Why don't my mining drills work?

[Tim_the_Plumber]

I have set up my latest fuel production site on Minimus on a 10.5% oar location.

Previous such stations have been sucessful in getting fuel out. This time I have 20 of the small drills all working with plenty of cooling and power.

They just don't give more than 0.00015 oar per second.

The small converter I have is at 1% capacity.

What's going on? Should it be that hard?

Edited November 30, 2015 by Tim_the_Plumber

[Mastikator]

They may be overheating, you need radiators for your drills in 1.0.5

Check the "core temperature" and "thermal efficiency" (or whatever it's called) on your drills.

[Tim_the_Plumber]

No, I have plenty of cooling, they are at optimum temp. Just not actually getting much oar.

[Streetwind]

Since I don't know how you scanned down your mining location, I'll just have to guess...

The small drills need ore concentrations above a certain minimum threshold to work. I think it's 2.5%.

In determining that concentration, it's important to tell apart the info that the m700 orbital scanner gives you from the actual concentration data. The orbital scanner will simply project a map that gives you a percentage value in relation to the planet's maximum. So if the orbital scanner showed 10.5%, then it means that that location has just over 10% of the planet's maximum value, and not that it actually has over 10% concentration there. If the planet's maximum value is 15% actual concentration (as in, 15% of the soil being ore), then 10% of that will be just 1.5% actual concentration, which is below the small drills threshold.

You need to use the narrow-band scanner or the surface scanning module to determine the actual concentration. The m700 alone is barely enough to give a rough idea of where the best spots are, but it will make no statement about how good those spots actually are.

Edited November 30, 2015 by Streetwind

[RoverDude]

Also.. do you have an engineer on board?  And bear in mind those mini drills are not nearly as efficient as the larger ones.

[Tim_the_Plumber]

The local oar is 10.5%.

 

That is using the thing that tells you how much there is as you drive over it.

 

It is an automated system.

 

[RoverDude]

If you have no engineer, and you are using mini drills, then yes you will have a ridiculously low ore harvest rate.   Either use the larger drill, or add an engineer to the vessel to bump this up.  

[Jimbodiah]

Add more drills. I usually have rigs with 10-12 drills on them (read: big container with drill and engines on them).

[fourfa]

9 hours ago, RoverDude said:

bear in mind those mini drills are not nearly as efficient as the larger ones.

In what way, exactly?  In the tool tips, they both show the same max ore rate (1.00/sec).  Looking in the cfg files, I see a line named Efficiency (large = 1.5, Jr = 0.3).  That seems to correlate with their electric charge consumption (large = 15/sec, Jr = 3/sec).  Is there some other way that this affects their ore flow rate?  From the standpoint of overall system efficiency, the lower power requirement of the Jr would seem to reduce parasitic load from fuel cells...

Edited December 1, 2015 by fourfa

[RoverDude]

They can only pull from high concentration areas, and pull up less ore.

[Tim_the_Plumber]

18 hours ago, Jimbodiah said:

Add more drills. I usually have rigs with 10-12 drills on them (read: big container with drill and engines on them).

I have 20 drills at the moment. How many do you think it should need to get an oar rate of 1/sec?

[KerikBalm]

Ok, I can't take it anymore.

This is an oar:

This is a type of ore:

Do you have an engineer?

Have you heard of time warp?

I'm happy to get .1 ore per second, using an engineer and multiple large drills. You can't just land and top your craft up in mere minutes...

Land, start mining, timewarp/go do other things and send other missions, and hopefully there will be fuel made when you come back to it.

Edited December 1, 2015 by KerikBalm

[fourfa]

On 11/30/2015, 4:14:23, fourfa said:

In what way, exactly?

I got curious about the lack of hard numbers here; nothing answers a question like experiment.  Turns out the large drills pull up 5x as much ore per second as the small ones, in all situations.  They also weigh 5x as much, so it's just a part count vs mass/size tradeoff.  It's very curious that the tool tips don't mention this critical performance metric.

FYI, further experiment shows that the large ISRU turns a given amount of ore into 10X the amount of fuel vs the small one.  I hadn't realized it was quite that bad.  This spec is in the tool tips however.