Small atmospheric miner trouble!

Greetings

I always play in survival mode and have pretty much stuck to being a small ship builder except when a large ship was built for refining or for carrying my small ships about. In space I have never really had problems designing and building my small ships in a compact way.

Now that planets have arrived I am really struggling to keep things small and compact, this in itself isn't really a problem for me once I reach a certain point with acquiring ore (at the moment always very slowly by hand drill). The "problem" I have been having is reaching that ore tipping point where it doesn't really matter what size ship I decide to build.

I just cannot seem to make a small atmospheric miner with 2 - 4 drills in a compact form like I was used to making in space...... Anything I make either cannot fly once loaded with ore or seems to grow out of proportion in size to fit all the atmospheric thrusters I need to be able to fill and fly with an oxygen system and a medium container of ore.

I just can't seem to build an able small miner suitable to bore a hole into the ground and fly back out again to allow me to get off the hand drill and use until I reach the threshold of building larger/large grid ships at an established fully operating base.

Does anyone else have a similar problem on the planet with compact small ships with small grid? Right now I have after successfully spending more than 1,450 hrs in space given up on planet survival and gone back to space only maps in frustration. (

 

hes also done a compact atmospheric welder in another video too.

2-drill atmospheric mining skiffs, i wouldnt bother making anything with more than 2 drills myself as it does become a substantial pain in the arse in order to keep it in the air, i built a modified version of this one with an extra large thruster and some more container space, it just about stays in the air fully loaded (ive crashed it once or twice) - once youve hit that aforementioned threshold then compact dosnt matter honestly, its just a matter of "does this work?" y/n.
if youre mining on mars, carry an oxygen cylinder, i know its backwards but its not worth the weight of an oxygen system on board when you can carry something that is substantially lighter, if youre on earth, just use a remote control and a passenger seat, its cheaper in the long run and if this is just a cheap "get you buy" miner, then you dont need a cockpit with a vent

 

I have to agree, two drills seems to be a good number for most mining skiffs. The one I built has a cockpit and vent, but it is also very much overbuilt for it's size. Five small thrusters down, five forward, four in each other direction. One large small ship reactor to power them, next time I might try for a remote controlled one using batteries. Using secondary fire on the drills, I can clear a much larger tunnel then it.

 

Greetings

@Harlequin Otterdog I have to say yours is the best design I have seen so far in my searching thats at least half aesthetically pleasing, most though there hasn't been many aren't suitable for anything other than boulder surface mining. It's not an easy task by any means it seems! I was trying to include an oxygen generator with tank as well so it would be suitable for the non air planets which then lets you not to have to carry a stack of bottles when out mining. It seems to me that atmospheric engines are rather under powered in SE.

I'm not really talking about realism after all it is a game so taking some license is expected, but if you looked at say an A-10 Warthog with its 2 engines and the weight they can push along it kind of makes the SE atmosphere thrusters look a bit sad. Granted in SE there's no lift from the ship itself. I am not a math genius but the amount of thrusters needed in SE seems to be overboard but if a spreadsheet numbers person wants to prove me wrong go ahead it'd be interesting.

I just think you should still be able to have a neat compact flyable small miner on a planet complete with all systems you need for any planet conditions to enable you to chase down the ore seams. If Keen ended up making ground vehicles more viable for such a purpose I'd be happy with that. Current rotors and pistons suck, though some people have made some clever designs control of said designs always seem overly complicated and clunky ( not to mention unreliable ) for what they do. A proper braking system would really be nice I'm a bit tired of chasing my vehicles after parking them on a slope that was steeper than it looked. ops:

But now I'm just whining so I'll leave it there and go have another crack at a small miner.

 

I nominal run on x3 invo, I've had mine up to nearly four times it's own weight. Which is when I added the stone ejecting system that you can't see from that picture. As it became nearly unflyable at that point. I do have plenty of power to add more thrusters if I wanted. There are two places to add a oxygen gen to that design. One is to move that top middle thruster forward a block and drop the gen there ontop of the medium container. The other is to remove the stone ejector system and move it else where. Along with the forward landing gear and stick it on the large cargo port on the bottom of the cockpit. I've found a tank usually isn't needed very often as you can turn the oxygen gen on and off to save power. The cockpit itself acts like a small tank if I remember right.

But if you had to add one, I'll have to go look at the cargo ports on a tank, but I think you can lengthen the design and slip it in behind the medium cargo container to make use of it's other unused small cargo port that is facing towards the rear. I do need to redesign the stone ejector system, it's very much just cobbled on. Probably rebuild it to make use of the rear small cargo ports on the drills themselves. I'll make a creative copy of my world and jiggle the designs then take some pictures.

Going to edit these in instead of making a new post.

What I did for the first was just move some stuff to clear the large cargo port on the cockpit. Second layout is actually nicer looking and I can simply not use the oxygen tank if I want to make it only slightly longer then the original. The three small ejectors I may move to point down instead of forward, at the moment they actually hit the ship when ejecting stone. Even if it doesn't do damage I don't like it doing that. Also can snuggle some batteries onto it instead of the large reactor without bloating it's lines much.

 

Glad to see I'm not the only one struggling to make decent looking atmospheric mining ships.

Hopefully now that I've seen harlequin otterdog's designs I might be asks to come up with/copy and have something half decent

 

This is what I banged together prior to deciding planet's weren't any fun:




https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=606545707

It's different from skiffs in that it's designed around plunging to mine, either into those boulders, or surface deposits.

 

Greetings

@tankmayvin Not bad but not uncommon either sadly...plunge miners seem to be how most people do it in a small way or go the path of big strip miners. I'm still having problems with a small compact miner */sigh. I have actually come up with a couple that were quite nice but once the medium container was full of ore they handed like flying bricks and I end up hitting the ground too hard on landing and wreck them. It seems with atmospheric thrusters the thrust to weight ratio is wrong or something else is amiss in the way Keen have done them.

You seem to get a very sharp thrust curve (making it very easy to overshoot in small maneuvers) to gain initial speed but when they are moving to dampening to slow you down they are much less powerful and reapplying thrust in the reverse direction does nothing to slow you down unless your movement has already actually stopped...sadly for me that seems to often be to late. Atmospheric thrusters are absolute pigs for maneuverability compared to ion. I am trying hard though not going to give up just yet!

 

Just try not to treat a mining rig as a race car, and you'll do better in controlling it

One of my early miners was a bit small (2 drill), and had a soft limit since my base is situated at 4.8 km from sea level. The higher up you go, the less those atmospheric thrusters will lift, and if you have a full load of ore, you will gradually hit a wall. So I built a new larger (but still small) miner to handle a bigger load, and my thin-air base.

This is my latest little personal miner I use:

* RAR, fighting imgur url, its not posting the right album... so go to it directly using this URL: Album Link

Handles 200,000 kg to my high altitude base (it weighs 55,000 kg by itself). So far its been doing me well. Makes quick work of ore boulders, and going underground is just as fine as the prior miner I was using.

My design is not that of a luxury vehicle, but rather more industrial. I find that the more streamlined and beautiful I make a ship, the more reckless I become in flying it lol!

PS: One thing to mention, for flying back out of a hole, is put a rear-view camera on, and simply back out. Trying to turn around inside a hole, is usually extremely difficult and depending on your thruster placement, not enough power to get out.

PPS: Also check your inventory settings on your saved world. If its at 10x, you will invariably inhale too much ore than any small ship can handle.

 

I like your design, big and beefy, yet still streamline. As for race car-ing, the fin on mine is both looks and to help protect the top of the large reactor from me bumping it into things. Which I do, alot, as I tend to bump into -everything-.

 

Nice protection! Not only good looks, but practical

I've noticed reactors like to go POOF on the slightest of bumps. Almost as much as the large atmospheric engines do.

I do like how slender yours is for containing gear, but also getting into tight spots with just the 2 drills.

 

Unless something has been screwed up, atmos should decel wth the same thrust they accel, I just find going someplace always feels slower than trying to stop. Evidently as you fill the craft up it is going to get more sluggish because it's carrying more mass.

The nice thing about plunge miners is that you can design it such that the downward thrust can comfortably hold up a full load of cargo, and then you just putter around using all your lateral thrusters.

With a pitching miner, you reach a point where you have to make sure you can always get your belly thrusters pointed downwards in order to recover from a descent and I find that risky. Plunging just makes more sense for small miners because unlike in space there is a distinct up/down and so it makes sense to have the majority of thrust oriented in the working plane.

Note, my mine also uses a gyro override script (I didn't write it), but when active it allows you to use belly thrust to increase your acceleration via pitching.

 

Mine actually flies upside down with zero to light load. So does the remote controlled miner I just built in my new world. It may fly upside when full as well, haven't tested it fully yet. It's fairly tiny, using only connector and drill for cargo space. I errored on the side of caution and gave it two batteries and three thrusters in all directions. Where maybe all it needs is one battery and two thrusters each direction.

I'll link directly to the album instead of posting the pictures here. Click here

EDIT: I'm going to use my grinder wreck for that smaller setup. You can actually see it in one of those pictures. It's where I disconnected the wrong ship and dropped it while taking pictures. Smashing off the whole front of the ship, but most of the thrusters and both charged batteries survived.

 

Greetings

@Frigidman Wow I really like your design! I too like a more industrial design but I do like my ships to have some form and that seems to be my downfall on planets. Example of my builds is this fully equipped exploration miner https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=542284230 So I believe this is my main problem as I notice the best atmospheric craft are really skeletons of working components without much body to them. So basically my attempts so far have just been to heavy even though their as small and compact as I can make them.

Currently while I fiddle with my disasters in trying to make my own small mining ship I'm using the mining ship from this build which works rather well. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=571858591

 

That is one issue with small grid ships, in order to 'skin' them, you need an amazing amount of blocks to do so, and then the miner become very large in footprint, which for a miner, means you need more drills to make a big enough hole, which means more engines, which means more skinning of armor blocks, which means ... LOL.

Not to mention all those blocks each add more weight, which reduces your ore load capacity. And for me, a Miner needs to haul as much ore per run, so I sacrifice some skinning to get as much ore as I can before it falls out of the sky (or gets stuck in a hole somewhere!).

 

A large reactor is an expensive block for a two-drill miner though.

 

If all it has is small engines, it shouldn't need it, I would think. I dont think you could run all those engines in full thrust at the same time

 

I couldn't find the right balance of small reactors, also the original ship was intended to be bigger when I first started. I'll enjoy my seven hours of power, makes it a great long range miner/scout. On my new save I've switched to just using pure batteries for now.

In other news, my smaller drone project ran afoul of the only tree next to my ship. Slammed into it while trying to switch cameras. It worked, but anything over it's own weight in ore makes it sink and not flyable. Mind, I'm running a x3 invo world, so it may be fine on a x1 world.

 

I find it interesting that some people are abandoning planets. I find the physics and engineering challenges fun, if exhausting at times. I've blown a tire on my large wheeled miner and needed to run back and get my lander, and basically use a piston to change a tire. I play on 3/1/1 (3X inventory) so granted I am getting a bit of a break on the weight but it is much more immersive than the easy-peasey space mining where anything and everything works.

I'm totally not trolling, I just agree with the OP that the challenge is real and makes me appreciate SE even more.

 

Umm, what inventory multiplier are you using? I'm not thinking this would work in my server on 3/1/1.

 

In deceleration the thrusters use override thrust which they won't in a default acceleration situation. Not sure if you meant by manually using override or not so I'm making an assumption in this.

 

It works fine on all multiplyers. Inventory mass scales with multiplyer settings so that a cargo container full of ore weighs the same on X1 and X10.

 

As far as I know they removed the small grid damper multiplyer back in Feb.

 

Because i havnt seen any small ship miners like mine in the thread so far, here it is. It is imperfect but I'm mostly pleased with it anyway. I play 1x1x1, my miner reflects, with sufficient cargo to be worth the mining trip on 1x.
It has had a few subtle revisions over time, this is current enough.
It is battery operated, I have a small reactor on it now to recharge in the field. It has 30min flight time unloaded, and 8 fully loaded.

It can fly at max load, even filling drills and cockpit. I used it extensively until i could afford a large ship miner. It got me to full uranium power.



Rough parts list,
5 batteries
5 large thrusters for lift.
2 thrusters for lateral motion in each direction(total 4)
6 thrusters for forward and reverse.
5 drills.
2 medium cargo containers,
1 large cargo container.

The good, minimalistic design, can be fully loaded with ore, semi-redundant thrusters(can lose one of the 4 primary thrusters), easily fits inside right click cross-section, fits reasonably in well in left click drill cross-section
The bad, exposed thrusters, mining angle only 15-30 degrees, low flight time, at full load likely have to right click drill out passageway to turn around.

 

Greetings

@admanter Not too bad to get mining with! So many thrusters though..you do need them..that's what seems kind of wrong to me. I believe you should be able to build a small miner with full support systems maybe two drills with only one or two large thrusters max with a few small ones for directional control in the various planes, just as you can for space. You can't seem to use much in the way of form/cladding at all because of the thruster to weight ratio currently.

I mean look at current jet planes and what can be pushed around with two or four jet engines. Though a minimalist design can look just fine in it's own right I don't like being struck with only that I want to be able to put some form and shape to my small ship planetary designs. I think they did it that way on purpose because of the whole trying to get into space thing so I see why it is so it is just a bit disappointing to me as on planets the thrusters really limit what you can do in design.

 

I think the real trouble is the weight of steel plates and therefore armor blocks. I'd love it if they'ed reduce steel plate weight, add a light skin block using only one plate, and rebalance armor blocks accordingly. Let armor blocks form the frame of vessels, and let us form a nice shape using the skin.

 

Designing a compact yet useful mining ship for planetary use is very difficult. Especially if you want it to look nice as well.
The main thing I've found out through testing is not to use large thrusters. The small ones are more powerful considering the space they take. The only problem is if you want to carry more than just a handful of ores you would need close to 20 small thrusters in most directions. My current design has, I think, 17-18 pointing down, about 15 pointing forward and 10-12 backwards. And it's a relatively small ship with 2 drills and 6 medium cargo containers. I decided on the medium cargos to keep a low vertical profile as it needs to fit in the hole the 2 drills make.
The main problem for me when designing such a ship is where to put all the thrusters I would need. Currently I am working on a larger version with a cockpit in the center surrounded by 4 drills. My hope is I would be able to put large cargos and still have enough space for what would probably be about 30 small thrusters in at least 2 directions. Not to mention the 2 large reactors I would need for power. Or I might have to go with one reactor and a few batteries. I'll have to see about that.
Unfortunately design and good looks will have to be thrown out of the cockpit again.
It's just too impractical and inefficient to have good design...

 

Greetings

@Vicizlat I so agree with you, it's even worse without the powerful inertial thrust for braking we used to have from 10x down to 1x. Unless you build in large scale ships are pretty much just flying bricks covered in thrusters.

Personally I preferred SE with thrusters pre-01.105. I'm sad to say I am STILL struggling to build a small miner I am happy with. Though after being put on to this mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=540586332 I'm a little happier. So I'm still playing SE off and on but my hours logged have dropped waay down from what they were and it solely relates to thrusters on planets spoiling my enthusiasm, half of the the time I am still spending in SE is now back on maps in space with planets as a nice background. I will point out this is only really an issue as a player who only plays survival enjoying the whole process of starting from scratch to build bases and more and better ships as I go on. In other styles of play I think this would be a minor issue if at all.

 

I actually like the change to dampeners. It didn't make much sense before - why do I have so much power when I'm stopping but I don't have it when accelerating? And especially on planets where you have to fight against gravity. You are mining comfortably in a hole, dampeners keeping you from falling down but all of a sudden you don't have the power to get back up...
What we need is more powerful thrusters. I know there are plenty of mods that do that but I like to make ships as vanilla as possible. And I just don't understand why the thrusters have to be so underpowered. Or maybe I should put it another way - why are some blocks soooo heavy that we need so many thrusters to keep our ships flying?

I read recently the change log for ME and they were introducing a Research table. I would love to have something similar in SE. Maybe you could invest some materials and power into a "Research chamber" for example and improve the performance of certain blocks. Or just unlock the ability to build improved versions. It could play with the cost and power required for the upgraded components to balance them out just like the mods do. And of course the tiered tools could go there and you would need to research them first before you can build them.
Oh the possibilities are so many, we just need them to be implemented...

 

A two ship mining operation works well. Have a (small) large block cargo carrier that you park near your mining operation and offload regularly to that so you don't make long trips in a heavily loaded miner.

My miner simply has two drills, one large thruster downwards, six small for reverse and only minimal thrust elsewhere.

Personally I recommend mining enough to get to space then setting up serious resourcing on asteroids or moons. A basic hydrogen rocketship makes a good cargolifter for early game (practice your taillandings!)