meant for Kerbin-bound vessels initially). IRL I would pick the L2 point (outer) over the L1 (inner) because of its lower escape velocity requirement, but in KSP there's no practical difference between the leading and trailing analog points.

I'll add another mining rover to smooth out / hasten operations. The idea is that there is no need to move the refinery equipment, and no need to fly up the drills and back down. The jury is still out on whether I should put the refining operation on Minmus ground (so I fly just fuel up to the L2 depot) ; or if I leave the refinery in orbit (and only fly ore up instead) ? What do you think is more efficient ?

Flying the fuel or ore up to the depot will be eeeaaasy: trajectory from the ground is practically straight up to the L2-analog. You can even drive right under the depot station (or wait until Minmus has rotated you in position), and fly nigh-vertically to it, with a single burn of slightly more than the escape velocity of Minmus (a cheap 243 m/s). Flying down from depot to the ground just requires a slight nudge (an outside push by an EVAd Kerbal would suffice) and then a single suicide burn next to the ground, that is easily planned for. Or a more continuous, gentle braking burn for the squeamish. There is little horizontal velocity to compensate for, as Minmus' tangential velocity is a mere 9.33 m/s.

And from the KMin L2-analog point, transit to LKO, Mun or Kerbin escape is nearly free: my interplanetary ships can thus afford a ridiculously efficient TWR.

What do you guys think ?

Edited May 22, 2015 by Jesrad