Pol Ore Fractions

[mystifeid]

After scanning Pol with a resource survey scanner it revealed a surface average of 1.6% yet even with the cutoff at 0%, no color was visible. I was a little shaken since I could not remember ever seeing no color whatsoever.

Next a narrow band scanner arrived in orbit and it revealed the highlands had an average of around 3.78%.

Then my mining base arrived and landed in the Highlands. Use of a surface scanning module revealed an ore fraction of 4.78% at my landing site.

Switching back to the narrow band scanner now revealed the Highlands to have concentrations as high as 4.95%.

And now, finally, clicking on ore in the Resources app shows color in all the Highlands (with 0% cutoff) - surface average still 1.6%.

You may think that originally Pol did not have focus and that is why there was no color but I only ever use the resources app to play with the cutoff and to do this, Pol must have had focus.

[bewing]

Hmmmmm. The visible colors are shown based on biome size. So if the biomes that had ore were tiny, I'd expect that you wouldn't see any color. But If you see color now, that's not good. I'll try looking into it, but ISRU is late career stuff, so I'm not sure I'll be able to confirm what you are seeing.

[mystifeid]

37 minutes ago, bewing said:

I'll try looking into it, but ISRU is late career stuff, so I'm not sure I'll be able to confirm what you are seeing.

That's what I thought. My contract counter is sitting on 748, so, steps to reproduce....

[Geschosskopf]

11 hours ago, mystifeid said:

After scanning Pol with a resource survey scanner it revealed a surface average of 1.6% yet even with the cutoff at 0%, no color was visible. I was a little shaken since I could not remember ever seeing no color whatsoever.

Next a narrow band scanner arrived in orbit and it revealed the highlands had an average of around 3.78%.

Then my mining base arrived and landed in the Highlands. Use of a surface scanning module revealed an ore fraction of 4.78% at my landing site.

Switching back to the narrow band scanner now revealed the Highlands to have concentrations as high as 4.95%.

And now, finally, clicking on ore in the Resources app shows color in all the Highlands (with 0% cutoff) - surface average still 1.6%.

You may think that originally Pol did not have focus and that is why there was no color but I only ever use the resources app to play with the cutoff and to do this, Pol must have had focus.

The orbital scanner is deliberately vague and misleading, besides rather lacking in resolution and accuracy.  It was made this way to force you to spend a lot of time and effort "ground-truthing" with the surface scanner.  It works like this:  As @bewing says, Ore concentration varies by biome.  But the Orbital Scanner doesn't show biome boundaries and in fact pays them no attention.  It instead takes a large region of the planet's surface, usually containing multiple biomes, and averages the overall ore concentration based on the proportional surface areas of the biomes in that region to determine the base color.  Then it displays that area of color at like the "center of mass" of the overall Ore distribution within the region.  As a result, small biomes with higher concentrations get averaged down to nothing if surrounded by large areas with no or little ore.  And if you see isolated dots of color on the resource map, you can be 100% certain (unless they're on an island in an ocean) that those dots are not where the best ore is.  In fact, it's usually not even the best place to start looking for it.  It's therefore not surprising at all to read of your experience above.  It's fairly typical, although a worse than average.  It just goes to show the complete uselessness of the Orbital Scanner and why it's so much better to use SCANsat instead.

If you stay stock, however, you can help yourself by knowing something about Ore distributions.  The system is set up so that biomes with highest elevations have the most ore, those with the lowest above-sea level elevations have the next most, and the biomes in between usually have little or nothing.  Within a given biome, the local amount of Ore will also vary from the biome's average with slight elevation changes within the biome.  Driving around with a surface scanner will quickly show if Ore gets better or worse going uphill or downhill, so then you just look around for the highest or lowest acceptably flat spots within the biome.  So, you can usually just remember which biomes have best ore on the flattest ground closest to the equator and just send surface scanners there, skipping the useless orbital scanner entirely.

And FWIW, IMHO Vall is a better place to get fuel than Pol.  Pol is way far away so the trips down to Laythe take forever (several weeks), especially due to having to wait a fair portion of an orbit to do the plane change, and the transfer windows are infrequent as well.  And while landing and launching from Pol doesn't need much dV, the long trip and the capture burns at each end do.  Plus, Pol doesn't have much Ore.  But the worst thing about Pol is that its collider is messed up so it's not uncommon to hit the "ground" and die during your descent while still 2-3km above the actual surface.  Vall, OTOH, is conveniently located between Laythe and Tylo for short, economical trips with very frequent windows and no plane changes, even if landing and launching there are more expensive.  And Vall's Lowlands are nice and flat, equatorially located, and have more Ore than Pol does.

 

[mystifeid]

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Then it displays that area of color at like the "center of mass" of the overall Ore distribution within the region.  As a result, small biomes with higher concentrations get averaged down to nothing if surrounded by large areas with no or little ore.

Doesn't explain why Pol went from having absolutely no color to now being half covered in pink areas.

 

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

The system is set up so that biomes with highest elevations have the most ore, those with the lowest above-sea level elevations have the next most, and the biomes in between usually have little or nothing.

This does not mesh well with my experience.

And according to the wiki, ore distribution is set up like this:

Quote

The Abundance Algorithm

The exact values of your settings affect ore concentrations strongly, and this can have big effects on an individual game. So unlike most other aspects of the game, a slightly deeper grasp of the algorithm details is important here.

The abundance of ore in a biome is determined by two "coin flips" -- ie. random number draws. The first is based on your "resource abundance" slider. Each biome on every celestial body has a "1 minus this percentage" chance of having no ore at all. If that first chance passes, then there is a second coin flip to determine the average ore concentration in the biome. This second chance is based on your game difficulty level. It is important to understand that this abundance can easily also end up "less than zero" -- so in a hard game, with a 50% resource abundance setting, you may still only end up with ore in 25% of the biomes on all the celestial bodies together.

Local random variations are also applied to the ore concentrations within a biome.

 

 

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

skipping the useless orbital scanner entirely.

Besides always having found their scans to have been of some value in the past, my orbital scanners are also strong relay sats which, working in tandem with a station, help to provide adequate comm coverage for the surface of a planet/moon.

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

And FWIW, IMHO Vall is a better place to get fuel than Pol.  Pol is way far away so the trips down to Laythe take forever (several weeks), especially due to having to wait a fair portion of an orbit to do the plane change, and the transfer windows are infrequent as well.  And while landing and launching from Pol doesn't need much dV, the long trip and the capture burns at each end do.  Plus, Pol doesn't have much Ore.  But the worst thing about Pol is that its collider is messed up so it's not uncommon to hit the "ground" and die during your descent while still 2-3km above the actual surface.  Vall, OTOH, is conveniently located between Laythe and Tylo for short, economical trips with very frequent windows and no plane changes, even if landing and launching there are more expensive.  And Vall's Lowlands are nice and flat, equatorially located, and have more Ore than Pol does.

Vall always has more ore than Pol??

Anyway, in my career games, everywhere gets a station, a mining base, a base lab, a fuel/ore hauler, a runabout, a rover, a scanner etc. etc.

Both Pol and Bop are used to supply Tylo station and Vall is used to help supply Lathe station. I do use KAC so the length or timing of trips is irrelevant. Usually I have between 10 to 20 ships queued in KAC.

I think that Pol was "fixed" some time ago because it has been several years now since I last had any problem landing on Pol.

Lastly, in the days when, in the process of landing, I would pass by my mining base - seemingly suspended in space - I used to hate Pol.

But I really like Pol now.

If you ever decide to rover your way around a planet or moon, I can tell you that, surprisingly, Pol is the most enjoyable and scenic body in the stock system. (Like Minmus it takes about 4 hours)

Edited June 20, 2019 by mystifeid

[bewing]

2 hours ago, mystifeid said:

according to the wiki, ore distribution is set up like this:

What the wiki describes is the way the average ore concentration for the biome is calculated. Geschosskopf is probably on the right track when it comes to variations within a particular biome -- altitude probably does make a difference.

[Geschosskopf]

3 hours ago, mystifeid said:

Doesn't explain why Pol went from having absolutely no color to now being half covered in pink areas.

Ah, sorry, I thought you knew that part.  The heat map updates to reflects your CURRENT knowledge.  When you do the initial orbital scan, you have only a very vague and highly inaccurate picture of the real ore distribution and per-biome values.  This is because the Orbital Scanner's resolution is poor both in terms of geographic area AND in estimating the Ore that's in each biome of that area.  The per-biome estimates can be off by about +/- 10% and, given that very few places in the solar system have even 14% Ore, that's enough error to make the Orbital Scanner essentially useless.  But as you later go in with Surface Scanners and ultimately the NBS, you learn hard, exact data on what's where.  You learn not only the average Ore within the different biomes you look at, but also the specific (and almost always somewhat different due to local elevation) Ore values at the specific points within biomes where you drive a Surface Scanner or point the NBS cursor.

So, as you Surface Scan or NBS, you learn the true average Ore concentration of various biomes.  And the heat map algorithm already  knows where those biomes are so it can do its averaging.  But now it has true average biome values to work with instead of the usually inaccurate estimated biome values from the original Orbital Scanner map.  Thus, the heat map's averaging algorithm now uses the known values of the biomes you've actually ground-truthed along with the original (and usually highly inaccurate) estimates for biomes you haven't yet ground-truthed.  If the original estimates for the biomes you have ground-truthed were on the low side, and those biomes exist in multiple places (or cover large areas) of the the planet, then suddenly the heat map will show dots where previously there was nothing.

This is all totally normal behavior.  That's how @RoverDude designed the system, and he spent a lot of time explaining it back when Ore 1st became a thing.  I suggest you go dig up his posts from years ago.  I have not heard, nor seen evidence, of any significant changes to the system since then.

 

3 hours ago, mystifeid said:

(RE:  I said the Orbital Scanner is highly inaccurate)  This does not mesh well with my experience.

And just where have you used it prior to Pol?   Minmus maybe?  That's about the only place where the Ore averaging and the actual biome maps more or less correspond, due to the large number of large flats and them having probably the highest Ore concentrations in the whole solar system due to being exactly at sea level.

The ONLY useful purpose the Orbital Scanner serves is to enable the resources heat map.  You can't get that with the Surface Scanner or the NBS AFAIK.  OK, that was maybe a bit harsh.  IF you've played the game for many years since Ore became a thing, and have scanned every planet countless times so knew which biomes have the best Ore available in the flattest, most equatorial locations on every planet, but then took a few months off and forgot some of the exact details, doing an Orbital Scan can refresh your memory.  So there's that.  But otherwise, it's only purpose is to enable the heat map.  You only learn actionable intel from the Ground Scanner and/or the NBS (but usually it takes both), except at Minmus.  And if you already know the best biomes and where they are, you don't need the heat map.

 

3 hours ago, mystifeid said:

And according to the wiki, ore distribution is set up like this:

Which is not totally correct.  Yes, every biome has a chance of having zero Ore, but it's not an equal chance across all biomes.  The higher and lower elevations above sea level have a greater chance of having some Ore than the middle altitudes.  This was deliberately built into the system to keep the whole Ore thing from being OP, to keep high Ore concentrations off the equator where folks are most likely to want to set up shop.  You have to remember that prior to Ore being a stock thing, the only resources you could exploit were from mods.  Kethane alone for years, which had its own brutal realities, and then RoverDude's Karbonite, which was considerably easier.  If you didn't use either, and most folks didn't, you either had to take all your fuel with you from the start or send out refueling tankers from Kerbin.  There was, in fact, strong community resistance to having resources at all, due the perception that made things too easy.

So, which Squad finally decided to make ISRU stock, they hired RoverDude to design the system.  Basically, he took the non-depletable and per-biome aspects of his own Karbonite mod and combined it with a very opaque and effort-intensive method of finding it.  And also made it so that you couldn't ever find huge amounts of it in useful places (as in flat and equatorial) except at Minmus, where it does essentially zero good anyway.

 

3 hours ago, mystifeid said:

Vall always has more ore than Pol??

Yup.  4-6% in the Lowlands on average.  Bigger planets usually have higher Ore values, again excepting useless Minmus.

 

3 hours ago, mystifeid said:

Anyway, in my career games, everywhere gets a station, a mining base, a base lab, a fuel/ore hauler, a runabout, a rover, a scanner etc. etc.

Well, if that makes you happy, knock yourself out.  But you must have way more money than you can spend if you do all that.

 

39 minutes ago, bewing said:

What the wiki describes is the way the average ore concentration for the biome is calculated. Geschosskopf is probably on the right track when it comes to variations within a particular biome -- altitude probably does make a difference.

It's easy enough to check.  Put a Surface Scanner on a rover and drive it west from KSC to get up on the plateau.  Apart from a few anomalous dots of Tundra and Poles scattered about, this is all 1 big biome of rolling hills.  Open the Surface Scanner's PAW and watch the Ore value of the spot your at change as you go up and down hills.

[mystifeid]

4 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Well, if that makes you happy, knock yourself out.  But you must have way more money than you can spend if you do all that.

Really? I call it hard work and dedication.

4 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Bigger planets usually have higher Ore values

So Eve should have the motherlode then? As far as surface averages go Pol's 1.6% is actually quite high compared to most other places. When it comes to the ore concentrations measured with a surface scanner, there is not much difference between the biomes I am mining in. Except for Eve. And Vall (Lowlands). Both of which have considerably lower ore concentrations than Pol.

4 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

And just where have you used it prior to Pol?

So far in this career - Moho, Eve, Gilly, Mun, Minmus, Ike, Duna, Dres, Pol, Bop, Tylo, Vall and Laythe.

Eeloo always gets to wait.

 

4 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

It's easy enough to check.  Put a Surface Scanner on a rover and drive it west from KSC to get up on the plateau.  Apart from a few anomalous dots of Tundra and Poles scattered about, this is all 1 big biome of rolling hills.  Open the Surface Scanner's PAW and watch the Ore value of the spot your at change as you go up and down hills.

I must be misunderstanding this - you're saying that all I have to do is drive uphill to find higher ore concentrations? Unfortunately in this career, Kerbin's grasslands has 0% ore so I cannot do as you suggest but I do have mobile mining bases with surface scanners on Moho, Eve, Gilly, Mun, Minmus, Ike, Duna, Dres, Pol and Vall (so far) and I can tell you my findings as I drove from a lower elevation to a higher one.

4 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

The higher and lower elevations above sea level have a greater chance of having some Ore than the middle altitudes.  This was deliberately built into the system to keep the whole Ore thing from being OP, to keep high Ore concentrations off the equator where folks are most likely to want to set up shop

It's hard to talk about chances when I know nothing about the algorithms involved but I can say that without exception, all ten mining bases are in the highest perceived ore concentrations, smack bang on their respective equators. (The only [future] exception looks like it will be Tylo.) Some are at low altitudes, some are at middle altitudes and some are high.

Btw - narrow band scanners don't seem to work (for me) unless I first scan with a resource survey scanner.

Edited June 21, 2019 by mystifeid

[Geschosskopf]

6 hours ago, mystifeid said:

So Eve should have the motherlode then?

Well, there is no "motherlode", it's just that the bigger the body, the more Ore it typically has on average.  The %s of the usable (as in non-pole, non-mountain) biomes won't be much higher than elsewhere, but they do trend that way.

 

6 hours ago, mystifeid said:

As far as surface averages go Pol's 1.6% is actually quite high compared to most other places. When it comes to the ore concentrations measured with a surface scanner, there is not much difference between the biomes I am mining in. Except for Eve. And Vall (Lowlands). Both of which have considerably lower ore concentrations than Pol.

Well, sounds like you got some strange rolls :).  Either that or you use different settings in the options or mods.

 

6 hours ago, mystifeid said:

I must be misunderstanding this - you're saying that all I have to do is drive uphill to find higher ore concentrations?

Or downhill.  It depends on the biome's proximity to sea level on that planet.  If the biome has relatively low elevation, then going downhill will usually find slightly higher concentrations than overall biome average.

With the Surface Scanner, once you do the "Run Analysis" thing, you several bits of data:  your lat/lon, the name of the biome, the biome's overall average Ore, and the specific amount of Ore directly under the rover, which will be slightly different from the biome's overall average depending on that location's altitude relative to the biome's average altitude.  Having done this, if you leave the Surface Scanner PAW open and drive up or down a hill, you'll see the biome's average stays the same but the amount of Ore directly under the rover will change.  Unless the slope you're on is rather steep, you'll have to go several hundred meters to see any change, and then only like 0.1%.  But that's enough to tell you if going up or down is better.  So then you zoom the view way out and look around for the highest or lowest places in the vicinity with reasonably flat ground and go to them, still keeping an eye on the PAW.  Periodically, you may have to "Run Analysis" again.  But by doing this, you can often find places with up to like 0.5% more than the overall biome average.

It's easier and also more effective to do this with the NBS on the same rover.  This is because there's a random scatter of local "hotspots" where the Ore is maybe 2-3% better than the overall biome average.  These hotspots don't follow the general trend of elevation--they can be anywhere in the biome.  With the NBS resource overlay on, you can see these on the map.  So you can drive straight to them and the Surface Scanner's PAW will tell you when you've gotten to them.  And again, the elevation across the hotspot will vary the concentration +/- a few tenths of a percent.  Without the NBS, you will only stumble into such hotspots by sheer chance.

Note that you can use the Surface Scanner and the NBS like this up to an altitude of about 1000m AGL, although you have to land to do the "Run Analysis" periodically.  If you get too high, or if you go far enough to have to "Run Analysis" again, you'll lose the Surface Scanner's reading of the exact amount of Ore under your vehicle.

Anyway, the whole Ore scanning system was intentionally designed to force players to use rovers.  The Survey/Orbital Scanner thing tells you little of value so you have to put tires on the ground with the Surface Scanner.  This is enough to get you started.  Eventually, the NBS will show you the hotspots, for when you really want the best you can get on a given planet.  The whole idea was to make setting up a fuel system require a lot of time and effort to reap the reward of ISRU.

 

6 hours ago, mystifeid said:

Btw - narrow band scanners don't seem to work (for me) unless I first scan with a resource survey scanner.

Yup, that's the main reason for doing it.  Also, maybe the Surface Scanner's "Run Analysis" won't work without it, either.  

[mystifeid]

27 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

Also, maybe the Surface Scanner's "Run Analysis" won't work without it, either

Nope, it works.

So, of the ten mining bases (on ten different planets/moons) tested driving uphill, the results were inconclusive. Some went up and some (most) went down and this appeared to have no correlation to the starting altitude.

I have no mods that would affect ore but resource abundance is on 50% in the settings.

Anyway - as interesting as this all is, it has strayed from the original topic. Let me recap.

I noticed a behavior that I have never seen before - ie zero color from a survey scan -  and inferred the possibility of a bug.

You have provided a reasonable explanation of why this might be happening by way of design.

Since I don't recall anyone else saying that they have seen this behavior before, I can't discount the possibility that it is only my game that is snafu.

Which is correct?

I must admit that initially I was quite excited and my reaction went something like this:

"Omg, no color? Warp until the daylight side is dark. Fmd - there's still no color!"

"What if there turns out to be zero ore in every biome?"

"Is this a thing now? I get someplace and there's no ore?"

"That could make things really tough."

"Wow - that'd be great!!"