Scanning and resource map overlay

[Aelipse]

I am confused! Again!

Today I concocted a mission to Laythe with a mining ship and took special care to scan its surface beforehand with the M700 Survey Scanner. What was my joy when the ore abundance at some places reached 70 %! I set a navigation point to one such location that in the resource map overlay didn't go blank under 70 % cut-off and made my merry way to that very place, almost killing three kerbals along the way. Alas, after landing and deployment of my drill (the large one) I was confronted with "nothing to mine" exclamation.

Contrast that with my Minmus mining rover, which happily mined ore where the scanner only found 20 % of ore. How and why?

[The Aziz]

M700 isn't very accurate. Typical low-res scanner. It shows big blurry areas to let you know that there is something - somewhere. You may want to also use Narrow Band scanner, which should show much better resolution and maybe even surface scanning module.

(having said that, I never actually used anything other than M700 so I'm just theorising)

Edited July 24, 2019 by The Aziz

[Blaarkies]

Use the https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Surface_Scanning_Module on the surface. Click the "Run Analysis" menu item on every binome to increase the  resolution of resource heat maps on the planet. The downside is that you have to send a scout lander out first.

The https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/M4435_Narrow-Band_Scanner can show you an accurate and real time measure of the ore concentration below your craft, but I believe there are altitude limitations on this part.

The 70 % cut-off number it keeps showing, is actually a measure of something completely different than the ore concentrations. It sets the cutoff of all ore heat map visibility, to only show the values above the 70th percentile of data it has available. So when a 70% cutoff is used, it will only show 30% of the values, those being the highest value spots on the planet (the concentration could still be like 5% or less if the planet has a low concentration everywhere)

Edited July 24, 2019 by Blaarkies

[Aelipse]

I see! That makes sense! Thank you.

[KerikBalm]

You can also mod the scanner to show you super accurate maps if you don't want to deal with all that

[Snark]

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

[bewing]

You need to understand that the Survey Scanner only shows which biomes have ore. So, it's best to first use a probe core and Kerbnet to look at all the biomes on the CB. Memorize (or take a screenshot, or look at the wiki, or whatever) where all the biomes are. Then do the survey scan. Look at the resulting map. Now, understand that what you are looking at is a biome map, with some of the biomes set as "bright" and some as "dark", and then pixellated on a large scale. Pick a biome near the equator that has ore (it's bright) and that you can land on, and go there to do your mining.