Making a mobile refinery

[MAFman]

How would I configure robotics to make a mining truck that could interface with any airplane waiting to be refueled? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to make a robotic arm.

[miklkit]

There are lots of ways to do that.  I used a klaw for a long time just mounted on the nose.  Now I use KIS/KAS.

[NewtSoup]

Off the top of my head:

design your ISRU ground truck with whatever you want on it.

put on the truck a servo to rotate in the ground plane.  Then on that put a piston that can go up and down.  Then on that put a piston that goes forward and back.  That way the end of the second piston can describe a cylinder  when moved through all it's possible positions.

On the end of the piston put a docking port jr.    

Make sure ALL your craft to be refuelled have a similar docking port jr that can be reached  by the one on your truck.

Why a docking port Jr?  because it allows fuel transfer and is small and light.  

It might even be possible to use an engineer to connect a fuel line from storage on the truck to a tank on the craft and save messing with robotics.

 

 

[Zhetaan]

17 hours ago, MAFman said:

How would I configure robotics to make a mining truck that could interface with any airplane waiting to be refueled? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to make a robotic arm.

16 hours ago, NewtSoup said:

It might even be possible to use an engineer to connect a fuel line from storage on the truck to a tank on the craft and save messing with robotics.

I believe that that will only work when the game considers it a single vessel, though, so you're not going to get away from needing to dock, in which case @NewtSoup has the general idea.

Ground docking is usually a pain, because even if you took two identical copies of the same rover with docking ports on their noses, for example, putting them together on anything but perfectly flat terrain can cause issues because the docking ports may not be angled to meet correctly.  There are some pre-robotics, stock solutions to the ground docking problem, up to and including making the refinery a landing pad and dropping the tanker onto it, but these tend to be cumbersome at best.

That being said, you should be aware that quite a few people have reported problems with combining docking ports and robotic parts, so be wary.  Anyway, there are some general tutorials out there for robotics parts, but I'm not entirely certain of how useful you will find them for your application.  Regardless, here are a couple of them:

Good luck!

[NewtSoup]

My personal solution to this is:

Given that the best source of fuel to Kerbin is Minmus Greater Flats I just build a mining base on Minmus  and a "Fuel shuttle" that is basically a large orange tank that can land on minmus and dock at the mining base.

My last version used robotics to rotate terrier engines such that it could land flat on wheels and then scoot along the flats to the base.  Then take of vertically. pitch up, rotate the terriers to flight mode and thrust away.  I don't have that save any more though or I'd demonstrate.

This time I have added a mod that gives me large Vernor engines to achieve the same thing via RCS controls.

[miklkit]

Since OP mentions spaceplanes here is my solution.  It is an early gas truck refueling a MK2 based spaceplane with a klaw.

[magnemoe]

As other say, robotics and an docking port or the claw. You can use the claw directly but this has some limits. Another option is Kerbal attachment system mod who come with fuel lines. 

One major warning does not dock two craft on landing legs or wheels during time warp or jump  away during mining. Then you come back the weight has changed and if you have an long arm connecting them them its an good chance thing will jump a lot, this is more a problem on Minmus and other low gravity worlds. 

[jimmymcgoochie]

If you’re willing to dip your toe into modding KSP, SimpleLogistics is a small yet useful tool that allows you to transfer resources between vessels when landed within a few hundred metres of each other, without having to attach them to each other. Drive up to the vessel needing fuel, activate SL’s interface and you can pull resources from the miner into the other vessel and then leave without the faff of docking or the risk of getting Kraken-ed to warp factor 7 when you reload the vessel.

It only works when vessels are loaded though, not in the background.

Edited October 12, 2022 by jimmymcgoochie