Please fix the drill to not waste asteroids

[Laie]

This suggestion is bordering on bug report.

Currently, mining asteroids may waste a good deal of the asteroid's resources. This happens if you a) run drill and converter at the same time, mine resources faster than your converter can handle it, c) the ore bunker is full.

a) is common practice, & c) go hand in hand: when your drill outpaces the converter, the tank will fill up. Once the tank is full, the following will happen:

1. ore bunker is full
   
2. refinery takes 0.5 units
   
3. drill sees empty space, springs into action, mines 8.5 units
   
4. only 0.5 fit into the bunker
   
5. the other 8 units are spilled
   

Actual units may be smaller depending on how many updates/second there are, but that doesn't touch the core of the issue. Even if a single drill can't keep up, this will happen if the player brings enough drills to keep his converter(s) busy. It only really matters on asteroids though, because bodily resources can't be depleted.

I kindly propose that the drill should follow the fuel cell logic: cease operations once the bunker is 90% full. As there may be situations where the player wants to fill the bunker to 100% (e.g. mining contracts), this behaviour probably should be toggleable or linked to timewarp.

Edited June 22, 2015 by Laie

[KrazyKrl]

Simpler solution:

In each situation, a drill has a max ore per tick it can produce and transfer. If freespace of all ore storage < 2 to 10 ticks of ore production, disable drill with reason "Ore Full".

[Skalou]

Hi,

if you had your asteroid depleted and want to repair it, i posted a solution:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/121719-Rapid-Asteroid-Depletion?p=2173235&viewfull=1#post2173235

[Superfluous J]

This would drive me nuts as I always want my ore tanks to become 100% full.

Why not instead of:

ore bunker is full

refinery takes 0.5 units

drill sees empty space, springs into action, mines 8.5 units

only 0.5 fit into the bunker

the other 8 units are spilled

We do:

ore bunker is full

refinery takes 0.5 units

drill sees empty space, springs into action, mines 8.5 units

only 0.5 fit into the bunker

the other 8 units are put back into the frickin' asteroid.

I would also add:

EC is put back into your batteries so it's as if you only mined 0.5 units instead of 8.5.

[magico13]

Why not take it one step further and do this:

ore bunker is full

refinery takes 0.5 units

drill sees empty space, springs into action, mines 0.5 units (at the EC cost of mining 0.5 units)

To tell that there is free space on the vessel it had to calculate the total storage and the currently used storage anyway, so why not only fill as much as is needed?

[Deddly]

I'd agree, Laie, perhaps this should be filed as a bug report instead?