Ballance The Ejector by adding an adjustable quantity

The Ejector has always been a problem due to the fact that its slow cycle rate about once a second and ability to only drop roughly 150 units of stone per cycle means that it is difficult to keep up with the rate of drilling and completely impossible if your using mods to increase drill yields. An ejector needs to have an adjustable quantity ranging from one unit to the entire capacity of the ejector. I made this video to briefly demonstrate the amount of time spent waiting for stone waste to be discharged vs time spend drilling. Keep in mind that this ship not even using the highest tier drill on the server.

Aside from the issue of time it is also important for server performance because 2-3 ejectors dropping large boulders is easier on the sim speed than a large number of ejectors spamming small stones.

 

Well, a few things after watching the video.
Some answers you may like, others not so much.

- Keen is under absolutely no obligation to balance the game around mods, I'm not familiar with the specifics of the mod you're using, but obviously it gets a more rapid yield than what was originally intended. Based on my own personal observations i've seen that ejectors can more or less keep some reasonable pace in the same surface area, meaning a drills 3x3 foot print carried straight on into ejectors is plenty.

- While annoying, removing/getting rid of waste stone is in most regards considered "engineering" and a logistics issue to be solved.

- in Vanilla 1x survival (which arguably a large amount of the game is balanced around) one drill has the same cargo capacity as a medium cargo container and one drill can only take in approximately 10 Tonnes or 10,000 units,
your measurement of 500,000 tells me you're playing on 10x (or have 10x capacity mods), I personally think you can't have your cake and eat it too: if you play on 10x you should be to some degree logistically prepared for 10x the stone to deal with. i believe your time was about 4 minutes to eject, now lets go ahead cut that by a factor of 10 you get 24 seconds, Which happens to be roughly the same amount of time you were digging.

- If you really wish to pursue this, i'd advise you move this complaint to the connector, and not the ejector, the connector has an incredibly disproportionate ejection relative to its size, if you want to crap out 2000 unit boulders you should probably not suddenly make it appear from an orifice that is substantially smaller, also if you start ejecting boulders that big and have ejectors that close together, i guarantee that one of them is going to clip into your ship and badly damage it.

 

With the current state of space mining and the way the spawns are working you really don't even have to mine stone as a byproduct at all.

 

The fact remains that every function of a block should be adjustable to suit the needs of the player within reason. the problem is that most of the non adjustable parameters are not set to reasonable values. For example a player can manually transfer and jettison ore faster than even an array of ejectors so if you can explain whats reasonable about that than ill concede to your point.

Also your argument about playing on 10x is invalid as if the server is set to 10X than shouldn't the ejectors hold 10x more and eject 10x more ore per cycle??

you cant really call this a engineering problem. The fact remains that engineering is all about doing things efficiently and the game focuses on requiring cumbersome over engineered ships to perform tasks that should be rather ubiquitous. I like a challenge but it has to be a REAL challenge not a FAKE challenge artificially generated by broken game mechanics. This ""Solution"" is rather simple spam the hell out of ejectors but than again what does that do to the performance of a server its better to have a single large boulder floating around than max out the floating objects count with pebbles dont you think?

 

I'm not certain of the exact values, but if I recall correctly, the player inventory on 1x is what 400L? Are you telling me that you can pull out ore, transfer it to another container, and repeat faster than literally like 4 ejectors? I think they have a volume of 142L and dump most of it per tick. I will personally guarantee that a couple ejectors would be more than a match for an engineer trying to line his pockets constantly.

Plus with ejectors you have the benefit of passive work, so while you're mining, you're also getting rid of the stone, not having to stop the digging to manually eject stone seems like a nice plus to me.

As for the adjustability, I agree, but like I also suggested if you actually cared to read my response, was suggesting you ask this of the connector instead. Right now it ejects a very small rock relative to its size, whereas an ejector spits out a rock roughly the same size as the block.

It does actually hold 10x more, but it doesn't eject 10x more because the rocks would be too big and would likely clip inside each other and cause a whole bunch of issues. Once again, this was included in my original response. Once again, I'll make my point: you can't have your cake and eat it to, if you play on 10x you should be prepared to deal with more stone. While some scaling would be nice, I understand there are reasons why it's the way it is.

By your own logic though it wouldn't make any difference on server performance. Because you take in 10x the stone, and crap out boulders that are 10x the size. You fill up the exact same amount of server resources because everything scaled.

I can actually call it an engineering problem, because the logistics of dealing with a metric ass load of stone is in fact a problem. One that has several potential solutions outside of spamming ejectors. It just happens that spamming ejectors is one of the more effective ways of getting rid of it.

But you and I play this game in radically different ways, I'm more about ground based miners, so I have an upper limit to my amount of ejectors due to weight. I also design my craft with 1x in mind.

For me waste stone is a major issue, so I've adapted accordingly.

 

I see where your coming from regarding ejection amount however cant this be shifted to speed when you look at real life mining equipment waste material is usually discarded at the same rate it is generated by simply falling onto a belt and being ejected out the back of the machine. Increasing ejection rate exponentially would resolve the clipping issue due to stone size

 

If you increase the ejection rate, you need to increase the force of which stones are ejected, otherwise gravity may not be fast enough to clear before the next eject tick or in space you may not want to be ejecting high velocity rocks in a tunnel where they're free to bounce.

As for your real life example: do you want to build a belt? I would, as it'd be super cool, but for my purposes generally pointless.

The way I mine I take in very little stone anyway, so I simply have a passive sorter system on my refinery area that gets rid of the stone after I've off loaded.

 

Weld and grind cargo containers to get rid of huge amounts of stone.

 

Stone size versus connector/ejector size is irrelevant.

It's not actually one huge rock. It's an abstraction of a bunch of smaller rocks that have already been broken down by the drill.

 

Actually that was my ultimate solution for my large grid mining ships I had a projector that would spawn a garbage drone which was basically a cargo container with a warhead attached to it that would fill up with stone than be discarded and self destruct

 

Well you already done what i was going to suggest...
use more ejector