Please share good mining vehicle designs

[Paul]

Hi folks,

I'm doing ok in my save but I've been through several iterations and ideas of mining vehicle and nothing is quite working how I'd hoped.

A big part of that seems to be to do with the land/wheel friction and the fact that a lot of stone deposits are on slopes. I understand from other posts this is something that is being looked into for patching but in the meantime I'd like to build something that can work around these issues.

I started off with a pretty standard drill "pincer" vehicle with two arms out front; it had a drill on each arm which could grab round the rocks and blitz them. I later modified this with the ability to rotate the drills in multiple directions, to raise the drills up and grind at a slight angle, as well as straight down for grinding smaller chunks on the floor.

Overall it's ok but struggles with bigger rock formations on steeper slopes.

I then tried a new design which kept a simplified version of the front drill setup for grinding up floor debris, but which would attack the big stacks with a retractable overhead arm drill - rather than getting close, I'd drive up on the flat and poke them from a distance.

This didn't really work very well at all though, so I went back to the previous design.

With controller/bearing engine propulsion this time (instead of piston engine) I can grind down most stuff but it's clumsy and unwieldy, it sort of just leaps on top of the rock and smashes it down.

So what are others using that works better? I'd really love to see some ideas and builds that are effective. I've seen j0hnbane's Scorpion, which is great, but basically another pincer design again.

The only other thing I could think of to get round the hill issue is to literally get round the hills by having a massive vehicle that is tall and with a wide wheel base so it can pretty much drive over the tallest formations and drop a drill arm downwards. Haven't tried it yet but I'm looking for better ideas.

[Joseph Sneed]

Personally I just have some drills mounted on the front of my work truck and use that for the big stuff and get out and break the small stuff manualy. I find the drills hitbox to be small enough it is just more of a pain than it is worth to build something that can get the small stuff.

[SteelFire]

I built a rig that is a bit more like a wheel loader, with a cantilever main arm and a set of drill heads mounted on that. The drill heads rig can rotate up/down. I need to do some more work to it, to add some logic to allow finer control of both the cantilever arm angle and the drill angle, but for now it works decently. Traction can still be a bit of an issue, but since I can attack the rock formations and chunks from different angles it's been less of a concern.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2109166742

[Paul]

Originally posted by SteelFire:

I built a rig that is a bit more like a wheel loader, with a cantilever main arm and a set of drill heads mounted on that. The drill heads rig can rotate up/down. I need to do some more work to it, to add some logic to allow finer control of both the cantilever arm angle and the drill angle, but for now it works decently. Traction can still be a bit of an issue, but since I can attack the rock formations and chunks from different angles it's been less of a concern.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2109166742

Nice build, this is similar to what I have at the moment but yours seems to be more vertical operation than horizontal. Might be something I can try out!