Moving minable asteroid

[()Alf]

I saw a video where the one said, that he moved the asteroid before he built the mine.
So i liked to move mine too, but with combined 942,61 kN it is not moving.

Related to 1 or 2 threads here it seems it is not possible, so was it in "early access" but not anymore?

Is it somehow possible to pull or push a minable asteroid outside an asteroidfield and/or how much kN/MN i would need to move it?

My nearly 1MN consists of 12 Force Turrets (much more sense in german, they called gravitation instead force),

[gussmed]

I haven't tried moving a mine yet, but from what I've read, the common advice is to temporarily make it really small. You're having trouble moving it because the default asteroid has a lot of stone, which has enormous mass. Rebuild it for a little while as a lightweight block and you should be able to push it around easily.

The main danger is that your small, lightweight block doesn't have much in the way of HP, so it could be destroyed by a collision. You have to be careful with it while it's in that state, and you should re-build it as something massive with lots of HP once it's where you want it.

[()Alf]

Hmm, i didn't build a mine there yet, just claimed it. So if i would do so but not building much there, it is lighter than it is in natural state?

It doesn't seem so, i even put a large drive on it, i didn't equip it with all personal, i didn't even got 1m/s wich normally is no prob at a normal ship.

[Chaoslink]

Stations are really just ships with a special classification. You should be able to build a mine and alter it however you like then rebuild it. I don’t know if you can add engines, but I remember being able to add thrusters to keep it stable and rotate them. You should be able to fly it wherever using the same method. Otherwise you need a ship of similar size to just push it. Not really sure that force turrets are going to be enough, though I’ve never used them myself.

[()Alf]

I can attach a drive, and thrusters - the drive needs over 1000 crew, still the alone thruster isn't even showing some output of thrust - seems nothing works.

[apellis]

Move the asteroid before founding a mine. Build a huge armor plate and attach it to the front of your ship and then slowly move into contact with the asteroid. Once you are touching, hit W and boost. You should be able to move it clear of the rest. It may take up to a couple minutes due to the mass of the asteroid and depending on how strong your engines are. Once it's clear enough for you, delete the armor plate and get your material and credits back.

[()Alf]

Hmm, maybe engins were not strong enough, but i tried something already, boosted until energy was drown. What kind of acceleration we talk about here, i had around 200+?

[()Alf]

To be honest, we need a "force turret" that is just fixing on a target, and then the engines do the move - the turrets strength would set the engines limitation and tell how much u do. Like tractor beam of the enterprise, fix the target and move, and movement is computercontroled relativ to coherence of that beam. Right now we have nothing except, 0m/s of target movement.

[gussmed]

Stations won't move even if you add engines and thrusters. Even though they're ships for most purposes, they cannot develop acceleration or rotation. Force turrets are the only way to move them.

Found the mine, alter it to be small, and then move it around with force turrets on a ship. Force turrets on the station won't work so well. Actually, I don't know that they'll work at all, but the mechanics are all wrong even if you use force turrets with "self push," because you'll rapidly move out of range of whatever you're using to push.

If you're going to follow Apellis's advice, it's not about the simple acceleration of the ship doing the pushing. It's about the total force the ship doing the pushing can exert. While the two are related, what you're looking for is a large amount of engine space _relative to the asteroid_, not a large amount of engine space relative to the pushing ship.

Suppose you've got a 4 slot ship massing 320 kilotons (320 million kg). It takes 320 million Newtons to accelerate it 1 m/s^s. An engine accelerating it by 200 m/s^2 is exerting 64 billion Newtons. If the asteroid is 200 million tons, that's an acceleration of 64 x 10^9 / 200 x 10^9 = 0.32 m/s^2.

If you have a 10 slot ship massing 32 million tons (32 x 10^9 kg) with an acceleration of 100 m/s^2, the engine is exerting 32 x 10^9 x 100 = 3.2 x 10^12 Newtons, 50x the force of the engine on the 4-slot ship. The mass is 100x as much even if the acceleration is half as much. 3.2 trillion Newtons accelerates a 200 mton asteroid by 3.2 x 10^12 / 2 x 10^10 = 160 m/s^2.

Note that you mentioned a total force of 94 million newtons from your force turrets. That's actually pretty small compared to the thrust developed by a small ship, let alone a large one. The advantage being force turrets don't require a collision to move something.

Oh, and it's important the check what the force turrets can do. Some push, some pull, some only push / pull the ship mounting the turrets, and don't affect other objects.

I'm just using numbers off the top of my head. When I get a chance I'll check the mass of my asteroid mines to get an idea how much force you need if you don't make them small first.

[gussmed]

OK, here are the stats on my 2 asteroids:

Coal mine: 367 million tons
Oil rig: 136 million tons
11 slot carrier (mostly Trinium): 877 kilotons
10 x 10 x 10 cube of iron stone: 204 kilotons

I’m kind of surprised at the difference, I thought both were the basic asteroid shape with some stuff added. I think I must have deleted some stone from the oil rig.

The takeaway is that a typical ship is MUCH lower mass than an unmodified asteroid. Ships also have an absurdly low mass, like 2% that of water, given the stated volumes.

My carrier has an acceleration of 101 m/s^2, so it’s developing 101 x 8.7 x 10^8 kg = 8.7 x 10^10 Newtons. About 1000x the 94 million newtons from the force turrets you mentioned. But it should only be able to push the coal mine by 8.7 x 10^10 / 3.6 x 10^11 = 0.24 m/s^2. Not very much.

Really, your best bet is to lower the mass of the asteroid unless you’ve got a REALLY big ship handy.

How big? Well, I’m finalizing a 15 slot ship that masses 3.3 million tons and accelerates at 113 m/s^2. That’s 3.7 x 10^11 Newtons, which accelerates 367 million tons at 1 m/s^2.

[rubyismycat]

if you build a big ship with tons of armor on the front you can slowly push it where you want or if your cheating scum like me you can build a massive hugely armored end game ship set collission to 25 percent and fly into it at 2000 kmps a few times and laugh as it goes spinning off into the distance lol

[()Alf]

I build a "small" ship, greatly overpowered, it needed around 1000 crew. I could push the asteroid at around 50m/s+ but had problems cracking down parts of it.
Maybe i accept some distances and create my mines where those asteroids are,

[gussmed]

50 m/s seems pretty respectable for moving an asteroid around. I'd imagine it probably drifts for a while after you stop pushing.

Did the ship crack? Or the asteroid?

One of these days I do want to try moving one. I've just had other priorities. I also don't interact with my mines very much, since in both cases they're sending their entire output to my factories via cargo shuttles.

[()Alf]

The Asteroid cracked smaller and smaller, so i had thougts that the outcome would be less, or is it unlimited when founding a mine?
As front shield i used a steady stone of x... (cant remember, 1 above trinium) with 2 block thickness. But at the end, as i wanted to push with some more speed at contact, my ship exploded completly ;) Soft touch works, using afterburner started to crush things out of the asteroid in k's.
I think my acceleration was around 600m/s. Also i had the complete front plated, maybe it is more useful to have just an extended toughspot instead a flat touchfront i used

[gussmed]

You almost certainly want just a single block in contact, and for that block to be quite large. Basically, the front of the ship should be one big block.

If you select a block in the editor, you may notice that many blocks have a stat for damage reduction during a collision. The bigger the block, the higher the total damage resistance. Armor and stone both have pretty high resistance to collisions.

You could also alter the asteroid so it's got a similar tough plate that will resist damage when you push it. Assuming you convert the asteroid into a station before you try moving it.

[()Alf]

But that could wait even after constructing the mine and i still want to move it, i had this in mind. On the other hand, so bad that those force turrets seems so worthless after all.