Mining

[Andy1334]

Just hav accepted a mining mission but have no idea where to start. Any pointers or links to tutorials??? First post and I have tried Google!

[DuoDex]

Punted to Gameplay Questions & Tutorials

[Ferdoni]

Have you checked youtube? Lots of useful tutorials there

Get a excavator, a ore holding tank an a ISRU converter. Line them up, en you can start drilling. These are all in the 'Advanced Science Tech' (level 7, 550 Sc points) in the Tech tree

[Superfluous J]

If you're not sure if what you've built will work, test it on the launchpad or runway. It probably won't be very efficient but if your drilling/converting rig is all set up correctly, you should be able to get ore and convert it into LF/O.

[Acet]

Simplified explanation

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What can you mine:

- You can mine planets and asteroids for ore.

- Asteroids have huge percentages of ore content - up to 90% - so mining is faster, but they only have a limited quantity of ore. The place on the asteroid where you mine is not important.

- Planets have much lower percentages of ore content, so mining is slower, but they have an infinite quantity of ore. The percentage of ore depends on the place on the planet you are mining at - there are richer ore areas and very poor ones.

Finding out ore content/richness:

- When docked to an asteroid (with the Claw) just right click on the asteroid to see the total amount of ore it has and the ore richness.

- For planets, there isn't a total amount of ore - it's infinite - but there is ore richness, which affects if there is any ore to mine at all in any one place and how fast you can mine. To find planetary ore richness out you have 3 kinds of scanners:

> The M700 survey scanner has low precision and will give you a rough idea of the areas with more or less ore in a planet. Put it in a probe in a polar orbit of a planet, right-click and scan: it takes a few seconds and scans the whole planet at once.

> The M4435 narrow band scanner is supposed to give you more precision but at the cost of having to scan specific much smaller areas. (Haven't use this yet, others please pitch in)

> The Surface Scanning Module is something you put in your lander. It gives you exact ore richness just below the ship when at low altitude. You would use this when landing your miner and trying to find the best possible spot.

How to mine:

- You need at least One Mining excavator and one ore container. When landed on a planet (or docked to an asteroid) right-click on the excavator and deploy. Once deployed, right-click again and start.

- Keep in mind that the excavator most deploy towards the planet or asteroid and when deployed it must go into the planet or asteroid otherwise it won't work.

- The excavator produces heat and can overheat. Apparently having a kerbal with the Engineering speciality on the ship improves the mining performance.

What to do with the mined ore:

- With an ISRU converter you can convert ore into monoprop, liquid fuel and/or oxidiser.

Important notes:

- Mining and conversion also continue when you are not tracking a ship, so you can go and do other things with other ships.

- All this consumes energy, so you probably want to make sure you have enough solar panels for it. Also, on planetary surfaces you should make sure you have enough batteries for the nighttime or fuel cells (a typical mining+conversion op can produce more Lf+Ox than what is used by the fuel cells in powering the entire thing).

- Weight-wise fuel and ore are related 1-to-1, so mining on site, sending the ore to orbit and converting there has no advantage or disadvantage weight-wise against mining and converting on site and sending the fuel to orbit.

Where to start:

- I suggest trying to mine in Minmus first. Personally I start with a single ship which can both mine and convert and is sent to Minmus with empty fuel space which it can itself lift to orbit once full. Later you can do things like mining bases with dedicate fuel lifters.

- After that, try making asteroid miner-grabbers which make fuel from the asteroid itself and use it to push/pull the asteroid to be aerocaptured by Kerbin. Just yesterday I got a Class D to a 100k orbit of Kerbin with 270 tons of ore left in it.

Edited June 3, 2015 by Acet

[Rickenbacker]

I second all of that. Also: Make sure your ore lifter (if you refine in orbit) has enough Delta-V to lift off with a FULL ore tank. My first one didn't .

[tadswana]

Hi Guys,

I've just started mining on the Mun as well, have a mining rig filled up with 600ore and put a docking port on the top. Was thinking about getting a lander down to dock on it, and haul the ore up into orbit for processing with around 600dV.

Is this how other people do it? The other option was to have a mining rig that launches to orbit to dock and then transfer ore for processing.

Which is the better way to go?

[Superfluous J]

Landing on a docking port on Mun is not the easiest thing in the world. It's actually one of the harder things to do in the game, even on a lighter world like Minmus.

Easier would be to land NEXT TO the refinery, and have a claw-car clamp onto the refinery, fill up, then clamp onto the ship to fill it.

Better would be to land a ship with wheels instead of landing gear, and drive that ship up to a sideways docking port or claw. Docking ports are hard. People fear the claw but if you F5 first and disconnect right when refueling is done, then you shouldn't ever have problems.

[jkool702]

I just recently got a mining set up on minimus going, and gotta say it works really well there. i wanna say it works better than the mun cause of the lower gravity. I have the fuel tanks and ISRU in orbit, and have a lander go down. My lander has 6x LV-909 engines and 12x T800 fuel tanks, and can easily take 21,000 ore loads up to my station at 50k orbit with fuel to spare. It costs about 3500 ore to replenish the fuel spent by the lander on a round trip, meaning each trip brings a net ~17,500 ore to my orbital refinery, so its very easy to keep it topped off.

Sorry that doesnt really answer the question of helping on the mun, if you're thinking about setting up a permanent mining setup I'd seriously consider thinking about setting it up on minimus rather than on mun just cause the low gravity makes things so much easier.

pics:

http://imgur.com/oXqqZRM,3CSGHUQ,G2yg3aa#0

http://imgur.com/oXqqZRM,3CSGHUQ,G2yg3aa#1

http://imgur.com/oXqqZRM,3CSGHUQ,G2yg3aa#2