Just how many Drills I need for one 250 ISRU.

[M(i)ech]

I did some testing, and according to what I found out, if I landed at 10% resource patch, I would need 67 (!) large drills to operate just one 250 ISRU at full capacity.

That many drills would require 1005 EC/s, which is

• 1340 PB-NUKs (game displays PB-NUK energy generation as 0.8, but it's actually 0.75) weighting 134t 107.2t
  
• almost 42 Gigantor arrays weighting 12.6t for half-day operation
  
• 84 Gigantors and 17731 Z-4K battery packs for constant operation on Mun on non-polar location, with such power source totalling 3558.8t
  
• 56 Fuel Cell Arrays, weighting 13.44t and consuming 2.52 units of LF+OX/s which is 2.52 times the output of ISRU

I mean, seriously? Fully automated refinery, operating one ISRU at full capacity would require THAT ridiculous number of drills and power sources?

Without counting wheels, structurals, communications, probe cores and all other stuff with relatively negligible weight AND not counting actual fuel tanks, such a refinery would optimally weight 222t 195.2t, and use 1408 parts.

During my testing, I built test rig with 8 drills and 200 PB-NUKs, and even that started slightly lagging my computer.

It all really is THAT absurd?

[Yaldabaoth]

Try putting an engineer kerbal on board. That boosts the ore production. Massively.
☆☆☆☆☆ 5x
★☆☆☆☆ 9x
★★☆☆☆ 13x
★★★☆☆ 17x
★★★★☆ 21x
★★★★★ 25x

[EffElYouEx]

Engineers for the win!

[maj.solo]

4 of the largest drill can NOT keep up with 1 ISRU using a newbie engineer. 5 might. But don't forget, you need to be drilling at the right place with high ore concentration. Try get above 9%. I think my best site ever was 10.3%.

In earlier career I had a superminer with 16 drills and 3 ISRU. So like 7 drills on 1 ISRU.

So when I have played it is like 5 - 7 drills on a ISRU.

But as they say the engineers are important and where you drill.

[maj.solo]

I have a question though. Is it enough to have one 5star engineer? Even if the ship have 153 drills?

OK OK I read through this while I eat.

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/'Drill-O-Matic'_Mining_Excavator

ONE SINGLE engineer is needed.

Would be nice with a REAL MINING mod. What we have now looks like we are drilling for oil. And even in that case we don't even need to add pipe sections. So it is surface orr then. But surface ore is usually not mined with drills. You shovel up the surface and transport with dump trucks to process at central location.

If people have time to seed and harvest in farming simulator for hours they could setup a mining operation. The activites should be automatic. And the output nominal based on available number of machines on the BASE he he he yes A REAL BASE. Like a LARGE BASE.