Just curious as to why mining bases are built?

[Sirrobert]

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.

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

I think you forgot low part count

[Spatzimaus]

A simple lander/miner that can mine, convert takeoff and refuel a station is all that is needed

For that matter, cut out the middleman. The lander/miner IS the "station", if you want it to be. After all, what's the point of having a dedicated station in orbit if its only purpose is to hold fuel brought to it by a lander? Just have your lander include enough docking ports and such to function as a station in its own right, and you save quite a bit of effort on docking. To illustrate what I mean, here's my latest design, using quite a few mod parts:

Empty it's about 100 tons, fully loaded it's just over 300. It lands on Minmus, Gilly, Pol (shown above), or Ike, fills up and refines a full load of fuel, and then launches into a nice convenient orbit for other things to dock with. Because of its size, it's extremely stable in orbit, and acts just like a space station. And while a 300-ton lander might seem a bit excessive, it's no less efficient than doing multiple trips with a smaller design.

But like I said before, once the full resource system gets implemented this sort of design just won't work any more. In the meantime, though, it really is the most efficient way to do things. In previous versions I'd do more complex arrangements, with tankers, landers, stations, etc. all working together. But this sort of do-everything design is just ideal in the current system.

[TheWanderer]

because people have imagination....

[tntristan12]

My mining bases are generally a single base area where the crew lives, and where the transfer shuttles arrive and leave. My actual miners are mobile units that can drive around to where the kethane is. I use rovers to bring the converted resources back to the main base for mid-term storage until another shuttle can arrive to take it off-world. That way I have a constant and steady stream of resources being mined and shipped anywhere in the Greater Kerbal Federation of Worlds.

[Biker Joe]

I started off my Mun base because I saw it as a challenge! And the whole kethane mining thing gives you something to do and a reason behind everything, and adds to the challenge a bit which is fun!

[Javster]

You could say playing the game is pointless... Or (pre-career) that landing anywhere was pointless.

It's just for the fun of it.

[dommcq]

You could say playing the game is pointless... Or (pre-career) that landing anywhere was pointless.

It's just for the fun of it.

No.

Playing the game is obviously not pointless, otherwise none of us would do it. I get the fun, the role-playing and I certainly am not lacking imagination as has been suggested.

I was just asking what practical application over Landers/Re-fuelling Miners could have over bases.

Exploration takes time.

A lot of time.

So my question was to find an answer as to why people invest a whole lot of extra time docking / transferring fuel on a surface base rather than in orbit, when the latter saves so much time.

I was not trying to infer that bases were... well whatever people have been taking offense to - which I don't get. Merely that I wanted to understand and see if I could get a good reason to build one.

I like drills too... always in symmetry.

[Aragosnat]

Outside of. Because we can, challange, looks and RP. For myself I look at it as a way to shield yourself from debries (if you have it turned on). As the planets and moons make decent shields till the part drops right down on top or rolls over it. As well as a start for when ever reasourses finally get worked in. As it takes some skill to get pin point landings. More so with planets with atmosphere.

[Wallace]

Efficiency for a start, if you just send a lander to get the Kethane refine it and bring the fuel up, then you are lifting the drills, converters and generators every time. If you are bringing up raw Kethane, well you need fuel to lift it so either you have to take that fuel down with you or still have a converter. If you have a base, your landers just need a fuel tank, an engine and a docking port/pipe endpoint.

Or course the real question is why play KSP, when it's so much easier to just sit and stare blankly at a wall for hours.

Edited December 16, 2013 by Wallace

[Bigcheecho]

Because we are trying to imagine what KSP would be like if SQUAD's initial resources system were added to KSP.

[nimbim]

It just takes some extra time and is more efficient in the long run. With OP's point of view it should also be pointless to use Kethane at all, since the time it takes you to set up everything is much longer than simply docking 2-3 ships in orbit or finding a better design to achieve the fuel requirements for a mission.

[syfyguy64]

Same reason I built a fleet of battlecruisers.

[thiosk]

As soon as I learned how to properly RCS balance, docking became a zero effort game, so spending a little time doing docking manuevers is much easier for me than setting up ejections.

I'm very much a "go there for the long haul" sort. I have devised a system that I call "standard deployment packages." My entire design paradigm is based around being able to deliver these SDPs everywhere. Equipped with docking ports, RCS, power, and other useful doodads, and weighing in at around 40 tons of fuel, they form a core resource station anywhere in the solar system, and are ultimately disposable. Linking up to one can give a ship enough fuel to get essentially anywhere else, and can be daisy chained and used as droptanks for major journeys. I look forward to the next version, as I intend to build kethane refineries in Jool, transport in a bunch of empty SDPs (because they're easier to move long distances) and then spread my SDPs everywhere to support various missions.

[Spatzimaus]

Efficiency for a start, if you just send a lander to get the Kethane refine it and bring the fuel up, then you are lifting the drills, converters and generators every time. If you are bringing up raw Kethane, well you need fuel to lift it so either you have to take that fuel down with you or still have a converter.

Kethane converts to regular fuels at a 5:1 mass ratio, so hauling raw Kethane ANYWHERE is horribly inefficient. You're far better off converting it on-site, wherever you drilled it; the weight of the drills and converters is far less than the weight you save by converting to more useful forms. So the idea of lifting raw Kethane to orbit to deliver to a station should be ruled out entirely.

In theory, refining at a fixed land base would be more efficient, since electrical power is effectively unlimited and you wouldn't need to lift the drills and converters against gravity. The problem is that you lose efficiency in other areas; if the base isn't placed directly on the Kethane then you'll be limited to however much Kethane the drilling rover can hold, meaning multiple trips back and forth. Whatever vessel you're using to ferry fuel up to orbit now has to land very close to your refinery; depending on the orbit, this might require a substantial amount of extra thrust each time. If you're delivering fuel to a space station you'll waste delta-V matching orbits, and monoprop for docking. And then there's the issue of capacity; by using a single vessel for all stages of the process, there's never a question of whether you refined enough to fill the lifter, and it'll always be 100% full.

So to me, there are two basic designs that work well under the current system. A huge lander, like I posted above, can land directly on the Kethane field, fill its tanks, and return to orbit to act as a fuel depot. Yes, the drills and converters do add mass, but on a 300-ton lander a 1-ton drill isn't much to worry about, and you save that much mass in other areas (to say nothing of the time savings for not having to transfer resources through three or four separate vessels, and not having to drive anything across the surface).

Alternately, a mining/refining rover that drives directly to landed vessels and refuels them on the ground. It gains all of the advantages of a base (like not lifting those drills and converters) without requiring the precision landing. Plus, once a field is depleted it can just drive to a new area. The first downside is travel time, of course. But also, this sort of thing doesn't help for any vessel not intending to land on the surface in the first place, unless you ALSO send a vessel whose sole purpose is to lift fuel to orbit. (And if you're doing that, see the previous concept.) The upside is once we get a more complex resource system, this sort of thing will be far more valuable.

[Frederf]

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.

I have hope that this is the future of KSP resource gathering.

[celem]

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

You trolling Majiir? You of all people ought to know how Kethane works A few folks have answered this one anyway but seem to have missed or glossed over the main issue.

Time

Real Time. My Time

Even when accelerating time. sure 5 hours becomes a couple of minutes. But 2 hours becomes even less.

Nothing happens while the site is off-loaded, we want the process to go as fast as possible when it is loaded; No-one wants to wait a game-day for their fuel tanks to fill. Since you can only generate kethane/fuel while focused on the base, we want that process to happen as fast as possible.

If just gathering kethane for export then obviously # drills is the only factor. more is more.

If we are actually converting to fuel then the limiting factor is processor output. so more processors. We then add drills until it at least meets the consumption of the processors. Sure we can cut down on drill # by using the bigger drills to feed multiple processors, but they dont fit everywhere, maybe smaller are just more convenient.

In practice I have twice as many drills as required to feed my refineries, always, because I also have kethane storage. I also always process on site

The upshot of this is that I switch focus to an empty base (no fuel, no kethane), drill and process till the fuel tanks are full, the kethane tanks will also fill.

Next time I want to refuel I only have half the process to go through. It takes the same time, but can be conducted without the drilling units being on site (good for me since I use drillers as haulers to move fuel into orbit).

re:OP

The bases really do just look cool. We are practising for the day when theres some real point to doing it. Theres a further purpose behind it if using certain mod combos. Leveraging Kethane and Extraplanetary Launchpads for instance lets you pretty much recreate KSC wherever you want and launch from anywhere.

[Superfluous J]

The upshot of this is that I switch focus to an empty base (no fuel, no kethane), drill and process till the fuel tanks are full, the kethane tanks will also fill.

This reminds me of another good reason to have a base, assuming you have KAC installed. I frequently - if I'm going to warp more than a day into the future - switch to a Kethane base that I recently unloaded a ton of fuel from first. That way, while my ship is coasting along to Duna or whatever, those tanks are filling, fuel's being refined, and Good is happening.

Can't do that if your refinery is orbiting Minmus.