Save my mining station!

[xlm]

So I spent hours designing my first mining station, tested it out on kerbin for overheat, spent over 200k funding to send it to minmus, and then realized I didn't leave enough room for my rover to claw on, so I jumped my rover on it:

Any suggestions on how I might still salvage it? Or do I have to jump my refuel rover since now on? Also, what would a reasonable design look like?

[Dman979]

Ahh! That's not following OSHA guidelines!

 

I'd suggest sending either a ramp to drive on, or lifting one of the drills.

Don't forget to wear your hardhat!

[xlm]

5 minutes ago, Dman979 said:

I'd suggest sending either a ramp to drive on, or lifting one of the drills.

Sadly, I've tried lifting one of the drills, and it is still too tight. I'll think about the ramp idea.

Also, how do I design one that does not have this problem? With the landing legs and drills it seems pretty hard to leave some space for docking.

[Dman979]

Just now, xlm said:

Sadly, I've tried lifting one of the drills, and it is still too tight. I'll think about the ramp idea.

Also, how do I design one that does not have this problem? With the landing legs and drills it seems pretty hard to leave some space for docking.

Make it shorter and wider.

If you flipped the orange tank 90^o horizontally, and stuck the drills on the end, you would have room for a docking port in the middle.

At least, that's what I'd do. The wonderful thing about KSP is the possibilities are endless! I mean, you solved it by jumping a rover, so you seem pretty clever!

[foamyesque]

Send up a spar with a claw on one end and a docking zone at the other, stick it onto the main miner at an angle, so that one end is where the rover is, and the other on the ground.

 

Then dock everything to that spar instead.

[Foxster]

The landing legs aren't really doing anything, especially in Minmus' weak gravity. So can't you retract them and claw onto an ore tank?

Also - if you are converting the ore to fuel on the spot then there's not much point in multiple drills and ore tanks. Just run one drill into a small ore tank and process it into fuel in one go, using timewarp to speed things up. That will save a lot of mass on your craft. 

Edited January 19, 2018 by Foxster

[bewing]

For yours, I agree with foxster: turn off the drills and retract the legs. I think you will be able to drive right up and attach to an ore tank.

For the future:

1) Klaws attach best to flat surfaces.

2) To attach a rover to your base, the part you attach to needs to be on the surface.

Therefore, you need to be landed on a set of big flat vertical surfaces.

So, don't use landing legs -- use wing parts instead.

I like to do it like this:

 

Edited January 19, 2018 by bewing

[Spricigo]

Every time I see those klaw contraptions I want to say thanks again to @DMagic for the EVA Resource Transfer mod.

 

[DMagic]

9 minutes ago, Spricigo said:

Every time I see those klaw contraptions I want to say thanks again to @DMagic for the EVA Resource Transfer mod.

I was baffled as to why there was nothing similar in stock when I first ran into this problem in ~0.19, and I'm still baffled as to why they haven't come up with something since then. Docking on the surface is such a known hassle, and the claw has historically been so prone to bugs that it seems like a no-brainer. And this mod took all of about 12 hours to develop (most of which time was spent figuring out the vagaries of how struts and fuel connectors work, which is something Squad developers presumably already know), so I don't think it's an issue of limited development resources.