What would asteroid mining equipment that can be rendered in a videogame look like?

[SomeGuy123]

So my question requires 2 separate conditions to be met.

1.  The mining equipment, for mining objects like asteroids that may be hard rock or loose aggregate, needs to obey known laws of physics.  The "open air drills" of Space Engineers don't work - there is no way for them to actually collect any of the rock they chew up, and there is no practical way for such a "mining" spacecraft to work without infinite propellant.  (or engines that violate conservation of momentum like they do in space engineers)

2.  It needs to be renderable in a videogame with a reasonable number of polygons and reasonably straightforward techniques.  The problem with the real life proposed nets and foil bags that you surround an asteroid with before mining is that they are flexible.  That means a game would need to physically model their surfaces as thousands of interacting joints, and this would murder performance.  

[Rakaydos]

Cant you just put a "frame" on your asteroid-circling bag, so it looks like a dodecahedron, soccerball, or other geodestic?

[kujuman]

In general, there's nothing too taxing with using cloth simulation real-time for the bag (not sure how the cloth engines would like zero g and a vacuum though). And once you can encapsulate the target body, the (1) point can be abstracted away

and depending upon what you're mining, using a laser to vaporize material and then using a magnetic collector may work (you still have the "can't anchor to the target" problem though

[swjr-swis]

3 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Cant you just put a "frame" on your asteroid-circling bag, so it looks like a dodecahedron, soccerball, or other geodestic?

That would be my suggestion too. Don't try to render the net/foil itself with all the ripples and wrinkles - i think that's what shaders are for.

In a realistic setting, people or equipment would need to be in the space between the net/foil and the asteroid surface, so it is reasonable to expect some type of framework that holds it 'up' a certain distance off or around the material of the asteroid.

That framework can be the vertices of your low polygon model, and the stretched/tensed net or foil would become a pretty reasonable approximation of the faces. Then do the wrinkles and ripples with shaders, and simulate the flexibility with animated textures (if KSP does animated textures.. totally guessing here). Or better yet, stop listening to me trying to  sound like I know of 3D modelling, and look for other existing examples.

The Scatterer mod does a pretty mean interpretation of wavy open ocean surface, which is a much more flexible type of surface, so a semi-tensed net/foil should be easier/less difficult to do. Probably useful to look into that code for some ideas.

 

[SargeRho]

With DX11, rendering reasonably soft cloth is not much of a problem at all. I have a bit much to do on my own game at the moment, but if I find enough free time some time soon, I'll see if I can come up with something.

[Findthepin1]

You play a game with asteroid mining equipment in it. So do we all. XD

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, kujuman said:

In general, there's nothing too taxing with using cloth simulation real-time for the bag (not sure how the cloth engines would like zero g and a vacuum though). And once you can encapsulate the target body, the (1) point can be abstracted away

and depending upon what you're mining, using a laser to vaporize material and then using a magnetic collector may work (you still have the "can't anchor to the target" problem though

Cloth simulation is way overkill, its only relevant for stuff like an cape or skirt, simply use either an fixed shape, sphere or sylinder with rounded ends or you could re size the asteroid a bit and recolor it to cloth.

For KSP astroids an ball would work well. Now an fun option would be to extend ball from probe, claw on an decent length girder, claw gimbal automatically to point girder trough center of mass.
Fun part move the transparancy map from north pole on girder towards south giving an animation of wrapping asteroid. 

[KAL 9000]

On January 30, 2016 at 5:58 PM, Findthepin1 said:

You play a game with asteroid mining equipment in it. So do we all. XD

Yes! It would be rendered like the (drumroll please) Drill-O-Matic^tm Mining Excavator!

[SomeGuy123]

So I'm hearing you guys.  The problem is the flexibility of deployment.

You need something you can bolt to something else the player can stick together from modular pieces, like legos.  A cylindrical mining bore that you can mount in a cylindrical hollow piece that becomes a square works for this.  You'd need a terrain engine that lets you subtract cylindrical pieces from it, but I've seen several engines that can do this, so it's possible.  

I don't quite know how you'd realistically deploy a bag around the asteroid.  How would you control where it went?  Where would you stick the pieces?  Just hard to imagine.