Mining Moons

[FlyingPete]

So I've been experimenting in sandbox mode to get the hang of the resource mining feature. The method I'm using so far is to place a station in orbit of Minmus with a couple of ISRU converters, tanks for fuel and ore, and plenty of power. A drill-equipped lander then goes to the surface, digs until its tanks are full, then hauls the ore back to orbit for conversion.

I guess the other approach would be to have the ISRU converters on the surface as a permanent base. You could then either drill directly below the base, or send mining rovers out to collect the ore. Only the finished fuel would then get shipped back to orbit.

In the Jool system, there's a third possible option. Assuming the colony is based on Laythe, you could have a processing/fuel dump station in orbit of Laythe, and having mining ships bring the raw ore back from Bop or Pol. You could either do this with the lander, or have a separate ship to go between moons.

Anyone found any specific advantage to either method?

[Superfluous J]

I personally prefer the "only lift the fuel" method. The only reason I prefer it (and it's marginal) is that you'll never run out of fuel while lifting it off the surface, yet you'll never end up docking to your station with fuel left over. So, it's more efficient.

One bonus of the orbiting station is that it's in the sun more often, and in night for less time, than a surface base so the refining can run all the time with less batteries, but that's not a big deal considering if you leave your surface base alone for a year and jump to it in the daylight, it will fast forward time and fill up all your tanks no problem.

No opinion on Jool. I've not mined there yet. Is Laythe (I assume with an inbound aerobrake) more efficient than Tylo (with less dV in all other legs of the journey)?

[_stilgar_]

I think there is too much work with all that docking - I have Mk3 supply ship with ISRU - it lands, makes fuel and then if other ship needs it, it takes off and flies to it. Sure, it's not the most efficient way, but I save lots of time by not doing all those runs to orbital stations...

[Edax]

Admittedly I'm new to mining, but on Minmus, I have a Mk3 ship medium sized fuel tanks (about 4000 units) and a medium amount of ore tanks (2400 units) and the converter. I just land, mine, fill up the fuel tanks, fill up the ore tanks, and dock with my orbital refilling station transferring fuel, and refining the ore into more fuel. This method seems the simplest. 2 lv-ns have no problems moving a now 100ton ship into orbit.

[AbacusWizard]

I've tried three different methods:

1) permanent surface mining outpost with drills, permanent orbital refinery with converter, lander with ore tanks (and fuel tanks and engines) to shuttle ore from the former to the latter (yes, I docked my lander with a landing pad on a surface outpost, because I'm just that awesome at docking)

2) permanent orbital refinery with converter, lander with ore tanks (and fuel tanks and engines) and drills to obtain ore from the surface and shuttle it to the refinery

3) permanent mobile combine (drills and converter on wheels), surface-to-orbit tanker with wheels that docks to the combine, receives fuel as it is produced, and then hauls it up to orbit (where it then docks with any ships that need refueling)

So far, I'd say #3 is the most convenient and efficient by a huge margin. For one thing the tanker doesn't need to waste space (and mass and part count) on being able to carry both ore and fuel. It also saves me the trouble of manually transferring ore and/or fuel from one thing to another, except when I'm actually using the tanker to refuel another ship. It also looks way cooler.

(That central cone, by the way, is the Engineering Bay. It houses the two engineers stationed at the Mobile Ore Combine to boost efficiency (and make repairs or modifications, thanks to KAS/KIS), and it can detach and roam around--with wheels or rockets or both--in search of better ore deposits.

[Caelib]

In my experience, the only efficient mining operation is asteroids.

[r4pt0r]

In my experience, the only efficient mining operation is asteroids.

Buddy of mine built a huge wrangler for tugging class-D's and was disappointed by how little ore they had. I always expected moons to be better.

[jkool702]

I actually prefer a method which hasnt been described here yet -

I keep the fuel tanks in orbit and send down a lander with drill and ore tanks, but put the ISRU on the lander (rather than in orbit). This works particularly well for large landers since the addition of the ISRU is a (relatively) small amount of weight (My last minimus lander for this purpose held 21,000 units of ore), and has the big advantage that the lander can refuel on the surface so it always leaves the surface with full tanks. This is particularly advantageous if you tend to be overly cautious with suicide burns, since you can afford to be be very fuel inefficient on the way down.

This way may not be the most efficient in terms of "Amount of ore wasted" or "in game time used", but I feel it is the most efficient in terms of "real world time used".

[SkyRender]

Engineer Kerbals really speed up the ore extraction process a lot. Even an untrained one will boost the rate by 5, and every Engineer on board boosts it even more.

My own setup is to establish a proper mining base, and have a fuel ferry that actually does the fuel transfers to an orbiting station. The mining base only stores a token amount of ore and fuel, enough to allow it to process during the fuel ferry's visits to the orbital fuel station. The fuel ferry is basically all business: it's mostly fuel tanks. I tend to set both mining base and ferry up with what I call a "KAS Mouse": a standardized mini-rover with a docking port, said rover being attached to the parent craft via a Kerbal Attachment System winch. Two KAS Mice can attach to each other, and in turn establish a link between their parent craft.

Edited July 14, 2015 by SkyRender

[Superfluous J]

every Engineer on board boosts it even more.

Really? I thought it took just the star level of your most leveled Engineer and that was it.

Never tested it, though.

[Sharpy]

Buddy of mine built a huge wrangler for tugging class-D's and was disappointed by how little ore they had. I always expected moons to be better.

Little ore content or low mass, not much fuel total?

[Evanitis]

I prefer orbital refining, as I can just move the whole thing on a whim. My very first ISRU is currently orbiting Vall. The rest of the operation returned home or got scrapped. The lander and drill couldn't stay, so it's pretty useless, I just thought that it might get handy one day.

My recent method is having my ISRU on LKO. Not the most efficient way I presume, but that's where refilling outbound ships is the most practical.

[Brofessional]

Since Kethane was new I've always done it by landing a permanent refinery on the surface, then having a really efficient bare-bones unmanned tanker to carry the fuel to orbit, directly to whatever vehicle needs fuel.

There's little reason to have a fuel-station at all. It takes the same amount of trips to refill the station as it does to refill the target directly, and you get to skip all the docking and station construction. Plus docking large motherships with high part count to a station can get hairy when the framerates dip.

[Superfluous J]

Since Kethane was new I've always done it by landing a permanent refinery on the surface, then having a really efficient bare-bones unmanned tanker to carry the fuel to orbit, directly to whatever vehicle needs fuel.

There's little reason to have a fuel-station at all. It takes the same amount of trips to refill the station as it does to refill the target directly, and you get to skip all the docking and station construction. Plus docking large motherships with high part count to a station can get hairy when the framerates dip.

While I agree with the docking thing, one nice thing about an orbital station is it can easily have less parts than a lander. No landing legs. No SAS. No RCS (except tanks). Heck, you don't even NEED a probe core on it. My first stations are usually 5 or 7 orange tanks, 2 big RCS tanks, and 2 of each docking port. I'm planning on doing similar with the biggest SLS tanks when I unlock them.

I also like the station to just be topped off at all times. I fill it when I can't devote a ton of time to playing but have some spare time anyway. If anything, I have MORE of that kind of time than dedicated playing time.

[SAI Peregrinus]

I keep my station and refining equipment in orbit. That's a bit less efficient than having the refining equipment on the surface, but since I'm using Extraplanetary Launchpads and USI Life Support + Karbonite I have a few mining stations getting different resources, a lander/tug that takes an appropriate tank from the station to the surface to ferry the resource, and then I've got all the refineries and processing in one place. And I only need one lander/tug ship, since it can swap out tanks between ore/substrate/metal ore/water/etc easily. So it's less effort for me than trying to pull all the various products around.

[mikegarrison]

There's little reason to have a fuel-station at all. It takes the same amount of trips to refill the station as it does to refill the target directly, and you get to skip all the docking and station construction. Plus docking large motherships with high part count to a station can get hairy when the framerates dip.

Yeah, mostly it's an aesthetics thing.

But having a few orbital tanks around does answer what to do when you fill up the target ship but your tanker/shuttle ship still has some fuel left over.

- - - Updated - - -

No one seems to have mentioned it, but the Minmus flats are really easy to land on. I have landed some really improbable ships there. In many ways, I found it simplest and even most efficient to keep the ISRU on the Minmus surface and not even bother flying fuel up to orbit. Instead, I land the target ship (usually some high ISP and low thrust monstrosity) directly on Minmus, and do the refueling there. It can be cheaper to land and re-orbit the interplanetary ship than to do the orbital docking plus land and re-orbit the fuel tanker. (This only works on Minmus, and it pretty much requires KAS so you can refuel with pipes.)

Edited July 14, 2015 by mikegarrison

[Geschosskopf]

Anyone found any specific advantage to either method?

In general, I believe it's more efficient (in terms of amount of fuel delivered to orbit vs. amount of Ore extracted) to move only finished product, not Ore (due to the empty weight of Ore tanks). It's definitely more efficient not to move the drills and refinery. So the most efficient set-up has 3 components: A land-based drill/refinery vehicle, an orbital product storage base, and a flying fuel tank (with as few non-tank parts as possible) that travels between the other 2.

Of course, chasing that sort of efficiency is only really necessary if you're doing some long-term, large-scale thing. If you're just doing flags and footprints, and only intend to refuel maybe once per planet visited, then you can carry the hardware with you.

[Laie]

Buddy of mine built a huge wrangler for tugging class-D's and was disappointed by how little ore they had. I always expected moons to be better.

Asteroids are an excellent source of fuel. If you feel you don't get you money's worth, you've probably run into a gameplay quirk. Which should be well-known but apparently isn't.

I'm fed up with explaining it in every mining thread, so I dared to issue a PSA: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/128707-PSA-how-to-not-waste-ore-when-mining-asteroids

[r4pt0r]

Asteroids are an excellent source of fuel. If you feel you don't get you money's worth, you've probably run into a gameplay quirk. Which should be well-known but apparently isn't.

I'm fed up with explaining it in every mining thread, so I dared to issue a PSA: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/128707-PSA-how-to-not-waste-ore-when-mining-asteroids

Hey knowing him he will be both glad his future missions arent screwed, and displeased that shoddy coding has wasted his time YET AGAIN. But thanks very much, I'll share this with him.

*Side note here: He comes over and plays his career while I play mine. I almost never have problems with the game, maybe a few occasions of phantom torque or something small, never a game breaker. He on the other hand always experiences the absolute worst. Engines that have exploded for no reason while on ascent, craft files get buggy/corrupted when over 300 parts, staging fuel logic breaks down inexplicably.That and more, I have seen it all firsthand. He gets upset because yesterday I did an Eve mission, and a Duna return mission, a Jool mission, and various local contracts in the time he was over, while in that 10 hours all he managed was getting his 3rd asteroid mover to orbit.

[AbacusWizard]

No one seems to have mentioned it, but the Minmus flats are really easy to land on.

So true and so much fun. It's like a continent-sized runway. I use landing gear (see big tanker above) to swoop in for a horizontal landing like a plane and coast until I'm close to the refinery. By using the brakes instead of engines to kill my horizontal speed I can actually save a fair bit of fuel... non-destructive lithobraking!