Miniature Refinery Troubles!

[Der Anfang]

I would like to build lightweight mining ships. The problem is that I can't ever seem to get the miniature refinery to work. The normal one seems to operate just fine. I only need to use 4 small rotating radiators and the refinery will always operate at optimal temperature. If I use the same radiators for the small one, it always overheats and eventually shuts down. Even 4 medium rot-radiatiors don't seem to help it maintain optimal temperature and it overheats and shuts down.

 

How the hell do people use the mini refineries without any trouble?? I like building heavy but I sometimes want to build light too... and I can't do this for a miner ship.

 

**Edit**

 

I wasn't talking about the baby drills. I was talking about the small ore processor. I know how the baby drills work. They only work with a certain threshold of ore underneath. I already knew this. I mean the processor overheats...

Edited November 12, 2017 by Der Anfang

[James Kerman]

The smaller drills only work if there is at least 2.5% of ore underneath them.  The small drills get 5x less ore but a levelled up engineer will speed the process.  I use 4x Thermal Control System (small) on a ship with 2 large drills and large resource converter.  After a few tries with the small drills I gave up on them.

I found it was better to build my mining rigs as detachable units with docking abilities and leave them behind when returning to Kerbin - Creating fuel stations throughout the system as you go.

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

You can get away with small drills if you need to save space or mass (on a planet or moon, not an asteroid; they throw away too much ore), provided you have a good engineer onboard, but not the small converter. Even with thermal control systems it'll always overheat and shut down.

Edited November 12, 2017 by Cpt Kerbalkrunch

[Snark]

33 minutes ago, Der Anfang said:

How the hell do people use the mini refineries without any trouble??

You don't.  The horrible, aggravating problems you're grappling with are by design, made that way on purpose.  I guess the idea was "you can save mass on the little stuff, but you have to pay a price."  I happen to disagree with that design decision myself (to me, it just seems to add pointless aggravation without adding actual challenge; I think simply making it inefficient and slow would have been sufficient).  It's pretty clear, though, that it was deliberate.  Feel free to post over in "Suggestions" if you'd like to speak up about it. 

My own solution to this problem is never use the small refinery ever, under any circumstances.  That's just for me, since I happen to find playing KSP to be fun, and would like to keep it that way.  Other players can come to their own conclusions.

 

[Urses]

If you look pricesely in VAB/SPH (for Coreheat and XFer Rates) you will see that the small raffenerie module can't translate the heat it needs to run. This way you can tinker as much radiators as you will but it will overheat for sure!

The only way to process ore permanently is the big rafinery,

Drills other hand have preferencies for drilling on a body or asteroids. Big ones are better for planetary use as example.

Edited November 12, 2017 by Urses

[TheFlyingKerman]

On ‎11‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 10:18 AM, Der Anfang said:

How the hell do people use the mini refineries without any trouble?? I like building heavy but I sometimes want to build light too... and I can't do this for a miner ship.

In my experience the mini refinery would not overheat if used well below its capacity (say 2 drills and no engineer).

[AeroGav]

On 15/11/2017 at 9:08 AM, TheFlyingKerman said:

In my experience the mini refinery would not overheat if used well below its capacity (say 2 drills and no engineer).

This.

For a small ISRU setup,  one or 2 baby drills is fine.  Remember you also have the problem of electrical power, which has to keep going overnight.    So more drills use more energy themselves, and cause the converter to consume more power because it has more ore to convert.   One small drill plus one converter can run off 4 RTGs when in high time warp.    If you're not any further out than Duna,  solar panels plus big amount of batteries (they're bulky, but don't weigh much for their size) can do a job for you. 

For a minimal setup that i am describing,  one of the smallest deployable radiator systems will do fine.    Note I did not say "panel".   Radiator panels are different from thermal control systems in that  they only remove heat from the part they are attached to  , so  if you put them on the converter the drills will overheat etc.

By design, the small converter  has a heat transfer  bottleneck,  no matter how many radiators you have, you cannot remove heat faster than a certain rate, which will only matter if you got loads of drills and are trying to push it to its theoretical capacity. 

The small drills don't work in areas of low ore concentration but to be honest you have to be quite unlucky to land somewhere with no ore.   I usually fit these setups to spaceplanes so it's not a big deal to use its wheels to roll a few hundred feet downhill and try again.  A rocket with legs that doesn't have fuel for another hop, ok that might be a problem.   In that case, one small converter, plus a single large drill bit.

For self refuelling vessels,  mining rate is not really a consideration , as you're facing a long wait for the launch window in any case.   You land, start mining, then quickly step into the second highest level of timewarp , where electricity consumption is less.    So long as the power doesn't run out overnight, and force you to restart the drills each morning,  it'll be done in the time it makes you to make a sandwich.  A bit of overheating just slows down the mining, but doesn't actually force you to restart the drills at sunrise.

[Laie]

On 11/15/2017 at 10:08 AM, TheFlyingKerman said:

In my experience the mini refinery would not overheat if used well below its capacity (say 2 drills and no engineer).

Wanted to post that I never ran into the problem the OP describes, but now I know why.

Seriously: if you want to run a proper refinery, use the big parts. The small parts are for building go-anywhere vessels, where you want to save mass.

IMO, it makes perfect sense to only bring one drill (or perhaps two, for symmetry) and let time warp sort out the details. That's how I could run the setup without ever running into trouble. On high enough warp, I didn't even need to have enough power. Large drills would shut down when out of juice, but the small one would keep running -- I could operate the whole rig on a single RTG without issues, and on max warp it didn't even take very long.

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

27 minutes ago, Laie said:

Wanted to post that I never ran into the problem the OP describes, but now I know why.

Seriously: if you want to run a proper refinery, use the big parts. The small parts are for building go-anywhere vessels, where you want to save mass.

IMO, it makes perfect sense to only bring one drill (or perhaps two, for symmetry) and let time warp sort out the details. That's how I could run the setup without ever running into trouble. On high enough warp, I didn't even need to have enough power. Large drills would shut down when out of juice, but the small one would keep running -- I could operate the whole rig on a single RTG without issues, and on max warp it didn't even take very long.

I actually thought he was talking about a small mining vessel. Meaning it was only meant to refuel itself. In any event, the small converter has a pretty bad conversion rate. It'll work, but I remember always running into issues. You had to keep focus on the ship, and keep restarting the process every time it shuts down. Bringing a good engineer and thermal controls along certainly helps.

After awhile, if I wanted a vessel that could drill and go, I just brought the larger equipment and dumped it when it was no longer needed.

For mining outposts though, I actually have one on Bop that uses small drills (had to squeeze them onto an all-in-one base). It works fine, but I have the large converter. I wouldn't have tried it with the little one.

Edited November 18, 2017 by Cpt Kerbalkrunch

[OHara]

On 11/15/2017 at 1:08 AM, TheFlyingKerman said:

In my experience the mini refinery would not overheat if used well below its capacity (say 2 drills and no engineer).

I had been avoiding the small converter, but just tried it now, and find it does not overheat as its documentation implies.  It stabilizes somewhat above optimum temperature with 2 drills running.  The converter stays cooler for me with a 5-star engineer than without one, even though it is producing 17 times the output with that engineer.  I shut down the radiators to see what would happen, and it continued to work up to 3000K core temperature at which point its thermal efficiency reaches zero.  I see no thermal shutdown in version 1.3.1.  

If our only problem with the converters were that we find some of the game-balance choices to be aggravating, we could change the rules to make the game we like.

Spoiler

@PART[ISRU]
{    // let things attach to the ISRU surface (not let ISRU attach to others' surfaces, as stock does)
    @attachRules = 1,0,1,1,0  }
@PART[MiniISRU] {
    @MODULE[ModuleResourceConverter],*    {
        // Change miniISRU to conserve mass from ore to output like the big ISRU.
        // MiniISRU in stock 1.2.1 consumes 10t ore per 1t output
        @INPUT_RESOURCE:HAS[#ResourceName[Ore]]        {
            @Ratio *= 0.1        }
        // Cut miniISRU throughput by a factor of 2,
        //  but leave electric consumption and heat generation at original values
        @INPUT_RESOURCE:HAS[#ResourceName[Ore]]        {
            @Ratio *= 0.5        }
        @OUTPUT_RESOURCE,*      {
            @Ratio *= 0.5      }    }
   @MODULE[ModuleCoreHeat] {
        %MaxCoolant = 100   }

Unfortunately, their behavior is complicated and mysteriously documented and has suffered many bugs, some of which are fixed, leaving a system that is very hard know how to use.   Now I simply include the mining equipment that I think is reasonable, and save-file edit the fuel tanks to full when I think mining should be complete.

[Red Wolf]

There is a bug with the heat transfer for the mini converter. I have a craft file to prove it. I'll try to describe it until i can upload the file. Create a symmetrical ship with a mini converter in between two empty fuel tanks. Add two Radiator Panel (large) on one tank and add two Radiator Panel (large) on the other (four total) Now add a single mini drill to ONE of the tanks. Now to save time add a couple full ore tanks a ton of batteries and solar panels and some legs so the hole thing does not fall over.

Now you should be able to cool the whole thing with only one panel (capacity wise at least), but you can't because of the separation. If you run the two panels on the to tank with the mini drill, these two panels hit over 75% and the converter goes to 3000K and 0%. Now turn off one panel on the drill tank and turn on one panel on the drill-less tank. You are still only running TWO radiators of the same size but this time the whole thing works just fine with the converter only hitting 1200K and around 90%. The same total cooling but totally different heat removal. By separating the one cooling panel from trying to cool two devices the system works. So as a work around for using the mini, it appears I HAVE to dedicate cooling to it. It can not be shared as the drill will rob all cooling forcing the converter to overheat.

Edited November 30, 2017 by Red Wolf
clarification.