The plan with these guys was that they’d have a small-grid mining drone and a courier drone docked to them. So, I could RC it out to an ore deposit then I could RC onto the courier drone and set up a courier route it would fly automatically. Then set up a lock/control for the courier so it would only fly the route when it had enough ore to fill it’s cargo containers.

The intention was that I could save time by RC mining and automate the ore transport process. If necessary also setting up relay stations so I could have a greater than 50km range I could RC mine in.

Yes, but I don’t know if/how to do so autonomously. You can RC them via Antenna and control seat and would be able to see through cameras on it and detect ores that way.

I don’t see there being that much for downsides. I want the hangers to default to pressurized but given they’re less than 1/10th the size of the flight deck a piece quickly pressurizing and de-pressurizing them shouldn’t be much of a problem. Just a matter of having eight depressurize systems instead of one.

We’re trying to enclose a brick shaped segment of a larger build to serve as a cabin. We managed to find the leak, I misunderstood how air-tightness works with reinforced conveyors, so adding a few junctions sealed the leak.

Yes. The ship is still connected to our groundbase, it was a connection issue between hold and assembler that was our problem

Nope, realized that problem shortly after posting. Ground down the assemblers and connected blocks to replace off of the cargo and now it works.

https://phtn.app/post/dormi.zone/892282 Not as pretty as I’d like, working around those massive thrusters is hard… but I’d need so many smaller ones It’d probably be just as hard.

Minor Update: The hull design couldn’t support the amount of thrusters it’d need to fly with full it’s oreholds full so I’ve flown that partial ship off my prototyping platform and started over. Now that I have the gist of the Hull figured out I’ve mapped out the functional blocks and am in the process of wrapping a new version of the Hull around them. Might be done today or tomorrow if all goes well.

Update: I decided to try mapping out the Hull and fitting blocks in afterword… It’s gotten me past the choice paralysis however the hull I went with couldn’t fit thrusters to make it able to handle the amount of ore it could hold. So, I’ve moved that version off my prototyping platform and will be starting over with the built version as a reference model as I like the overall shape. Going to use the other method of building out the functional blocks then wrapping the hull design around that.

Will post the Workshop link once it’s done as I’m really liking taking a liking to this ship.

Yeah, I have a backup of my survival world I use for that kind of creative testing. I still have this problem though.

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.

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.