Hand drills or ship drills: which gets the most ore per voxel?

[The Nameless]

I have a system set up to collect ore chunks; I can go out with an Elite Hand Drill or use my little mining drone that's just set to pick it up in the front and chunk it straight out the connector in the back. That way I don't have to keep flying back to my mothership to turn in my haul. Question is, which way do I get the most out of an ore deposit? The ship drills are faster, that's for sure, but are they wasting more too? Or am I just wasting time out there with the hand drill?

[Sinclair]

Never checked or even thought there is a difference. My suggestion is to set a test in creative: use Space Master tools to make two identical asteroids of ore, mine one with hand drill, another with ship drill and compare.

[The Nameless]

I will if I can't find something, somewhere. As long as this game's been around, SOMEbody almost has to have tested it by now, and I'd rather avoid reinventing the wheel.

[DiabloDBS]

Mmh ok i think i need to create a custom asteroid just to make sure.

I spawned several procedure generated asteroids using the same seed and they all yielded different values for Si, Fe and Stone (+-15%) both for hand drills as well as ship drills. So i guess they don't have exact amounts but rather a total mass, volume and shape when generated as their Mass / Volume are pretty close each time (<5% above all samples which might be due to some ore failing to hit the collectors)

Or there is some RNG to the drills which would be funny but not absurd. But overall i don't see a better yield for hand drills (Elite) compared to small ship drills as both have had similar results. But i only tested 5 times each and with a small asteroid (5m seed: 302027501) yielding between:
Hand(Elite):
Fe: 6047,60kg - 8747,22kg
Si: 63029,09kg - 72424,96kg
Stone: 44248,33kg - 53632,75kg
Small Ship:
Fe: 6155,61kg - 8902,04kg
Si: 60159,59kg - 71323,24kg
Stone: 45218,55kg - 51552,18kg

[The Nameless]

Well we're not trying to save the world from a zombie plague, so I'm sure five tests is plenty. Actually come to think of it, if we were trying to save the world from a zombie plague, five tests would probably be all we had time for anyway, but that's beside the point.

Thanks for doing that; saved me the trouble of finding someone else's test OR doing it myself!

And yeah, it does look like the differences are insignificant.

Edited: "ORE" changed to "OR". Typo was an interesting but unintended play of words, considering the subject at hand. lol

[DiabloDBS]

Still i'd like to know if the RNG lies with the drilling or with the spawning of the asteroids. ^^
Overall i'd say unless you're in a super low resource scenario a ship drill will always be better if just cause you don't have to pick up the stuff or use collectors.

And drilling a small asteroid 5 times by hand doesn't really take too much time. And with a drilling ship it's just a matter of seconds. ^^

[The Nameless]

Well, what REALLY takes practically no time is a commandeered Mining Carriage with a massive suite of drills on the front. I have one in one of my games that pretty much eats entire ore deposits in just moments. Of course, docking it to get rid of the ore is a bit of a beast. Not to mention processing that much with realistic refinery settings.

[DiabloDBS]

Well i usually don't use large amounts of drills in my worlds as they hit the performance quite hard but yeah.. reminds me of the 600 drill ship a friend built and when he forgot to turn on his GPS coords he was like "oh hey another asteroid in the way lets eat it" followed by my screaming, death and despair that i just had finished our automated storage and production assembly.

Today i either use smaller drones mining more or less automated or i just install the mining laser mod and use that. As old EVE player i just love that they are designed after the mining barges strip miners.

The biggest problem we had was trading stuff between our moon and earth base as the droneships would always mess up and we had to do it manually.. while.. well it seems that anybody but me who uses my transport ship designs messes it up as well so maybe the drones aren't to blame too much.

Oh and somehow our drone ships between moon (Earth) and Mars work on a similar level... collide with asteroids after leaving the accel gate while when i do it manually and don't touch the thrust after leaving the accel gate there are no asteroids in the path.
And a friend of mine was delivering stuff manually with my mining excavation cruiser and crashed into an asteroid at some 5km/s which resulted in a 30min lag orgy due to the energy shield mod holding up quite a while. ^^
But it's funny how the ship got welded into the asteroid. I think i will leave it there as a kind of memorial.

[The Nameless]

Yeah, my PC is... pretty good. But 600 would be a bit much even for me, your friend must be overclocking the crap out of his system and running dual 1080Ti's or maybe even Titan blacks.

I don't get overclocking, can't get my processor to do it despite the fact that it's totally supposed to be able to (probably because I didn't get the absolute best motherboard), and $1000 for a graphics card was enough for me without buying another for the same price thanks. :P

Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that your automated ships mess up a lot, I can't even get them to FOLLOW me much less trade stuff between bases. Of course, now that I've moved into gravity drives, getting them to follow me would be even harder. And most of the ones I'd WANT to follow me would never in a million years be able to keep up.

Can I see a screenshot of your ship welded into the asteroid? I'd like to see that. And you should probably convert it into a station, for performance, if you're gonna leave it there. If you can do that without it blowing the heck up. lol

What is the mining laser you use? I've tried Nukeguard's version that comes with the drills and welders, but didn't like the way the controls worked (or, more to the point, didn't). I don't suppose there's a mining laser mod that just busts up the rock like a hand drill instead of magically collecting it too?

Hehe... I, um, don't just use a collector and spherical gravity generators to collect ore chunks, I actually have Nukeguard's nanite mod too. His mods and MA Lasers are probably the best and most professionally done I've seen. Cython's energy shields come close but he really needs a visuals update. And his shields have no effect on warhead-type explosions, which caused me to resort to a backup save when I tested GBF's 'photon torpedo' fighter weapon on them and blew off half a wing of my battlecruiser.

[Chucky Dickens]

I think I heard somewhere, that you get ore faster by using the hand drill, a grav generator and a collector, than if you use a ship drill.

However, 4 or more Small ship drills will beat out a hand drill's speed.

I think.

[The Nameless]

Maybe. If the collector actually works right, which is usually doesn't; the ore chunks just pile up on top of it without being collected, and only when you account for the time it takes the ship to go back, dock, and unload its ore.

I've found a collector works best with not one, but four, spherical gravity generators around it on their minimum acceleration and widest field setting, and the armor plates around it arranged into a little funnel. But it still sometimes decides to refuse to pick up the ore and you end up with a pile that's not going anywhere.

If, on the other hand, you make a drill ship (or drone) that just chunks it out the back as fast as the drills pick it up, and you have a mod like the Nanotech Factory to scoop up the bits the collector misses (and pick up the slack when the collector decides to just sit there like a lump while all the ore piles up on top of it), the ship is gonna be way, way faster.

[DiabloDBS]

@Well in case of SE you don'tt need a 1080 at all. What you need is raw CPU Core power, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of main memory and foremost a stable and well balanced system.
I run my old FX6100 system at 4.2 GHz for that purpose until finally a CPU suited for my needs is released.
My friend runs a i7-8700K OCed but his system only gets about 20 fps more out of it even with his 1080 OCed compared to my r9 390 OCed. (When the 600 drill ship is turned on we would still have 20~30fps but with <10 UPS that is worth little ^^

Well you need a suitable motherboard for OC and got to get fitting parts as well so that the CPU and RAM won't run unstable.

Yeah i think i should stop using the remote pathfinding at all and implement it myself as that seems to cause trouble whenever a transition to / from natural gravity occurs. Well if i ever want them to effectively go around a planet i will have to i guess.

Sure usually set the stuff to friend only but well who cares:

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197967223153/screenshot/930431644837647334

Well actually the game did turn it into a station after the collision was handled as it seems ..

I am using these:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=681276386
They can be used forward drills and also attach a turret. I use them for large projects since a 100+ drills will ruin the fun for the most part :-X

They collect the stuff automatically thou but it should be doable to mod it to drop the stuff at the location where it is mined instead.

Well i usually don't use collectors much either. They work well enough but if you can just use a mining ship they become more useless.
BTW collectors work well for me. But what really is annoying is that the non collectible parts breaking off an asteroid won't vanish as well when they get close. Probably somethign worth changing since it is just a few lines of code and probably annoys many more than just me.

I actuall also use the nanite mod but i usually want to mine tunnels and underground bays which is more efficient with other options.


@Chucky Dickens

That is caused by performance issues which will make ship drills update less often hence being overall slower in a 1:1

[The Nameless]

Well, I've got the processor for sure, it's the Ryzen 7 1800x. I have 16gb of memory, thing about memory is I hear SE won't actually use what you've got; it's got a cap to it. There's supposed to be a mod around somewhere that lets it eat more RAM, but I can't find that. It'd be nice if I could get it to use my hard drive as virtual RAM, since it's a solid state. I do, as it happens, have a 1080ti. Just the one though. No doubt my mobo is, as I said, not suitable for overclocking and I probably don't have whatever those other parts are. I *could* change it but frigging windows copy protection was enough of a hassle the first time. I won't be screwing with that again until the next round of latest-greatest hardware comes out and I have the money to afford it.

I've seen that drill mod. I haven't tried it because the guy said he was taking a break, but I see he *does* say he's keeping it up to date, so I guess that's good enough. Unfortunately I can't figure out how the stupid modding tools work, all they do for me is try to open the command prompt, then immediately shut down again, ultimately accomplishing nothing. So I can't mod a mod. Or make my own mods, which sucks, because there are some things I'd *like* to do.

The nanite mod *can* help you mine tunnels and underground bays more efficiently. Granted it's not going to do that if you use the direct mining application, which really works like crap. What you do to use it for mining is go out there with a hand drill or a ship that chunks everything straight out of a connector, and use the *cleanup* function of the nanite mod to send the little yellow nanite balls out to pick up the ore chunks so you don't have to keep going back to your ship to drop it off.

[DiabloDBS]

Never use a SSD as virtual RAM. And SSD is still too slow (factor >100 ) to be useful for that purpose. If you'd use RAM as virtual disk it would make much more sense. But writing a controller to do that practically and efficient is another story so even 64+GB aren't that useful unless you never turn off the PC.

The 1800X certainly isn't bad for the task but the 8 cores won't help out much in case of SE. So unless you OC it to 4.2ghz (or at least 3.8) you won't get more out of it than off an i7 8700.
The 1080ti surely is a nice asset but as mentioned not that useful for SE as most of the time the bottleneck will be the CPU preventing the FPS from going up.

Well the automated mode bugs from time to time but overall it is quite useful especially in manual mode.
You mean the modding SDK you can install via steam? What are you using for programming? I think it is cut out for visual studio so maybe get the free version of that and try to use the API suppot the SDK gives. While i have no idea about the graphical part .. at work i usually just write a request to our graphics guys :-X That reminds me that i wanted to get into ZBrush and relearn what i forgot about 3DSMax ...

Well i usually just used to have a tunnel bore for that until a patch broke it and i got the mod.
Which reminds me that i wanted to test if it works again after the piston / rotor overhaul. While it will probably explode when i spawn it like half of my piston creations do as the merged pistons are not aligned the same way.

Still with the beam miner mod it takes mere seconds to dig a 100m tunnel so i will probably still stick to that :-X Even if they eat up energy like small black wholes... :-X

[The Nameless]

Huh? Using for programming? I usually use, uh, notepad. I'm a trash truck driver. Go figure. Notepad works. For simple stuff. I never heard of ZBrush or 3DSMax before.

Heh, rotors. I had some of Mexpex's cannons set up in batteries of six on my wingtips. I hadn't found his turret mods yet so I used rotors to give me a way to set convergence. Wasn't 'on the fly'--I had to set it before a fight, decide what range I wanted to shoot stuff at, and thus what angle I needed. Then after one fairly intense firefight, they decided to just... detach. Despite Cython's shields. They didn't seem to have taken any damage, but there my wingtip batteries were, floating around in space anyway.

I recycled the cannons and reconfigured the pods into small drone hangars.

[Dr.Thunder7]

If you look through some of the files the ore per voxel should stay the same no mater what. It just changes the speed at which it gathers and the area it collects from