PSA: how to not waste ore when mining asteroids

[Laie]

(Please forgive me for issuing an PSA, but this is an important gameplay quirk and it seems as if most people are still not aware of it.)

If you only get 200t of fuel out of a 3000t Class E asteroid, this is for you.

On asteroids, the drills are 100% effective and can produce ore much faster than your converter can process it. Drills are supposed to stop once the ore bunker is full, however, as long as the converter is running, the bunker will never be quite full... and any excess ore your drill retrieves will be wasted.

It happens like this:

a) converter takes 0.5 units ore

drill sees free space

c) drill produces 8.5 units of ore

d) only 0.5u will fit in the tank -- the other 8 units just disappear

e) thus, ~84% of the asteroids' ore will be wasted

The above figures are correct if you have a three-star engineer on your vessel and create LF+O.

Things you can do:

• don't bring any engineers (then one drill produces about as much as one converter can take)
  
• micromanage your drill, stop it when the ore bunker becomes full
  
• bring enough refineries to process the ore as quickly as it comes in
  

Of course, this only affects asteroids. When mining on planets and moons, the deposit can't be depleted so it doesn't matter if you waste any ore.

Edit: typos

Edited July 14, 2015 by Laie

[Superfluous J]

I did not know this. Hopefully this bug will be fixed in 1.1.

What happens if you *would* get poor returns while controlling the ship, if instead you went back to the space center, time warped for a month, and then went back to the ship? Do you still get the poor returns or does the automatic way the drills and converters work skip this?

[moronwrocket]

I got bit by this bug (I assume that's what brought up the PSA Laie, thanks). I am going to edit my save file to add in the 800 tons I lost. In my case, I had 4 drills and 1 ISRU converter with no engineers.

[Laie]

5th Horseman: I can't tell you what happens when you leave the vessel. On my very first mining attempt, I went away, came back five days later, and found that nothing had happened in my absence. I've remained focused to my miners ever since.

[Specialist290]

Moving this over to our Tutorials section

[r4pt0r]

Moving this over to our Tutorials section

Excellent, now no one will ever find out

[Specialist290]

Har har

[sal_vager]

Excellent, now no one will ever find out

General KSP Discussion

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Gameplay Questions and Tutorials

(192 Viewing)

Currently 88 additional members will benefit from this thread than would have done so in GD

[Laie]

Even Bug Reports would be more appropriate than Tutorials.

It was intended for as wide an audience as possible ("know your quirks") but if that isn't desired, at least bring it to the attention of the powers that be.

[Specialist290]

I understand your frustration over the impression that your thread was miscategorized, but consider:

• The purpose of the Tutorials subforum is to provide a catalog of gameplay advice created by players to share with other players, particularly if it addresses a problem that they might have due to not understanding or misinterpreting the game mechanics.
  
• We ask that player-submitted bug reports include certain key pieces of information found in our bug reporting guidelines, to make it easier for the developers to reproduce and identify the issue in question. As your post didn't include that information and, moreover, appears to be written as if the intended audience is the player base as a whole rather than testing personnel, we judged that it would serve its purpose better
  
• General Discussion is indeed a high-traffic area, as you've pointed out, but it is, as the name implies, meant for "General Kerbal Space Program discussion, on topics that do not fit the forums below [in the roster order as viewed from the main forum index]." Since we judged that, on its surface, the post's intention to inform other players of how they could make better use of the tools available to them to their benefit fits within the Tutorial mandate best, we felt that the best course of action was to move it into the Tutorials subforum.
  

You are, of course, free to make a new support request in the appropriate forum if you so choose, but as this post corresponds with most of the other content already contained within the Tutorials subforum in both form and in its target audience, we believe that it is best if it remains in the Tutorials subforum.

Edited July 15, 2015 by Specialist290
Formatting

[moronwrocket]

A better place would be the wiki, when is that going to be opened back up again?

[Haze-Zero]

I was bit by this bug but I wasn't quite sure what exactly was happening. I suspected that there was some significant loss somewhere in my asteroid operation. I suspected it had something to do with adding an Engineer to my station, but I couldn't quite narrow down how the loss was happening. Thank you for sharing this.

[Superfluous J]

The fact that people don't check the tutorials section when they're having trouble with the game doesn't mean the thread belongs in a different section.

[cantab]

Personally I associate "Tutorials" with longer pieces, things that I might follow while building or flying something. For example this satellite tutorial. Not a quick bit of advice.

[wossname]

Xeno's paradox springs to mind when thinking about this mining issue.