ISRU Base tips?

[MAFman]

What are some ways I can make a mining/refinery base on the Mun? The refineries I come up with are way too big to actually land.

[Curveball Anders]

Moved to Gameplay Questions.

[miklkit]

I'm a lousy pilot so I built gas trucks.  After the plane lands they drive over to it and refuel it.

[MAFman]

Do you use the claw thing to refuel craft, since you can't use EVA construction for fuel lines?

[jimmymcgoochie]

If you’re going about it in an entirely stock (i.e. no mods) then you have a few options:

• The monolithic mega-miner: a huge, heavy lump of a machine that has drills, ore tanks and ISRU converters all in one place. Easiest to design since everything’s there, but hard to get where you want it due to the sheer size and mass. Very expensive craft and one failure will lose the entire thing, but only needs one (admittedly LARGE) rocket to get it there.
• The modular mining base: why send everything at once when you can break it down into bitesize pieces and send them all separately instead. Send the ISRU converters, drills, solar panels etc. separately and then stick them together on site. Assembling a mining base on the surface isn’t easy with just stock parts because the terrain is rarely smooth and flat, but you can usually find a reasonable area (or one of Minmus’ flats) and connect them up by using wheels to drive them into each other. Multiple vessels that all need some parts (command, power, control, rockets to land, wheels etc.) and multiple launches make it a more expensive option overall, but it’s a lot more flexible and lower risk as losing one module is only part of the total and a replacement is cheaper to build. Requires precision landing skills to land within close proximity of previously landed modules, but since you’ll need wheels to attach everything on the ground “close proximity” can be a few kilometres away. You can also expand it if you need e.g. more drills or more power generation.
• The featherweight fueller-upper: Make one small mining module with the bare minimum of equipment to operate the system. Cheap, easy to launch and land, but the small drills aren’t as efficient and the 1.25m ISRU converter is horribly wasteful (it has a 10% fuel yield from the same amount of ore compared to the 2.5m) so it’s more of a prototype/baby’s-first-mining-base option to dip your toes into off-world fuel production. Make it a rover and add a surface detector and it would make a good prospecting vessel or a mobile fuel station to fill up other small vessels to extend their operational life.
• The space-assembled super-base: much like the modular base, but you attach everything together on orbit before landing. Only really feasible for places with low gravity and no atmosphere since the assembled base will likely have centre of mass/thrust/drag imbalances that would make controlling it much harder on larger bodies, but docking in space is much easier than docking on the surface especially with 1.12’s rotating docking ports. It might be hard to judge how much fuel you need to land though.

[MAFman]

I think the option I'll go with is the modular ground base. That means I need one rover for mining, one lander for refining, and a rover to transport the fuel to my Starship replica.

[jimmymcgoochie]

I didn’t have time to add this part earlier…

If you’re willing to consider mods, there are a few that can make base building much easier:

• Simple Logistics, a simple and easy to use mod that allows resources to be shared between nearby (inside physics range) landed vessels even when they aren’t connected, but only when you’re looking at them- it doesn’t work in the background. Saves a lot of the hassle of connecting stuff up but you have to babysit it a lot.
• KIS/KAS (Kerbal Inventory/Attachment System), aka EVA construction before it was stock but with hoses. You can use KAS hoses and attachment points to connect vessels up so they become one craft, just like docking, but with a lot more flexibility. My experience doing this was a bit mixed though, even on the Minmus flats things had a nasty habit of bouncing into the air or just completely breaking apart when the vessel(s) loaded so if you choose to use these mods, save regularly!
• I think MKS (Modular Kolonisation System) has both a system to share resources across an entire planet/moon and flexible connector parts to hook different modules together, but it’s not a mod I’m familiar with so I can’t say for sure.

The Breaking Ground DLC’s robotics parts can be helpful to connect stuff up on uneven ground, but they’re also prone to drifting out of position and/or adding unwanted forces that can build up and shake the whole thing apart. I tried a modular base attached this way and eventually gave up after it kept shaking itself violently within ten seconds of loading it, plus having so many parts in physics range at once really hurt the frame rates.

A single monolithic miner has an advantage in that respect- a lot fewer parts needed since you only need to land one thing not several- but regardless of how you build your miner, do not use the miner to haul fuel to orbit! All that mining stuff is dead weight that’ll hurt the delta-V and reduce your payload (fuel for other vessels); instead, build dedicated fuel tankers so the mining base can keep on mining 24/7 (or 6/428 in Kerbin time).

[MAFman]

3 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

do not use the miner to haul fuel to orbit!

That's where I messed up...

[miklkit]

21 hours ago, MAFman said:

Do you use the claw thing to refuel craft, since you can't use EVA construction for fuel lines?

I have the DLC.  Dunno if it helps in this case, but.  The claw on the nose works and transfers fuel just fine.  The can't be seen in that screenie but there are fuel lines as well and they also work. Sometimes..........   More recently I have gone back to KIS/KAS and running fuel lines with that.  That rover is an old and much modified one.

[MAFman]

How did you land such a massive rover?

[miklkit]

Land it?  Like any other big rocket.  Those are the biggest things I've launched. 

A launcher.

This one is on its way to Ike.

A small one landing on the Mun.

and landed  Transfer fuel and decouple and it is ready to roll.

[Zacspace]

I'm a known advocate of huge rovers, but I have an alternative strategy:

It has 12 drills and two large converters, it's able to run 2 processes on each converter for a total of 4 and it's able to operate indefinitely with a max level engineer. I don't remember how many fuel cells, but it's something like 20. For cooling it has 4 medium thermal control systems and 2 of the curved radiator panels. I'm telling you all this because this dropship has pretty close to the ideal ratios for these parts given a max level engineer aboard.

The dropship was designed to make just sort trips, the idea being that whatever it's refueling will land nearby and the dropship will just get itself into position. (In practice it has a lot more range than it needs. no complaints though.)  Doing it this way means that every piece of your system can focus on doing what it's best at. The dropship makes fuel and fast as it can, and the big lander behind it lifts fuel as efficiently as it can.

Ore storage beyond just the one smallest tank is useless in an ISRU setup whenever the mining and processing are being done by the same vehicle. And they should always be (if you care about playing optimally), because mining and refining share so many systems in common that aren't typically required on any other kinds of vessel.

This sort of system overlap also means that rover wheels are a natural companion of ISRU equipment, since all these things require robust EC generation, which brings us back to rovers. They don't have to be huge though.

The small converter really isn't that bad if it's properly fed and cooled. I usually use it with 4 of the large drills, which I've found to be most consistent with a max level engineer. This rover takes a few days to re-fuel the plane that brought it to Duna

Of course I also have a colossal refueling rover, here's how I land it:

Basically two rockets on either side. There' s vector engines in the service bays to soften the landing after I tip it over with RCS or robotics. After that the rockets are staged away. The launcher that carried all this to Moho was just your standard KSP-class gigabooster which was refueled on Minmus using actually the dropship from my first screenshot.

EDIT: One final Tip: use docking ports to secure robotics parts that don't need to be in motion. If your part never needs to move again after it's deployed, consider designing it so that the robotic parts are staged away and it;s just docking ports holding it all together. Autostruts can cross docking port connections, but not robotics.

Edited September 17, 2022 by Zacspace
Typos and neat lifehack

[magnemoe]

I tend to use something like this, core with lab, crew space and command pod also an bay for various stuff like life support and stuff. 
Two towers who hold fuel, ore and reaction wheels. You can add room below the center tower for an small rover. 
You can also use 3 side side boosters instead of two. 

This is an outdated design, I stopped using landing legs, I use girders instead and I add retractable wheels to them, this is from an mod Kerbal_Planetary_Base_Systems but you could use landing wheels and an rear placed rocket engine for some ground travel capability. Its not nice to drive but you will hardly travel more than some hundred meters for contract stuff or to refuel landed ships.   
And yes its an pretty large ship but very versatile and handles well enough with enough reaction wheels the 3 booster version is very stable. 
Now I tend to use mechjeb to land it on the Mun as its more accurate than me but has landed them manual plenty of times. 
Part count is pretty high as this is an mobile utility base who can do all science and collect it for other ships,  all sort of contracts including recovering crafts, refueling other on ground or in orbit. An pure refinery will have 1/3 the parts. 

On Minmus I tend to go industrial, huge multi part bases as they are the fuel station for the stuff I send outward. And Minmus has the benefit that its very easy to land on.