Are ore tanks required for ISRU?

[livefree75]

I recently tried to mine some ore from an asteroid, and had two small drills and a small ISRU unit, but no ore tanks. When I started harvesting ore, the drills were definitely getting ore, but the Convert-A-Tron acted like it had no ore to process. Does this mean ore tanks are required to convert it to fuel?

Sorry I don't have any pictures.

[Reactordrone]

Yes, you need to have at least a small ore tank to collect ore before it can be converted.

[Snark]

Note that this got easier in 1.0.5, they added some small/light radial ore tanks.  So if you don't particularly want or need to store a lot of ore, those can come in handy.

Or if it bugs you too much that you need to have an ore tank on, it would be pretty easy with a few lines of ModuleManager config to add some small amount of ore-storage capacity to the ISRU itself, just a thought. 

 

Edited December 14, 2015 by Snark

[Geschosskopf]

3 hours ago, Snark said:

Note that this got easier in 1.0.5, they added some small/light radial ore tanks.  So if you don't particularly want or need to store a lot of ore, those can come in handy.

Or if it bugs you too much that you need to have an ore tank on, it would be pretty easy with a few lines of ModuleManager config to add some small amount of ore-storage capacity to the ISRU itself, just a thought. 

 

This.

The way things work under the hood, the ISRU has to draw from a stockpile of ore aboard the ship to be able to turn ore into fuel.  Therefore, you can't avoid putting some ore tankage on the ship to hold the ore that the ISRU draws from.  But it doens't need much.  As long as there's a fraction of an ore unit stored somewhere in the ship, the ISRU can work.

So like Snark said, add about 10 units of ore storage (empty) to the ISRU and problem solved.