Just curious as to why mining bases are built?

[dommcq]

Hi.

Not being disrespectful or wishing to cause controversy, but....

Why are mining bases for Kethane necessary?

I have seen many designs for moons/planets that have cool looking bases but surely they have no function.

A simple lander/miner that can mine, convert takeoff and refuel a station is all that is needed without the fuss of a Moon / Planet base that requires docking/building/KAS etc.

Am I missing something?

[astropapi1]

Am I missing something?

The coolness factor.

[Scotius]

Something to do? Something that we are not doing in real life, and won't be doing anytime soon? A reason to return to a planet or moon you've been before? A challenge? An occassion to role-play? To add more depth to your game?

Pick one. Or pick them all

[SoldierHair]

Am I missing something?

Yes, the fact that the game is a sandbox and everybody can do whatever they want in their saves.

[Wayfare]

The man has a point though when you look at the economics of it. In that view, the point of having (semi)permanent installations like bases or space stations is to save fuel by not moving around any more equipment than you need. As I understand Kethane, it requires you to mine raw material and refine that into fuel. That requires a refinery. If you integrate the mining equipment, refinery, and transportation all into one ship, you're always ferrying around stuff that could have stayed at the surface. By breaking it up into separate parts (for example: mining rover, refinery base, tanker shuttle) you only need to lift the refined fuel. All the mining and refinery stuff stays dirtside.

Of course it takes more fuel to initially move three separate units into position rather than a single integrated one, but there's a break-even point after which the split set-up becomes more efficient.

Another thing to consider is the hassle of it: the amount of hours you as a player are willing to put in, as well as the trouble of moving all that gear someplace else once all nearby sources of raw material have been exhausted.

Fuel economy is currently the only real limiting factor. Things will get more pronounced when money is introduced to KSP.

[Majiir]

What I want to know: Why do some bases and landers have more than two drills?

[Sirrobert]

For the same reason we build space stations and normal bases. Because we can

What I want to know: Why do some bases and landers have more than two drills?

More drills means faster drilling.

[Botch]

What I want to know: Why do some bases and landers have more than two drills?

Symmetry, 3-way for example

[Galileo Kerbonaut]

Something to do? Something that we are not doing in real life, and won't be doing anytime soon? A reason to return to a planet or moon you've been before? A challenge? An occassion to role-play? To add more depth to your game?

Pick one. Or pick them all

I pick them all... this pretty much covers it for me.

[Donziboy2]

What I want to know: Why do some bases and landers have more than two drills?

They could not find the time warp button?

[Libra00]

There are pretty much 2 reasons I set up a mining base:

1) Refueling rovers for long-term-ish missions

2) Orbital refueling stations for interplanetary transfers

In the case of #1, I put drills and tanks on one machine and just leave it where it sits. I've only done a couple of these and not for terribly long-term missions, so maybe for a long term rover mission you'd want it to be mobile. Kethane generators are way better than fragile solar panels for long-haul roving/flying, though I tend to do a bit of both.

In the case of #2, it seems to me to make the most sense to have drills and kethane tanks on a heavy duty lander that can go where the green stuff is and the orbital station is both refinery and storage. I tend to offload kethane and keep it in that state until I have a specific need, rather than trying to keep tanks full of mono/LFO hanging around. I sadly don't have any pictures anymore, but I used to have a fuel depot in orbit of Minmus using the spherical tanks (which hold something like 40-50k kethane each). I used kethane generators to power the stacks of refiners so an interplanetary ship fueling up for a transit wouldn't have to sit around forever waiting on the refining process and potentially miss its window.

I'm currently working on a design using Hooligan Labs' airship parts (on .21) and KAS that can cruise around at high speed (using firespitter's electric props I can get up to ~200m/s on Kerbin) going where the kethane is. Once it finds a patch it uses KAS winches to anchor and lower drill pods. Only part I haven't worked out yet is how to land something on a moving airship to take the kethane back to orbit. I'm certainly not going to attempt mid-air fueling, and even more certainly not in the kind of volume I'd want to make it worth the effort.

Edited December 14, 2013 by Libra00

[Superfluous J]

What I want to know: Why do some bases and landers have more than two drills?

Why 2 and why not 1 for that matter? I use as many drills as will drill at a decent pace.

They could not find the time warp button?

I try to not warp excessively. I launched landers to Duna and Jool that haven't gotten there in over a month of playing. If I'm not going to time warp for those, I'm sure as heck not going to do it to mine Kethane faster.

[Scotius]

The man has a point though when you look at the economics of it. In that view, the point of having (semi)permanent installations like bases or space stations is to save fuel by not moving around any more equipment than you need. As I understand Kethane, it requires you to mine raw material and refine that into fuel. That requires a refinery. If you integrate the mining equipment, refinery, and transportation all into one ship, you're always ferrying around stuff that could have stayed at the surface. By breaking it up into separate parts (for example: mining rover, refinery base, tanker shuttle) you only need to lift the refined fuel. All the mining and refinery stuff stays dirtside.

Of course it takes more fuel to initially move three separate units into position rather than a single integrated one, but there's a break-even point after which the split set-up becomes more efficient.

Another thing to consider is the hassle of it: the amount of hours you as a player are willing to put in, as well as the trouble of moving all that gear someplace else once all nearby sources of raw material have been exhausted.

Fuel economy is currently the only real limiting factor. Things will get more pronounced when money is introduced to KSP.

Kethane deposits tend to exhaust quickly for me. And yes, i do use big, huge kethane miners\refineries\haulers. My SOP is to land my enormous gas-sucker on biggest equatorial deposit i can find, deploy drills and solar panels and start filling kethane tank. When i have enough i'm landing fuel hauler next to miner, connect KAS pipes and start converting gas into fuel, mono or xenon until hauler's tanks are full. Then hauler takes off and either docks to refuelling depot in orbit, or parks there on its own waiting for a ship in need of a quick drink Rinse and repeat until deposit is empty, then move miner to another gas field. I've never tried to build semi-permanent base or rover-miner.

[Spatzimaus]

The main reason to make mining bases or mining rovers isn't for Kethane. It's for Blutonium. These sorts of designs aren't optimal for the current system, but in the long term they WILL be how you do these things, so it's useful practice to do them now.

You see, we'll eventually get a full resource system. The developers announced it a long time ago, and I'm sure their concept has changed a bit since then, but the core of it is a system with six to twelve raw resources, which then get converted into the various fuel types through a 2-for-1 refining process. While Kethane is good practice for dealing with a resource system, this is the part where it fails. Kethane has one resource that combines to four fuel types, so there's no downside to just making a single heavy lander with onboard refinery to make all fuels as needed, especially if that lander can then act as a pseudo-station in orbit.

But in the upcoming official system, that just won't work because you won't be able to extract all of the necessary ingredients for rocket fuel at a single location, and you won't be able to refill all fuel types even from a single pair of resources. That means one of three things:

1> You use landers with raw resource tanks to ferry the ingredients to an easily accessible space station, where the refining can take place mixing and matching whatever ingredients are found on that planet

2> You use rovers with tanks to carry individual ingredients to a centrally located base whose output is then ferried up to an orbital station

or

3> You make a gigantic Sandcrawler-style roving refinery that drives from one resource field to the next to extract all of the necessary ingredients by itself, then refine them as necessary, and which can then drive itself over to any landed vessels and refuel them on the ground.

Option 1 is probably the easiest, but it is the least efficient on anything other than the lowest-gravity moons. Personally, I like option 3, but it's the least practical. So option 2, with bases and such, will be pretty popular.

[Sof]

Taking mining equipment on every journey is inefficient.

It would be sensible to build a remote controlled mining base on planets or moons and then transfer the fuel over to the manned return missions.

Overall less fuel and therefore smaller launch vehicles=more money

[sgt_flyer]

well, in real life (for example, the proposed systems to convert CO2 to methane on Mars) would require some time operating in automatic mode to make enough fuel. if they use something akin to it for the game, if a base has the mining / collecting equipment on it, it could gather the resources alone in automatic mode, when you are doing something else (even far away - they just put the collection system 'on rails'. - ex, if you integrate automatic mining rovers to your base design, they could go mine more or less far away, but the farther away they are, the longer it will take to fill up the mining base tanks.

[Hiromoto]

I've found it easier to build probe landers and keep my refueling / orbital constrution station in orbit.

[Jon Tash]

Hi.

Not being disrespectful or wishing to cause controversy, but....

Why are mining bases for Kethane necessary?

I have seen many designs for moons/planets that have cool looking bases but surely they have no function.

A simple lander/miner that can mine, convert takeoff and refuel a station is all that is needed without the fuss of a Moon / Planet base that requires docking/building/KAS etc.

Am I missing something?

Mining bases for Kethane are necessary for me personally because I use the Kethane mod with the Extraplanetary Launchpads and Orbital Constructions, with these mods, Kethane became my main way of building ships in other places other than Kerbin.

For instance, I have been building an orbital assembly station(OAS) in orbit around Eeloo. I mine Kethane on Eeloo and I launch it to orbit. The OAS processes the Kethane to make whatever kind of fuel I want (only stock fuel like Liquid Fuel, Oxidizer, Monopropellant and Xenon Gaz for the moment). But I can make rocket parts out of Kethane too.

With that I can build whatever ships and what not in orbit around Eeloo directly without going trough the hassle of launching from Kerbin and go to Eeloo.

Right now I became totally independent from Kerbin.

[magnemoe]

Kethane deposits tend to exhaust quickly for me. And yes, i do use big, huge kethane miners\refineries\haulers. My SOP is to land my enormous gas-sucker on biggest equatorial deposit i can find, deploy drills and solar panels and start filling kethane tank. When i have enough i'm landing fuel hauler next to miner, connect KAS pipes and start converting gas into fuel, mono or xenon until hauler's tanks are full. Then hauler takes off and either docks to refuelling depot in orbit, or parks there on its own waiting for a ship in need of a quick drink Rinse and repeat until deposit is empty, then move miner to another gas field. I've never tried to build semi-permanent base or rover-miner.

Mine to, typically 2-4 orange tanks with fuel, yes I convert to fuel while drilling, keep some kethane as it can be used for both fuel and monoprop. Nuclear powered with some chemical for liftoff.

Now if you use extraterrestrial launchpads you will need an major base, the smelter is huge, you will also need crew quarters if you build manned ship.

However then you can make your own copy of the space center on Pol something who can be very useful

[Commander Zoom]

Some things are best left at the bottom of a gravity well.

Some things are better off near the top of one.

The wise one knows which is which, and plans accordingly.

[Panzerbeard]

Yes, the fact that the game is a sandbox and everybody can do whatever they want in their saves.

Calm down there, the guy never said he was against the idea of mining bases, he was just asking why we do it.

Personally, I build bases because I can. That, really, is the entire point of this game, right? There is no real goal or ending, nothing to be gained by, say, visiting Duna or Eeloo, no point in setting up a surfing club on Laythe or a Starbucks on the Mun. Even in career mode, you max out on science before you've done everything there is to do, once you're past that point, its up to you to make your own fun and choose your own goals. For many people, that includes building bases, for the sole reason of "why the hell not"

We choose to exploit the natural resources and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard.

[Danish_Savage]

One makes bases because one finds it either fun or challenging, or maybe both.

Also because of bragging rights

[SkyHook]

Other than RP/ Bragging rights, they absolutely pointless

[Jasmir]

A simple lander/miner that can mine, convert takeoff and refuel a station is all that is needed without the fuss of a Moon / Planet base that requires docking/building/KAS etc.

Am I missing something?

It's simply a matter of "how to design the workflow". For example, I don't have a dediciated "Fuel Station", but a fuel tug that is not only for refueling. But also for pushing/pulling interplanetary payloads on their route out of the kerbin-system. After the ejectionburn, it will decouple from the payload and re-circularise immediately. So the design goals are: Low partcount, lots of fuel, low partcount, very stiff, low partcount, decent TWR, and so on. The extra mass & parts for drilling and converting would be very cumbersome for this job. So i have a extra mining-rig on minmus.

What I want to know: Why do some bases and landers have more than two drills?

Is the outcome not scaled with the number of drills (and converters)?

[Psycix]

What I want to know: Why do some bases and landers have more than two drills?

Drills look awesome.

For that reason, could you slash drill performance and mass by a factor 10, so that we have a legit reason for having a multitude of them?