What's Missing?...I'm Going Senile... I Must Be...

[NeoMorph]

So I put a nice little heavy mining rig together and finally send it off to Duna after fuelling it up and adding satellites to scan for the Kethane and land when I find big deposits (use them as landing markers)...

After several mistakes with poor intercepts (I still don't have interplanetary nodes down pat yet) I get the heavy mining rig and four scanning satellites around Ike ready to begin my mining op. So before I do the mining rigs landing sequence I do a quick checkover of the ship.

Four huge orange tanks for the fuel... Check.

Four drills... Check

Quantum Fuel Transfer nodes... Check

Kethane Tank for the intermediate drilling material... err.... MISSING

Kethane Converter... err... MISSING... WTF????

Somewhere between Kerbal and the Duna SOI I seem to have lost four Kethane tanks with the converters on top. To be honest with you, I can't even remember if I put them on this build or not lol. I had been swapping things around you see to make a better mining rig. Better... rigggghhhhht. Arrrghhh.

Talk about annoying. So now I have a mining rig with almost no fuel left and no way to drill for more. Oh well... It will make do as an orbital fuel depot lol. Oh and to add insult to injury when I realised what had happen I think KSP crashed in fear heh.

[Spatzimaus]

The way I did it was build the mining rig around the primary Kethane tank itself. Effectively it's just a big K-tank with wheels, so it's pretty much impossible to forget that bit. And the converter is placed between that tank and the control node, so I can't forget that part either. The part I kept forgetting was the fuel storage tank, but honestly that part's not as important since a full tank of Kethane goes a long way towards refueling a landed vessel.

Now, personally I think the Quantum Fuel Transfer is just too cheap. Using actual docking ports is a bit too difficult, unless you throw in the KAS mod (which'll also make fueling a lot easier in the next major version, when fuel ports are added). Or, just use the robotic arm mods; a vessel grabbed by one of those arms is treated as docked, and you can transfer anything at that point. While this might not seem much different from the quantum lines when you're on the ground, it makes transfering in orbit non-trivial.

[NeoMorph]

Nah... the Quantum Fuel Transfer acts as the refuelling line when vessels are landed. You have to get the Kerbal to drag a virtual refuelling pipe from one vehicle to the next anyway. Refuelling in orbit is done by docking so basically it is sticking to current practices.