Kerbin ore mines

[The Aziz]

I came up with an idea. I'm not saying it should work in stock, or just be a mod, whatever.

What if at the beginning of career, we would only have access to SRBs. AND also to drill, converter and related parts. (or just drill and container) We would have to set up some mining facilities to get liquid fuel. The amount of mines would limit the amount of fuel our rocket can carry. The idea is to get rid of mine>convert>transfer mechanism at this point. Mines would just work constantly. But only on Kerbin.

Also you couldn't just spread 30 mines around KSC, because their efficiency would be the same as one. Let's say that one mine inside a circle with 15-20km radius works as good as 30 of them.

Wow that's more complex than I thought it would be an hour ago.

[KSK]

Fine for a mod but I wouldn't want to see it in the stock game as it currently plays. 

If - and it's a very big 'if' it were implemented in stock, I'd want to see the following features added too:

Ability to simply buy in whatever fuel I need, so that I can get in with running a space program without having to run a mining conglomerate too.

Have different fuels and manufacturing facilities. Maybe I can't be bothered building yet another mine at an arbitrary distance from KSC but I'd be quite happy to try turning some of that seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.

A rewrite of the early tech tree so that I can at least build a decent land-going vehicle to transport the mining gear, or some mechanism for automagically building a mine wherever I want. If I'm forced to cobble a mining rig together out of girders, aircraft parts and Mk1 capsules then forget it.

Having a bit of extra logistical challenge to building rockets isn't a terrible idea in itself but the current stock game is woefully ill equipped to implement that challenge. After all we're dealing with a game where ISRU and off-world resource harvesting has been boiled down to one magic resource (ore), one magical means of extracting that resource and one magical means of converting it into whatever we need.