My First Mining base of 1.0.5

[Nich]

And I cant for the life of me figure out why anyone would use the big drill.  5 times the required electric with the same max?  Am I missing something?

Also I am forcing myself to play fair on self sufficiency of electricity at night.  6 drills is 3*6*60*60*6~388,000 electric charge just for drills? Then 30*60*60*6~650,000 charge for the ISRU.  That is 257 4k batteries :/  I am fine with lifting that mass (51.4 tons) but that part count I suspect is going to make my base unusable.  Any tips?  I think I may have to install tweak scale for this base.

[Dr.K Kerbal]

I don't know how to put in photos but I have put a base on Duna.

Here is some info.

1.) If you are on a low gravity body, make sure you have a lot of control of the base in case you accidentally bomb your base with a incoming rendezvous ship.

2.) Make sure you have a good power supply and a fair amount of light during the night.

3.) Try and find a smooth surface. When you land, try and find a nice smooth spot instead of going, " Doyyyyyyy. Ok. Now I am in orbit, let's just kill my velocity to 0 m/s."

No. Try and have a bit of fuel left so if you land on the wrong spot, you can launch again and try again. If you have a tall part, come in slow.

[lobe]

I completely acknoledge your links to the world peace!!!!!!! Teach me your ways.

OH MY GOD! IS IT THE TOXIC WALTZ??????

[Scotius]

Big drills can dig Ore from any deposit, no matter how diluted. Small drills work only if certain percentage of Ore is present (it's + 2% i think). If you can't find good enough deposit in a reachable position you are in trouble if equipped only with small drills.

[Starhawk]

Fuel cells are a better solution than batteries for drilling/refining through the night.

Some of the fuel your refinery produces goes toward making electricity, but once it's up and running it'll keep going as long as you like.

The small drills have a couple of important disadvantages.  They require 5% ore concentration to even work and they extract ore much more slowly.

Happy landings!

[Red Iron Crown]

4 hours ago, Nich said:

And I cant for the life of me figure out why anyone would use the big drill.

The big drill doesn't have a minimum required ore concentration to work like the smaller one does.

Edit: Ninja'd, that's what I get for not refreshing an old tab.

[Nich]

1.  I though fuel cells required a level 3 engineer to break even

2.  Any data on how much faster the big drills are? how about with a level 2/3/4/5 engineer?

[Starhawk]

1 hour ago, Nich said:

1.  I though fuel cells required a level 3 engineer to break even

2.  Any data on how much faster the big drills are? how about with a level 2/3/4/5 engineer?

I'm not sure about 1.  The info on fuel cells came from stuff I read in the forums rather than personal experience.

As far as 2 goes, I don't have any solid data atm, but I'll run a couple of tests later to get some hard numbers.

Happy landings!

[Nich]

So here is an interesting pic

3.06% ground

Level 2 engineer

.006035 for the small drill

.030174 for the large drill

500% increase

electrical and mass are a 500% increase so it is basically a wash except you can drill anywhere.

 

For my base I want a continuous base which means I need .45 ore/second.  I am guessing I will need 8 drills on good ground.

That is 30+15*8 or 150 e/s or 3.24 million e per night which would weigh 162 tons

That is 150/18 = 8 1/3 solar arrays or 1/3 fuel/s

LFO has a mass of 5kg/unit thus the arrays are using 5/3 kg/s or 36 Tons of fuel a night.  Batteries pay for themselves in 4.5 days

[bewing]

It takes some care to make your drills run in the background, unattended. You need to leave them alone for 6 hours at a time and have enough ore storage. You also can't access any other craft within 2.2km of the drill, or the drill will retroactively stop. If you can't live with those restrictions, then you have to sit and watch the drill run -- and the big drills run 5 times faster. Yes, you can timewarp to the limit of your timewarp, but it's still a long time, even with the big drills. All the while your contracts are ticking. Do you really want to wait a Kerbin year to fill one tanker full of fuel?

And the whole "running the little drill at night" thing is just one more reason to use the big drill. If you want to play fair on electricity, then the big drill gives you 5x more ore output per hour during the day, so you can just turn it off at night.

 

[LordKael]

Due to a bug in the way drills are done, if you leave physics range while the base has power, and return while it does, then the game assumes you had power during the interim. 

[Nich]

Electricity is all bugged in this game.  I think I am going to take a big fuel tank, turn off the fuel and call it my "Battery" and not feel bad cheating at night

 

Although I have already hit some problems as the base is 200 parts the lag is getting pretty bad attempting to assemble it at kerbin.  Also my darn mover has a floating wheel that is making getting under the craft hard.

 

[Starhawk]

This is probably redundant info now but here are the results of some tests I ran on the runway.

Small Drill
Level 5 Engineer
0.021797/sec
Level 4 Engineer
0.018309/sec

Level 1 Engineer
0.007847/sec
No Engineer
0.000872/sec

Large Drill
Level 5 Engineer
0.108981/sec
Level 4 Engineer
0.091544/sec

Level 1 Engineer
0.039233/sec
No Engineer
0.004359/sec

Happy landings!

[Red Iron Crown]

So...large drill about 5x faster than the small one under similar conditions, by the look of it. Great data, Starhawk.

[Dr.K Kerbal]

14 hours ago, Scotius said:

Big drills can dig Ore from any deposit, no matter how diluted. Small drills work only if certain percentage of Ore is present (it's + 2% i think). If you can't find good enough deposit in a reachable position you are in trouble if equipped only with small drills.

Drills on bases are very good. If a spacecraft comes in with an empty tank, you can drill some ore and turn on the ISRu and voila! You have a full tank!

[magnemoe]

18 hours ago, LordKael said:

Due to a bug in the way drills are done, if you leave physics range while the base has power, and return while it does, then the game assumes you had power during the interim. 

Yes, leave base alone during night and be sure to leave before power runs out and it will continue to drill.
Note that the untended function is a bit weird, first it will fill up your ore tank then it will make fuel and oxidizer even if your isru is faster than the drill as it usual is. My tips is to use huge fuel tanks. 

[LordKael]

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Yes, leave base alone during night and be sure to leave before power runs out and it will continue to drill.
Note that the untended function is a bit weird, first it will fill up your ore tank then it will make fuel and oxidizer even if your isru is faster than the drill as it usual is. My tips is to use huge fuel tanks. 

The reason behind this is due to how the code handles the 3 point conversion process. 

Drill => Ore => Fuel

Each one is calculated for the last 6 hour cycle (it might not be 6 hours for stock, but with USI it is). Basically, for the first cycle, all the drill work happens, but nothing happens with the second two points. On the second cycle, the Drills do there thing, and the ISRU does it's thing. For every cycle after that, it appears to function as one would expect, in that for every x cycles of time, x cycles of drilling and x cycles of converting occur. 

TLDR; Set it up, leave in the daylight before the power runs out, and then wait a week in game. Come back, and profit.

Also, make sure you have a big enough ore tank to store 6 hours' worth of drill production for max efficiency

Edited February 7, 2016 by LordKael
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