Ore Percentage Question

[Jakinbandw]

So I've been been setting up a mining base on Minmus in my career game and I'm currently very confused. I sent up a survey ship and found an area that had a cutoff of 80% on Minmus, so I built a mining station and set it up there. It wasn't doing so well so I landed a rover to do some surface scanning, and after driving around for about an hour I haven't found any section over 9 percent (I landed in an 7.8% zone randomly). What gives?

Edited October 18, 2015 by Jakinbandw

[Wild Cobra]

I can't answer that. I too am disappointed. I landed on what looked like a rich place on the Mun, just to find a max 8.54%, after scanning an searching with a rover.

[Snark]

The cutoff of 80% just means that it's 80% of the planet's max concentration, not 80% ore. 7.8% ore is actually pretty high for Minmus.

Just to be clear, did you use the surface scanner to do a biome scan? Makes a big difference to the orbital map's accuracy.

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I can't answer that. I too am disappointed. I landed on what looked like a rich place on the Mun, just to find a max 8.54%, after scanning an searching with a rover.

8.54% is a pretty high concentration... if that was a disappointment, what percentage were you expecting/hoping?

[Clipperride]

If you were expecting the actual return from mining to be 80%, I can see why you were disappointed. But over 8% does produce a reasonable amount and you can add multiple drills It also helps if you can house an engineer or two in your mining rig.

[Jakinbandw]

Oh, I have engineers, and I did my surface scan after I was confused about the low percentage of ore. It just caught me off guard because I was thinking I was going to need multiple refineries for my two drills and level three engineer, and instead I wasn't getting very much ore at all. I landed at the wrong spot due to lack of fuel and I was getting 5% fuel at that random spot. I'll move my drill to the 9% patch, and I guess just land a few more drills to connect up with it. I'm planning to make a massive minmus base before 1.1 comes out, and I just thought I had messed up how ore worked or something.

[Snark]

Oh, I have engineers, and I did my surface scan after I was confused about the low percentage of ore. It just caught me off guard because I was thinking I was going to need multiple refineries for my two drills and level three engineer, and instead I wasn't getting very much ore at all.

Yah, that's definitely backwards. You need many drills per ISRU. It takes a lot of drills to max out an ISRU's capacity (in practice, I've never done it).

[KerikBalm]

Yea, but if you have a level 5 engineer onboard, it takes 25 times less drills to max out the capacity.

Ore % in the map is % of maximum concentration, which is 15%.

also, it may be "cheating" (without discussing what that is), but if you go into your overlay.cfg, and change the interpolation level from 4 to something lower (like 2 or 1), you get an orbital readout that is much more accurate (its somehow not perfect even at level 1, as I still observed changes after using the surface scanning module).

You can even go

GameData>Squad>Resources>Overlay.cfg

Choose 1 of the 3 types (solid, lines, or dots)...

and make it more accurate by doingthe following:

MapResolution = 256 ->

MapResolution = 512 (this makes it take a little longer to generate the overlay)

InterpolationLevel = 4 ->

InterpolationLevel = 2

or 1 or 0... lower values also seem to make the game take a bit longer to generate the display

I'm not sure if you should raise or lower the cap pixel value to make the poles more accurate..

Anyway... reduce the interpolation value to get more accurate orbital scans.

I'm still not sure what exactly the surface scan does, or how it affects the display, but it does.

I can't seem to find any file that controls what it does though.

[klesh]

7.8% ore is actually pretty high for Minmus.

I guess I can be thoroughly satisfied that my first ISRU attempt is at a 9.72% spot on Minmus!

Thats the highest I could find after a bunch of roving about.

[Ripper2900]

I'm still not sure what exactly the surface scan does, or how it affects the display, but it does.

The orbital scan gives results per BIOME. The surface scan gives you the actual values of ore concentration WITHIN the biome you've landed in.

Narrow-band scanning doesn't affect the overlay. It's only for real time viewing.

So an orbital scan of minmus may show that all "minor flats" biomes has more than 70% on the overlay. Landing in one "minor flats" and doing a surface scan, might tell you that one of the minor flats has >80% and another only >60%. These percentages are still only relative. They're the percentage of the maximal concentration of that planet/moon.

Then moving in with the narrow-band scanner, you can see the results in detail. If you've only done an orbital scan, all biomes shows uniform distribution, but with the surface scan, it'll show the actual distributions. One part of the best "minor flat," you've found above mine have 5% but in the other end it might have 8%.

--> you've found your spot!

Edit: the above places and percentages are purely an example. Each new game you start generates new ore concentrations, although I think that the max concentration per celestial body remains the same.

Edited October 20, 2015 by Ripper2900