Asteroid mining for a complete newb

Player Questions
1

I’ve looked through the wiki and Reddit, and while I feel tantalizing close to an answer, I haven’t figured out the asteroid mining mechanic.

Background: (C#, btw)

Starting from zero knowledge, watched a couple tutorial videos and followed along for a while, then hit a not-so-small problem. My homeworld is shorting me on a resource, a fairly crucial one. I’ve got mines (250 and building more), and I’m not even keeping up with the upgrading of my starter shipyards to larger size capacity (20k military and 200k civ).

Okay, it’s a 4X, like literally in the name, and my survey ships I’ve got scanning the Sol system have found several comets and asteroids with this resource. I’ll go mine one of them, can’t be that hard, right?

Designed a mining ship (with mining modules!), built two, stuck 'em in a fleet, got 'em to the destination comet which has 71k of this resource. They aren’t mining… Quick Reddit search, oh, I just need to declare this comet a colony in the mineral scanner! No worries! Done. They’re mining! Huzzah! Now to get some of these resources home… I forgot to put a GD cargo module on the damned things… FINE! We’ll build dedicated cargo lighters, probably needed them anyways!

Design a small (5k cap) cargo lighter, engines, fuel, engineering space with a small maintenance supply (this comet is over a year round trip for my current engine design with 3 engines, MSC is important…), retool my civ shipyards to build these now, get one built, send it out… can’t load minerals from the colony. It has over 100 units by now, this is annoying.

FINE! The wiki and Reddit seem to agree that dropping a mass driver on the colony and shooting the cargo at home (which has a mass driver now, 2 in fact since I can’t actually build one out there, no BP) is probably best. Minor miscalculation on the mass of the driver, FINE! We’ll design and build a bigger transport after making sure it’s actually going to be big enough this time.

Okay! We have a mass driver in the new transport, it’s in “orbit” around the comet with a follow order, and now I can’t land the GD DRIVER! Obviously I’m missing something, but what am I missing? My general hope is to drop the MD on site, get it aimed for Earth, and go pick up an Auto-Mine, drop one on the comet, have the two just kinda sit there until the comet is dry, meanwhile move my mining ships elsewhere and then figure out manually moving cargo from these mining asteroids/comets. Then figure out semi-automation with orders, which seems mostly to consist of “get to target, wait X seconds (about a year?), load, fly back to earth, drop minerals, repeat”? Deal with that later…

But for now, how do I actually get a mass driver and/or auto-mine into this not-a-colony-colony?

2

Sounds like your transports don’t have cargo shuttles, which are needed to move ore and installations on and off colonies

3 Likes
3

You need cargo shuttles if the target planet doesn’t have either a spaceport or a cargo shuttle station.

Ships don’t land, except for anything under 500 tons in v2.7.1 (1000 tons in v3.0). So you need someway to get the minerals off the asteroid, or unload the mass driver. This is done by having cargo shuttles on the cargo ship. You didn’t need to them load the mass driver because Earth normally has a spaceport.

Once you have that, order the fleet to Unload all installations at the asteroid population

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4

Is every, <= 500t ship able to land?

I am sure my 500t boarding pods needed cargo shuttle station to load marines off luna.

5

I am sure they did not.

I use 500t boarding pods. I load troops off of bare rock colonies all the time.

Besides, no troop ship ever needs cargo shuttles.
You can add cargo shuttles to reduce load/unload time, but they aren’t required.

6

I wonder what the problem was loading then, I ending up using a troop transport to load them off Luna and then transfer them in space to the boarding pods while I shipped over a cargo shuttle station.

Question, why do you have boarding pod troops on bare rocks? Just shuttle a load of them in on a normal troop transport and drop them off for replacements on the frontlines? (I’ve done that but they stayed in the troop transport.)

7

Because getting boarding troops off of captured ships can be a big pain.
When targeting a fleet, you have no “Load Assigned Ground Templates” order.
So you have to give a separate order targeting each individual formation.
I often attack single ships with 50 or more pods.
Ain’t no way I’m going to do that much clicking to reload the formations onto the pods.

So I use SM-mode.
Make a waypoint to mark your spot.
Put a drop pod on the captured ship design.
SM-move it to some empty colony.
Orbital drop the troops.
Move ship back to waypoint.
Remove drop pod from captured ship design.

Now sm-move the pods to that same colony, use that very convenient “Load Assigned Ground Templates” order, and sm-move them back.

1 Like
8

@Isotoxal and @AuroraSteve , thanks muchly. I did not have cargo shuttles on board, I’ll have to go re-re-redesign the cargo ship. Presumably after doing some research in Logistics?

Tangential question, do I need to have my fleets actively Follow the comet, or will they hold an “orbit” around it like they would around a planet? They’re not burning a lot of fuel holding a Follow, but they are burning some and I’d rather they didn’t run dry and have to go rescue them with my deep-space tankers.

9

No need to follow, just put the ships into orbit and call it a day

1 Like
10

O’h nice work around.

11

Just use a ‘move to’ order and a fleet will stay in orbit of any body.

You don’t even need the ‘move to’ order though if unloading. Just target the body with an unload order. The fleet will move there and remain in orbit while unloading.

Quick redesigns because you didn’t know the rules is what SM Mode is for :slight_smile:

3 Likes
12

I’m very deliberately avoiding SM mode. Forces me to learn when I don’t have “god-mode” active, and while I may grouse about it I’m not actually worried. The more I use the systems, the more I become familiar with the way they interact. The more I understand how they interact the more I am able to figure out and learn and grow.

So yeah, I appreciate the fact the mode is available, it allows for customization in a BIG way, like designing new additional NPRs on the fly and creating custom scenarios. And I’m fully cognizant of the difficulties I’m imparting on myself. But it is my way. :slight_smile: Absolute worst case scenario I paint myself into a hard corner there is no coming out of and I restart. I lose some time, but I’ve also learned something new about the game I’m playing. I also play Dwarf Fortress, have done since 0.31, so building out from hard starts and losing is !!FUN!!, as the saying goes.

Cheers, and thanks for the great game, I’ve not yet seen a tenth portion I’m sure, and I should probably start working on developing actual weapon systems sooner rather than later. :stuck_out_tongue:

3 Likes