Help me build decent early game planetary mining constructions!

[LordStuff]

Working under the effect of gravity brings a few problems and building a descent mining facility can get pretty tricky. In addition, it would be best to power any ship designs through batteries because the planet

My approaches:
1) A gantry crane with a mining head instead of the hook. It should let you dig up a decent square hole into the ground. By making the gantry itself a ship on wheels, you could move the whole thing and dig up another hole somewhere else. I ran into several problems:
1. limited depth of the hole as you'd have to use pistons or something to lower the mining head
2. construction problems when building the crane gantry itself (I attended to that in another discussion)
alltogether a very pleasing idea in my opinion.. but I wasn't able to build it so far..

2) A vertical drill somewhat according to oil drills. It'd allow you to dig very deep holes without noteworthy depth limitations. However, it would mean you'd have to constantly extend it, which probably means high construction costs without even covering up large enough areas to consider it efficient. It would allow you to provide a conveyor system to get your stuff out of the hole, but it probably doesn't allow moving the drill itself once you reach a certain depth.

3) A small mining ship.. Not very easy to fuel using batteries... the conveyor system and drills will make the ship pretty heavy and the atmospheric thrusters might not provide enough thrust to keep it in the air.. large thrusters mean higher energy consumption and the need of more batteries making it even larger and heavier... not quite pleasing I think...

4) A large mining ship.. probably easier to build than a small one, but even heavier and harder to handle.. I don't think that flying miners are of good use under the effect of planetary gravity...

5) A mining car? I don't have any satisfying ideas... wheels are very blocky, and you'd need to drill downwards to reach any ores... probably still better than building a flying one...

Any ideas?

[dga8705]

Small mining ships do work for going after the boulders on the surface. I haven't found one that works that well for tunneling though. I built a large one that was basically a vertical cylinder which would mine down, but it had power issues. If I didn't get it back and connected to the base in 2 minutes, it was screwed. I've seen a mining car done somewhere that basically dragged drills behind it and took off layers behind it so you drove it around in circles removing layers at a time until you got down to the ore, essentially making a pit like modern day mining technology. It would seem like this could work very well, although its more work and you have to think about getting out as well(maybe thrusters to just lift the vehicle up and out at the end? They wouldn't have to be on the whole time and would only have to lift it for less than a minute).

The only other success I've had at mass mining was taking my capital ship which flies in atmosphere, attaching a huge drill head to the end of a line of conveyors, and basically landing while the drill was running which drilled down 30-40m. It worked, but I got a ton of stone in the process, I could only get to a certain depth, and it meant I had to do it every time I landed, whether I wanted more ore or not.

[moodster3137]

My attempt. Uses batteries with a 50min flight time, also auto-filters & ejects stone. can lift out upto 600k ore at a time.

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/577948561800277977/284C389C0E9CAE11D743059DB12AA844F7A179F7/

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/577948561800303329/A5FADE8BB9940009108EFB8CA397E55933324721/

[LordStuff]

Thanks for the ideas..

@moodster3137 how do you power you ship? From the number of thrusters I can see I guess you need many batteries.. also it looks very heavy plus it's a large ship..

[moodster3137]

I have 2 x reactors and a 140 panel solar farm at a base i dock the ship at. Charges up at a connector which also automatically unloads the cargo via a cargo sorter (throw out box in its description). Powered by 9 x batteries. Uses a collection of 10x small cargo containers placed around the back, opposite to the drills (for weight balance), although max takeoff weight is 1,150 ton so i just mine till i reach that amount. All built in survival. I started with a simple scaled down version & just upgraded the size as i progressed.

[LordStuff]

I tested an idea for a wheel driven miner I saw in a youtube video...
the basic idea is that you simply put the drills on a rotor so you can drill downwards and create a ramp.. the guy in the video kinda failed, because he didn't straighten out the drills after the ramp angle was reached, so he basically made it steeper the further he drove in and couldn't get the car back out...
Check out my version here (I hope the screenshot thing works):
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=579879593
you can see the drills and the advanced rotor (in order to move the ore to the connector in the back).. the thrusters are important as the current clipping problems with the ground and wheels can make it difficult to drive back out
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=579879707
I slowly dug out a ramp with right clicking - it became even enough in order to drive in and out (with the help of thrusters of course)..
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=579879766
it works just fine... underground you can put the rotor back up and even out the ground:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=579879857
I didn't test the energy requirements of the vehicle as this is just a creative construction... but there is plenty enough space left on the vehicle, so you could add more batteries or even reactors.. the construction doesn't really seem to be bothered by weight as long as you don't jump around too much, I set the speed limit to 15 m/s to stay safe, but this only helps on a flat surface where you can turn off the thrusters as they certainly don't mind the suspension speed limit and handbrake..

sorry for the bad quality of the screenshots.. I didn't quite remember to turn off the HUD and get the perfect angle :/ but I think you'll get the idea..
it's a bit tricky and you gotta be careful and keep the ramp as even as possible.. using the right click feature let's you dig the ramp faster, but you even have to rotate the drills up so you don't bite a giant hole out of the ground..

[LordStuff]

Currently thinking about gathering and testing some designs and making a guide from it.. there doesn't seem to be anything useful yet

[Saadharta]

well,atm i'm digging with the hand drill, slowly. I tried few designs of mining ships but had problem with ships becoming too heavy while digging. All would be so simple if there was a device able to make ores anti-grav sensitive.

Eh, this car with a rotative mining head don't look that bad. Gonna modify my scout and see if i can work with it.

[Zefnoly]

When you talked about your crane i wished the had some winch stuff. I tried to make a cargo crane once. Also because i may could use it for mining but pistons makes it really buggy and unpractical http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=536886472

[Hitori]

Well my suggestion is that you build a small rocket ship and head out into space, the asteroids carry far more materials.

As for surface mining, you know how poor the planets are with materials.
Except for one resource, namely ice.

I have a idea for strip mining a lake for fuel/ice that i have not yet tested.

Find a lake, make 2 walls going paralell, and then make a large car that fit between the 2 walls.
Give it a thruster and set the wheel friction to 0%, place some drills on a piston, lower it down and have it move forward on thruster override, build the walls all the way to the end of the lake and turn 90 degree so it stops or turns at the end of the lake, continue like this for eternity or untill 90% of the lake is dry.

This railed track surface strip mining, is the best i can come up with as i been having the same problems as you have.

Ofc if you make it go around in a circle/loop, and have 2 drills remove the ground behind the rear wheels, it might be possible to make a strip miner that does not use pistons at all, but i would hardly recomend it.

[LordStuff]

That is actually a nice concept, you could just let the car mine behind it and keep driving to mine away layers of ice... I gotta look into this when I have some spare time..