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Mining Methods (dormi.zone)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/spaceengineers

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Hello everyone, I'm working on building myself a better mining ship and it's occurred to me that I predominantly use only two mining methods: Fixed drills or "simple" drilling arms that use only pistons and rotors to extend forward and make a bar of drills drill the area of a field via rotation.

I'm know people make large-grid mining ships and I've seen a few that are amazing... and suffered a good bit trying to replicate a design I can't find anymore. But, I don't know much about how to effectively go about mining with large drills...

When I was trying to make a large-grid drill wheel I was told that builds usually focus on making a small number of drills do more drilling and my design was horribly inefficient (and it was, in addition to being a PITA to assemble). So, are there any good resources on how to make a drilling-arm that'll cover a broad area using a small number of drills?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

When starting out, I like to (eventually) make a large grid 3x3 drill ship with hydrogen thrusters up on top. The general stuff sits on top of the 3x3 grid of drills - that's the H2O generator and production, cockpit, battery, gyros, storage, connector, and the stuff necessary for PAM. The sensor goes face down in the direction of the drills.

After all the basics are done, I build a tall spire of conveyors that feeds the thrusters. It must be high enough to clear the damage zone of the thruster. For small grid hydrogen, I think it's 2 or 3 blocks.

Now you have the bore punch! Set it up with PAM to automine an area.

It's super handy to have the ALIGN command set up with PAM so you can guarantee you're level. Tipping over in that thing is a death sentence.

Eventually I like to build a 10x5 drilling ship for asteroids.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nice, in the time after I've posted this I had just engineered a subgrid-monstrocity for mining that would still require me to be babysitting it.

Large grid: 8 Pistons, two facing up and extended and 6 facing down unextended (at rest), all set to 0.1mps Rotor on the end of the final piston set to 2rpm Three down-drills off the rotor in a line and two horizontal-drills facing opposite each other off the drill meeting the rotor. Use timer blocks to have the pistons activate for 1 second every 30 seconds.

Haven't built a ship to support it yet though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh man I can't imagine the klang from that once you mount it on a ship.

I like to build just ships for mining (using PAM) and a base for processing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It was pretty stable on a landing-gear'd platform so my intention is to make a ship that lands on the surface adjacent to intended mining spots and then drills down into the ore.

The timing was very important though, took a fair few reloads to get the timing down just right to mitigate unwanted collisions and missed voxel material which would damage the system. But once that's done it's actually pretty smooth.

The design I mentioned in the main post was a Klangy monstrosity though, I had made a wheel out of like ~16 drills contorted into a wheel shape using hinges. I then used merge-blocks to condense the wheel into being ~4 subgrids. It worked OK just it was a nightmare to assemble and couldn't handle impacts very well so the user would have to be exceptionally careful when using it.