Drill o matic won't drill

[Aristarchus]

I am having trouble mining an asteroid attached to my new space station. The asteroid is as yet untapped. I have plenty of storage space for ore, plenty of electricity, good contact between the drill and the asteroid, more than sufficient cooling. The drill deploys just fine but when I click "Start Asteroid Harvester" it just flashes a thermal efficiency number then does nothing. The status reads operational, but I cannot extract any ore. This is my first genuine attempt at mining, so I assume I'm missing something simple. I would appreciate any advice on the matter.

Thanks,

Ari

edit:   I figured it out. It is kind of a long story though. I have two asteroids attached to the station and I already drilled out the second one using a different ship, but it took forever so I decided to build a refinery ship to make the process go faster on the second asteroid. I forgot to put the ore container on that vessel, and that was when this drilling problem seemed to start. I sent up an ore container and docked it to the station via a docking port, still no luck, so I assumed it was a problem with the fuel crossfeed, after playing with the docking ports for a while I decided to just send up a second refinery vessel with an ore container on board. When that failed I began to assume it was a problem with my ship that I was overlooking. The game must have tagged the whole station as ore deficient when I finished with the previous asteroid so the drills think there is nothing there. As soon as I undocked the other rock from the station, the drills fired up just fine.

Edited September 19, 2017 by Aristarchus
Solved it!

[Just Jim]

From the looks of the picture, your drill is positioned too high up, and not making contact with the asteroid.

 

[bewing]

Hmmm.  No, I don't think that's it. Looks to me like the right-hand drills on both vessels have good contact.

However, there are many mods that interfere with drilling, and I am pretty confident that it's one of your mods that is making your drill not work. If you click the "Start Harvesting" button and nothing happens and there is no error message in the status -- then you are doing things right, but there is probably a mod bug blocking it from working.

 

[Just Jim]

3 minutes ago, bewing said:

Hmmm.  No, I don't think that's it. Looks to me like the right-hand drills on both vessels have good contact.

However, there are many mods that interfere with drilling, and I am pretty confident that it's one of your mods that is making your drill not work. If you click the "Start Harvesting" button and nothing happens and there is no error message in the status -- then you are doing things right, but there is probably a mod bug blocking it from working.

I was looking at the middle drill, the one under the pop-up menu. I can see a gap between the drill and asteroid. 

However, I agree the other two look OK enough.

Edited September 19, 2017 by Just Jim

[bewing]

Interesting! I've never tried that before ... I'm gonna have to try to reproduce that. Thanks for the additional testing.

 

[Logan Sace Poject]

THANKS Aristarchus !!

Was having (almost) EXACTLY same problem. I tried a few different drill vessel configurations and had no luck too. I think you may have saved me lots of f5 f9

 

[ScrapIron]

I had the same problem. I had multiple asteroids attached with tiny crafts (basically short tubes with klaws at opposite ends). After checking everything: electric, thermal, storage, drill depth, etc. the drill wouldn't start. As soon as I detached an asteroid the drill "kicked-in" immediately. 

[Altaille]

Sorry for reviving an old thread, but I had exactly the same problem and I think I have gone a bit further in understanding what is happening. Google brought me in this thread, so it might help others

• I have a station with 3 connected asteroids. One of the biggest class (F I think) and 2 others a lot smaller.
• All of them have been drilled at least a bit before addition to the station, none of them was however empty.
• Initially, drilling was working fine. I am pretty sure (not 100% though) that the only drills I activated were the one "into" the biggest rock.
• A bit later, I noticed drilling had stopped, and drills refused to start again.
• At this stage, I noticed one of the little asteroids was empty.
• If I undock the empty asteroid, I can mine again on both the big one and the other small one. That is the only way of solving the problem I found.

So it seems the game (or one of my mod) does not handle properly multiple-asteroids-ships. Drilling takes into account one of the asteroids only, whatever the position of the active drills (as long as it is below asteroid surface). In my save file, the asteroid emptied was the last in the vessel block. I tried putting the part corresponding to the big asteroid after the emptied one to see if it could solve it, but the game did not like my experimental surgery operation

I am running a modded install, so I am not sure the behaviour would be the same in stock. I might try it and fill a bug report if it does, but finding 2 asteroids and dock them can take a bit of time. I can use cheats to change orbit before docking to help things a bit.