Why can't I mine Gilly?

[Loren Pechtel]

I have a mining ship intended to set down on a low-g world, mine, refine and haul a load of liquid fuel into orbit (and refuel itself also.)

My miner definitely works--at launch I sent it to Minmus to refuel so it had enough to even reach Gilly.  I put down on Gilly, deploy my drills and they run for maybe half a second and stop.  I seem to have forgotten to put a ore scanner on the ScanSat bird that's orbiting Gilly so I don't know the ore concentration I'm sitting on.  I'm not after the fastest possible mining, just to get fuel eventually.

[HvP]

Are you using the small drills? I believe the Junior Mining Excavators require a minimum of 2.5% ore concentration in order to operate. The only other problems you could be running into would be overheating (not likely in such a short amount of time,) or insufficient electricity. If you don't have enough batteries on board, and you're mining on the night side then your drills could be depleting your probe's charge before shutting down.

Edited April 11, 2017 by HvP

[Loren Pechtel]

52 minutes ago, HvP said:

Are you using the small drills? I believe the Junior Mining Excavators require a minimum of 2.5% ore concentration in order to operate. The only other problems you could be running into would be overheating (not likely in such a short amount of time,) or insufficient electricity. If you don't have enough batteries on board, and you're mining on the night side then your drills could be depleting your probe's charge before shutting down.

Plenty of charge--lots of solar, lots of fuel cells (enough to run 4 drills & the converter at night and almost 40k of power, fully charged.)  Big drills, but perhaps I'm in an area with zero ore.

I've got enough fuel to hop a bit, but it's sure painful on Gilly!

Edited April 11, 2017 by Loren Pechtel

[Blaarkies]

1 hour ago, Loren Pechtel said:

I've got enough fuel to hop a bit, but it's sure painful on Gilly!

Much better than on Mun...Gilly is very forgiving, just be gentle and patient

[Cunjo Carl]

@Loren Pechtel Though some planets may tend to have more ore than others (I've heard), the amount and location of ore on each planet is different for everyone in every save file. It's controlled by a randomly generated game seed, which is created when you first make the file, and controls the ore locations forever hence. That said, planets tend to have widely varying ore levels across the surface... given it's Gilly, you might just try settling down somewhere else and see if it's any better!

Good luck with the mission. Don't take too much mass off of Gilly it doesn't have much to spare .

**edit: It's not at all uncommon to find places of near-zero ore on most planets, so it's not too surprising if you happen to hit a dud spot or two.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Cunjo Carl

[bewing]

Ore rates depend on your game difficulty level, too. It seems to go as "resoucre abundance" squared, as my best guess. In hard mode, that means most spots on most bodies will have zero ore. Usually the drills will tell you so -- they say "no ore available" or some such thing when they quit.

And I find hopping at Gilly to be the easiest thing in KSP. You point your nose where you want to go, fly there, turn around, brake to zero, then fall. It takes a long time, but it's sooooo easy.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

6 hours ago, bewing said:

Ore rates depend on your game difficulty level, too. It seems to go as "resoucre abundance" squared, as my best guess. In hard mode, that means most spots on most bodies will have zero ore. Usually the drills will tell you so -- they say "no ore available" or some such thing when they quit.

And I find hopping at Gilly to be the easiest thing in KSP. You point your nose where you want to go, fly there, turn around, brake to zero, then fall. It takes a long time, but it's sooooo easy.

 

Yeah, it takes a long time.  And it's so bumpy it takes a long time after landing, also.  I've been touched down 10 minutes now, still sliding down a steep hill with occasional hops into the sky.  The engines are off, SAS is enough to keep my rocket upright as it goes sledding on one corner.  I wish I had landed closer to midday so I could see what the terrain actually looked like, all I can see is the horizon.

 

Yup, that did it.  Now they work.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Loren Pechtel

[Snark]

13 hours ago, Loren Pechtel said:

I put down on Gilly, deploy my drills and they run for maybe half a second and stop.

My guess about what the problem is:  You have a drill-ground collision.  That is, you've mounted the drills too low and they're banging into the ground as they jiggle, which in Gilly's low gravity is causing the ship to lift slightly (perhaps invisibly to you) off the surface, which then causes all the drills to shut down because they only work when you're "landed"-- even if their drill heads are underground.

Detailed explanation below:

The drills have two parts.  Sorry, I'm not at a KSP computer right now so I can't give you a labeled screenshot, but I can describe them:

• One part, the "base", has a "collider"-- i.e. it's solid.  Things can bonk into it.  An EVA kerbal can stand on it.  If you ram it into the ground, it collides.  This part of the drill includes the unmoving part attached to the ship; the big orange moving part of the drill body; and the first segment of the telescoping "sleeve".
• The other part, the telescoping drill, doesn't have a collider.  It's a visual element only-- it's not physically "there".  Objects won't collide with it.  An EVA kerbal can walk right through it as if it weren't there.  And it won't collide with the ground-- it just passes through the ground, like a ghost.  (Which is important, since this is the part of the drill that's supposed to go underground; you don't want it to lift your ship up like you're on stilts!)  This part of the drill includes the drill "head", and most, but not all, of the telescoping shaft.

When the drill is mining, it "jiggles".  A common problem with miner ships is that they mount the drills a bit too low, such that the first stubby segment of the telescoping sleeve-- which is "solid", and does collide with the ground-- comes into contact with the ground when it's extended.  You can tell this is happening if your whole ship bounces and jiggles while it's mining-- that's what tells you that you've got a drill-ground collision.  (When you don't have this type of collision, your ship stays steady as a rock, and only the drills jiggle while mining.)

Players get bitten by this very easily, because the visual design of the drills tricks you.  That first, "collidable" section of the sleeve looks just like all the other, non-collidable ones.  So when players are designing their ships, they tend to eyeball it just to make sure that the orange drill itself isn't hitting the ground, not realizing that that's actually not good enough-- you need to make that first sleeve segment also not hit the ground.

For most worlds (i.e. just about anywhere other than Gilly), it doesn't matter all that much when this happens.  Why?  Because the "jiggle distance" of the drill is fairly short-- specifically, it's shorter than the suspension travel distance of lander legs.  So, even though it jiggles the ship up and down while it's mining, it doesn't actually lift the ship off the surface, because the lander legs automatically extend to compensate and surface contact is never lost.

On Gilly, however, the gravity is so low that the jiggle can actually launch you off the surface, to the point that your lander legs can't extend far enough to compensate, and then you can run into this problem.

 

I note that several other folks have suggested that your problem might be that you're using the small drills and are somewhere that the concentration is under 2.5%.  Even before you clarified that you're using the big drills, my guess would have been that that's not what's happening here, because of your quote above-- i.e. that your drills are actually starting up before they shut down.  I believe (someone please correct me if I'm wrong, here) that if the problem were the under-2.5% one that's been previously suggested, then your drills wouldn't have started in the first place.

[Vanamonde]

If that's the case, @Snark , I wonder if leaving some of the drills inactive but deployed would cause them to act like anchors to keep the probe in contact with the surface while the other drills, uh, drill? 

[Urses]

6 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:

If that's the case, @Snark , I wonder if leaving some of the drills inactive but deployed would cause them to act like anchors to keep the probe in contact with the surface while the other drills, uh, drill? 

Will they be recognised as "landed" in this situation? If the contaktpoint isn't the drill itself as more only the collider of the drillhead?

And Thanks @Snark for the "wall", i has this problem on a asteroid and this will explain what happened, because one of the drills was to deep inside through clawing degree. And i get only starting and autoshotdown.

Urses 

[juanml82]

58 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:

If that's the case, @Snark , I wonder if leaving some of the drills inactive but deployed would cause them to act like anchors to keep the probe in contact with the surface while the other drills, uh, drill? 

Solution 1: Redesign the mining ship with the drills a bit higher, use hyperedit to teleport it to Gilly and land it by the original miner. Evacuate the crew of the original miner into the new miner, destroy the original miner, if in career mode, use cheats to refund you the money.

Solution 2: the moment the drills are working (because the ship is landed. It's also useful to have KER or MJ showing the ship status to see if it's "landed" or "flying low") press "C" for non-physical timewarp. The ship becomes "on rails" and gets fixed to the ground

[Loren Pechtel]

23 minutes ago, juanml82 said:

Solution 1: Redesign the mining ship with the drills a bit higher, use hyperedit to teleport it to Gilly and land it by the original miner. Evacuate the crew of the original miner into the new miner, destroy the original miner, if in career mode, use cheats to refund you the money.

If that were the fix I would just send the engineers out to move them--I've got KIS and KAS installed.  The problem turned out to be a lack of ore.  After a  hop it slid back into the original no-ore biome, a second hop actually landed on a flat enough spot, it's now mining.

[Snark]

Caveat:  The following discussion is now moot, 'coz @Loren Pechtel has now clarified that his actual problem was something else. 

2 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

If that's the case, @Snark , I wonder if leaving some of the drills inactive but deployed would cause them to act like anchors to keep the probe in contact with the surface while the other drills, uh, drill?

If that were the problem (which in this case, it turns out, it wasn't), then no, I don't think that would help.  The problem is that the extended drills that are drilling are jiggling up and down, and when they hit the ground (on the "downstroke" of the jiggle), they are, by definition, the lowermost collidable thing on the ship.  (They have to be.  If they weren't, you wouldn't be having this problem in the first place.)  If they're low enough for the jiggle to lift the ship off the ground, then they'd lift any other part that happened to be mounted to the ship rigidly.

Other than mounting the drills higher up so that the jiggling doesn't hit the ground, basically the only solution is to make sure that the primary weight support of the ship is something that has an elastic "suspension" and is optimized to maintain ground  contact, which means either landing legs or wheels.

But, like I said, turns out this is all moot. 

2 hours ago, Urses said:

Will they be recognised as "landed" in this situation? If the contaktpoint isn't the drill itself as more only the collider of the drillhead?

The drill works if its (non-collidable) drill head is underground, and doesn't work if it doesn't.

The ship is landed if a collidable part has contact with the ground.  The extended (non-collidable) drills don't count.  You could be hovering a centimeter above the ground, and wouldn't be able to drill even if your drill heads were buried a meter deep.