How to make a mining drone?

[Tythos]

Does anyone know how to make a mining drone? I'm having difficulty in making a working module.

[Hitori]

Depends on how much autonomy and efficiency you want from it.
I have a working large scale miner in the workshop that only needs to be guided to a asteroid and then it can drill clean thru on it's own if there are no serious obstacles inside the asteroid.
To make a miner that finds it's own asteroids is far more complicated and dangerous tho.

There exist 2 ways to make a ship fly forwards by it self.
Thruster override will work but it's prone to bouncing back alot.

If a gravity propultion is used, it will depending on the setting gently make the ship move forward at a slow pace and the faster it moves forward the more counter thrust the inertial dampener gives to prevent it from accellerating (it's a carefull balance act).
This method works better as there is less backward bounce.

And a sensor can be used to stop the ship if it leaves the asteroid.

A system of timers and a remote controll can be used to guide a miner towards a asteroid and then start mining it, but for that you need to program coordinates, and at that point it may be simpler to guide it manually by remote instead as you otherwise have to travel in person to get the coordinates and then program it in afterwards...

In theory it is possible to make several gravity guided drones that travel between 2 spherical gravity fields (trapped in the 0 gravity zone created by 2 opposite gravity generators), i have never tried it tho as it's a far risky idea to have 2 miners drill at random within the same area.

But when it comes to automatic mining you need both a stable/balanced and tested design that you confident will be able to do the job at all without fail, else you better off mining manually.

[Tythos]

Thank you that helped me out. I'm still learning about it. Anyway thanks again

[FцllSїzёd]

I make several now which are mainly autonommous. You can put sensors to detect the rock, waypoints to move the ship and remote block with antena to fly it remotely. So The way I set mine up is. I have scout ship to find ore. I make GPS. I remote control mining ship and send it to those coords near the mining spot. When the ship gets there I can check on it when I'm between things. Now I remote the ship and view the camera. I fly i it towards the ore I want to mine or aim it at it if its deep in the asteroid. When the ship gets withing 10 meters sensors turn on the drills and activate some forward thrusters on override command. I can now leave ship alone. Later I go back and remote control it and see if its done. It will dig completely through the asteroid and when the sensors dont detect ateroid nearby it will shut off the drills and the thrusters and sit there and wait for me. I also have many ejector ports with sorters so it is contantly ejecting all the stone I pick up leaving only ore in the hold. So when I check on it if its done I may send it back through the asteroid or I may remote it back to coordinates near my base to be control manually again to dock it up. All in all i can do hours of mining with only a few minutes of personal interaction with the mining ship. The rest is autonomous. Hope this helps.

P.s. I can't seem to get this to work on planets. I have to control the ship manually the entire time its mining or it will twist in the hole and get broken. :(