Do more drills do more drilling?

[Tazin]

jokes aside, i want to put a miner in minmun surface, but don't wanna leave a kerbal engineer stranded there operating drills. If i put say 6 drills in the same vessel, will i get more ore? provided i keep them all powered, obviously. What problems could i run into?

[Wolfox]

Yes, they will.

What problems could i run into?

More ore storage and more heat, pack up some extendable radiators.

[More Boosters]

More mass, more boosters.

[AlanP]

From what I experienced. More drills do produce more but it is more efficient to add an engineer. Running out of power is definitely a problem, 2000+ electric per drill probably. Heating I never encounter but it is also a concern. I made one that had a rover for the mining part but misaligned the docking port so I lost mobility. Location make a difference to use the scanning parts to pick a good spot and a rover to find the best spot for ore.

You get a better boost from experienced engineers. You can always change the out if you land a ship near by or even dock with it with you refueling lander ( if it had a crew capsule on it).

If your playing career, do a lot of rescue missions and you will have many engineers to use.

If you give me more info on how you play and what your objectives are I can offer more suggestion.

Hope this helped some.

[brettuzzi]

It's likely that your limiting factor will be electricity, not drills -- at least, if you want to mine through the night. The drills use 15 electricity per second and a Minmus night lasts 6 hours.

[ajburges]

Indeed.

You need a touch over 4 fuel cell arrays to power 3 drills and an ISRU at full bore. The number of drills needed to supply a ISRU fully will vary with with ore percent, but the mass does not scale well.

[Tazin]

Thanks guys! i have no problem warping through the night so i just add plenty of gigantors. I play Career, currently i have 16 kerbals but only 4 engineers, and had to buy the 4th. Got unlucky with the rescues! but i maxed out science already so maybe i'll buy another engineer and be done.

[Sharpy]

Note doubling your drills doubles your output. Adding power to last through the night doubles your output again. Adding a total noob engineer gives you 7x the output and adding a three-star one - 17x. So for a typical setup of two drills, that sits idle through the night and runs at full power on two gigantors through the day, you'd need 17 drills and either 340 RTGs or at least some 25 gigantors and 1337 largest batteries.

Or 34 drills and some 50 gigantors to get the same output without mining at night.

And no, you won't ever break even with fuel cell arrays without the engineer.

The engineers are paid for this, they are there to oversee the machinery and make sure it works best. It's their job.

Oh, and at 3 stars you're above the break-even point for running off fuel cells.

Of course you can always take the idle approach and just accept your operation is going to be sloooow or take to mining asteroids. Considering top ore concentrations on Minmus don't exceed 10% and a very poor asteroid has maybe 80% ore, doing it without an engineer will still yield 8x the ore.

[Skorpychan]

If you don't want to leave a kerbal there, use a probe core instead.

[THobson]

Does the engineer have to be in the ship doing the mining, would a near by EVA work? Do they have to physically touch the drill? Actually I have the same questions about the ISRU as well.

[Ripper2900]

The engineer needs to be in the ship. Any pod or even a command-seat will do.

[Sharpy]

The engineer needs to be in the ship. Any pod or even a command-seat will do.

or passenger cabin. Doesn't need to be a command pod - the ship may run off a probe core, just the engineer must be in the crew rooster.

Of course the engineer can go on EVA to fix nearby wheels/landing legs, or pick a surface sample or do some sightseeing... the drills will just run at reduced efficiency for the duration.

Considering that with an experienced engineer you're likely to outpace your ISRUs with mining speed by a considerable margin, there will be no loss to fuel production as it will run off the ore tanks.