Best type of mining ship

[gludar]

Are large mining ships better than small mining ships? I haven't done anything in this game in years and I was just wondering which type of ship is a better miner.

Thanks for your help

[Dan2D3D]

Hi, I prefer small blocks but I will surely try large someday.

For Planet I use a small vertical Atmos miner :

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1327567718

In Space I use Ion thrusters with a few Hydros to help moon mining :

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1402259191

[gludar]

cool ships! Thanks for the help :)

[Dan2D3D]

You're welcome!

Don't forget to test the ''inventory mass'' > go survival and full it to see if it can fly.

If not enough thrusters = it may not be able to move or fall on the soil on Planets when full.

[The Big Brzezinski]

The thing to remember about large grid miners is that their drills have less than their one (large) block radius. This means your large grid miner often needs a solid wall of drills to function efficiently. Small drills can clear voxels further out than their 3x3 (small) block size, so they can be arranged into checkerboards and other gapped patterns.

However, there are ways of getting around this problem. On planets, a lot of people will build large drillheads suspended from flying gondolas to dig out large pits. I myself am a fan of dredge miners, which strip mine whole ore bodies from the surface;
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1172407232

In space, things are easier. I've gotten good result with one-block-height drillhead that extends just passed the width of the ship. I just point the drills at an asteroid, set a gyro override to slowly roll the ship, and move a little closer every half-revolution. It's like a cross between a combine harvester and a tunnel borer.


Large grid miners are difficult, but really worth trying out. Not only is mining is one of the few mechanics the game supports, it does it pretty darn well. It's very satisfying to design, build, and operate a ship that brings in ore by the large cargo container-load.

[Xilo The Odd]

the benefit to a large block mining ship is if you want to go crazy, you could put arc furnaces on it to process materals while you mine, ultimately making more space.

this can be a bit more of a challenge on planets though.

[gludar]

Sounds great! I am going to create some new miners then. I am still lacking in any skills on planets. I quit when the planets were added. Definetly going to check it out again

[Tsubasa]

Large grids require better space management, but ultimately they are better if you are going to mass mine stuff for their incredible efficiency. A dude I know made a really huge mining ship (with modded drills but I bet vanilla will do just fine), thing bored a massive hole on asteroids and harvested so many stuff a bunch of refineries couldn't handle all that stuff. The equivalent ore count would take a lot of mining trips with small drill ships and ultimately should only be used as a starting base or drone ships where you don't care crashing onto stuff.

[gludar]

well i made a large miner and it will not penetrate an asteroid in any way. It seems large miners are still broken from years ago. I even turned off the block limit and added over a hundred drills. It just sits on the outer layer of the asteroid and will not go any deeper. I'm sure the small mining ship will mine just fine as before. Kind of sad as this is why I quit years ago.

[Xilo The Odd]

yeah my small block miners are often space drones. theres something about knowing your character is jsut sitting on his butt, with his own game controller to control the drone from a safe enviroment.

also your not using any mods for large ship drills are you? i tried using the keen posted drill power mod where you can add a module to boost the mining power, but all it seemed to do was nerf non modded drill power.

[gludar]

no 100 percent vanilla. This was the same issue from almost three years ago. I would have thought keen would have fixed that. Ohh well. Back to the shelf se goes

[Luzilyo]

i'd say go big or go home. my personal favorite was my self-built "mining tube". had about 40 or 50 large drills on the front in a pryramidal shape, a spherical grav gen almost directly behind the center drill to suck in any ore that might have gotten lost in space otherwise. then, behind that, 4 refineries, next room was cargo, then reactors, gyroscopes, a medbay room with an entrance on the side, control room, oxygen room with, if i remember correctly, four oxygen generators and a bunch of oxygen tanks, batteries for emergency power supply and on the very end a connector. the outer layer was pure heavy armour, the inner layer was light armour and a bit of piping. in the end, there was only enough space for a 1 block walkway along the lenght of the ship, so it was a bit cramped, but it meant that not only did i have everything that i'd ever need even for the very longest of mining-flights, i also managed to cover the entire outside with heavy armour without exposing anything (except a little bit of piping where the medical room was, because that needed a bit more space than everything else). unfortunately, due to the limited space, the med bay room also had to function as airlock. all completely built in survival and without any mods.

of course she was a bit slow due to only being equipped with small thrusters, but after going through an asteroid 3 or 4 times, in almost every case there was pretty much nothing left of it. i really miss that ship lol

i might still have some screenshots around, hang on let me check.

edit: no screenshots, unfortunately, but i still have it as workshop object, for some random reason (must have uploaded it at some point, though i don't really remember why)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=476792620

[Tsubasa]

Originally posted by gludar:

well i made a large miner and it will not penetrate an asteroid in any way. It seems large miners are still broken from years ago. I even turned off the block limit and added over a hundred drills. It just sits on the outer layer of the asteroid and will not go any deeper. I'm sure the small mining ship will mine just fine as before. Kind of sad as this is why I quit years ago.

When I mean big....I mean, REALLY big ones. So big that it is essentially a small corvette like thing with a massive wall of drill heads and a massive bunch of thrusters. It will take a very long time to mine a hole but it will be cleanly drilled.

[DuuD]

I prefer small as it's cheaper and I don't need a wall of drills.
Small drills can safely drill when you leave 3 whole blocks between them.

[Sergej]

Well i prefer to start big in space (slap a large drill to the space banana), and go small vertical on planets.
I'll be shameless and do a little self advertisement:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1349487971
It's mah baby, it can do automated drilling and semi auto mining. Just go near the asteroid and mining starts. Back off to stop.
It has all you need, mix and match, mining, refining, traveling in industrial style!
Rotation mining is the way to go if you don't wana stuff the front full of drills and kill your simspeed.
There are links that inspired the ship, they are awesome fun designs.

[gludar]

The miner I made was very similiar to your miner serge except I had a wall of drills without any kind of rotation. I had a ton of thrusters on it ( large and small). I hadn't even put the outer skin of armor on it yet. It just sits there at the asteroid and goes no further than literally a foot. It had very low weight for a large miner and tons of push power in each direction. It just seems like large mining is a thing of the past. I agree 100% with the statement of " go big or go home". Absolutely, it just seems like a large mining ship is a thing of the past in space engineers. I will admit, I was very dissapointed with the results. It's truely a shame as I used to love se, I really have next to no interest in a smaller ship personally.