Where to mine ore on Duna? Concentration vs accessibility

[THX1138]

Duna has a slightly higher concentration of ore away from the equator but I figure that it might be more efficient to go for ore nearer the equator due to the possible necessity of plane changes. What would you do?

[Streetwind]

You basically have two hard reasons for wanting a high concentration. One, you wish to use junior drills, which only work above a given threshold. Two, you want the setup to run on fuel cells that consume fuel you convert from ore, which means you need a certain concentration to break even and make surplus.

If you have one of those cases on your hands, your landing sites will be limited by that, and you'll be forced to go to the hotspots away from the equator. But if you don't have one of those cases, then you might as well plop down wherever it is convenient - you just use the scan data to find the highest equatorial concentration. Because then, a lower concentration just means having to timewarp for a few moments longer.

[ineon]

Another consideration is how quickly you need the ore. I assume that you are mining it to hit some biomes for science, deploy a base, get probes into different orbits, and/or plot a transfer back to Kerbin. If you have a transfer window looming then higher concentration might jump up the priority. On the other hand if the everyone is going to sit around for a few months (or years) waiting for the correct window then they might as well wait while getting ore from a convenient location.

[bewing]

Alternately, if you will have an infinite amount of fuel available to you at some point in time, then an efficient transfer window becomes much less important.

[Montag]

Unless you have a contract requirement, then I would suggest mining on Ike instead.  But I am guessing you have a contract requirement.

[Geschosskopf]

22 hours ago, THX1138 said:

Duna has a slightly higher concentration of ore away from the equator but I figure that it might be more efficient to go for ore nearer the equator due to the possible necessity of plane changes. What would you do?

I hope you're not basing your decision on landing sites just on the M700 orbital survey overlay.  That has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the actual concentration of Ore in the ground at any place on the planet.  Ore concentration is based on BIOME.  The same biome will have pretty much the same Ore concentration in it regardless of where it is on the planet, whether this is a large, contiguous biome or small, discontiguous patches with the same biome name.  But the M700's overlay bears no relation to the planet's biome map.  All the overlay does is show you where areas the size of Texas have more biomes with relatively high ore than biomes with relatively low Ore.  Because the overlay is a very low-resolution, large-area thing, small biomes of high concentration can be swamped in large areas of biomes with low concentration, and thus hot appear on the overlay.  Conversely, a large area with below-averge concentrations will show as a "hot spot" on the overlay even if the actual amount of Ore in the ground there sucks compared to the good biomes.  But in no case does the "cut-off" value of the overlay have anything at all to do with the actual Ore concentrations in the ground.

So NEVER just look at the overlay and decide to land where it shows a "hot spot".  You'll almost always be disappointed.  What you have to do is explore the various biomes with the Surface Scanner and/or NBS to find out how much Ore is really in which biomes.  Then look at the biome map of the planet and see if there are any areas of good biomes that are conveniently located to where you want to be, and have relatively flat ground.  But here's the deal.  On average, the biomes with the highest Ore concentrations are usually those near the poles and those with both the highest and lowest terrain elevations, while biomes at middle terrain elevations tend to have the lowest concentrations.  Because polar areas waste a lot of fuel with plane changes, and because it's dangerous to land in mountains, this means you'll usually have to settle for biome with the 2nd or 3rd highest concentration on the planet if you want reasonably flat ground reasonably close to the equator.  So really, you can limit your Surface Scanner and/or NBS prospecting to the tropics and concentrate on areas that are reasonably flat.  Once you know how much Ore is in the various biomes, you look for patches of the best biomes close to the equator that are reasonably flat.  Only then do you decide on where to land.

By doing the above method, you completely avoid the Hobson's Choice you asked about.  You set up camp in the best Ore that's conveniently located.  Real estate is all about location, location, location.  But this is only for places with noticeable gravity like Duna.  If you're refueling from something tiny like Gilly or Bop, the inclination change cost is minimal so just find the biome with the highest concentration and land there. regardless of latitude.

 

 

 

[KerikBalm]

The narrow band scanner is accurate... the initial scanner is really bad.

I think it gets better, although I'm not sure how or to what extent, if you do surface readings with the surface scanner for teach of he biomes.

If you want to "cheat", you can mod your .cfg file.

GameDate>Squad>Resources>Overlay.cfg

I change the dots configuration(but feel free to do it to any one) from 256 to 512, and the interpolation level from 4 to 1. Then I change the cap pixels from 32 to 8... its much much much more accurate then. It takes a while(a couple seconds for me) to generate the overlay though... and switching between percentages is slow.

Also if you leave the mapview centered on the planet instead of your craft, then it seems to regenerate the overlay everytime you go to mapview, which makes it slow (if the focus is on a craft, it switched back and forth from map view as normal without pausing to regenerate the overlay)

As an intermediate accuracy overlay (thats not as slow to load initially and when changing percents) - I change the solid overlay from interpolation level 4 to 2, and cap pixels to 16 (I don't increase resoultion to 512, I leave it at 256).

You'll be amazed at the changes to the display as you switch between those modes.

Also a note: in my current career, Duna's lowlands have 0% ore... so I'm forced to mine from Ike or the midlands and highlands (which are harder to land on due to the atmosphere being so thin). I've noticed that in general higher elevations have more ore... I don't know if this is real or not though

Edited June 28, 2016 by KerikBalm