Space Engineers - Drop Ship Mining rig. (CHEAP! and portable. NO SCRIPTS!)

Show a simple method for passive mining operations!
Tired of mining manually? Try this instead.

[stingerstinger]

I built the mining rig and set the settings as listed in the vid. Twice broke off the drill as I found out, the upper rotor is going too slow and by the time it gets round the second half of the hole, the piston has pushed it down far enough, it will brake the drill. I've tested it at .006 (instead of .003) and still broke the drill. I found if you set the upper rotor to 0.10 it will spin the upper rotor fast enough and have no breakage. I've tested it several times now at this speed and it works fine. I use my drill in space and primarily to drill ice. I added a hydrogen engine with an event controller to fire it up when batteries get below 90%. Also added a pair of hydrogen tanks with 2 02 Generators because I can...lol Fills the hydrogen cargo ship up when picking up the ice for delivery. All in all, great design and now that the upper rotor speed has been changed, works perfect. Thx

[TinyTeeth]

You could also automate it a bit by setting an event controller to turn on a signal when the containers are full. Well done

[nauticalgaming]

Ooh, you just gave me an idea to increase their efficiency, depending on your needs.
If you want to build one to use as a portable dock: build it out of Large grid, deploy it on ice, have some O2/H2 Generators on the top of cargo, going into a couple Hydrogen Engines, and a couple Hydrogen Tanks and maybe an O2 tank (if you want it, that part is entirely optional) to store the refined gasses. This would work to refill ship batteries (more Hydrogen Engines=Faster charging, so if you use primarily battery powered ships this would still work for those too, you just have to adjust the formula as necessary to your needs). You could place the connector somewhere up high, like on the top of one of the H2 tanks. That way picking up and moving the rig would be easy, and once it's placed it would fully serve it's role as a portable docking station. Ice empty? Just pick the drill up with a ship and relocate.

Miner: Large grid, still need the power generation setup, but for this one you could put a Refiner on it, doesn't need to be anything fancy you could go Basic Refinery or if you wanted to go all-out just slap a reg Refiner with max Yield mods. Then you do the sorter-connector gravel dropper to remove any of the gravel the Refineries make, so you squeeze every last drop of resources like Silicate, Iron, and Nickel that you want out of the stone and leave the bare rock behind.

[ryanmcdonald]

"The Virus" Love It. When I make a miner with a lot of drills on it, I save the drills as a group called "The Fist". I might try this idea, but on wheels for something to collect tons of ice on my home base.

[mrdarkevilme]

reminds me a bit of the large mining assemblages i'd build on site. They used a bunch of timers to do stuff like reverse the pistons and had 1 arm for vertical descent (that did nothing but move super slow) and 1 arm for horizontal reach that very slowly oscillated in and out. as they were bases they were moderately stable and used large blocks.

[kurzninja]

I just built this in my survival world, but I'm concerned that the piston won't have enough distance to make it down to where the ores are. I also built wheels onto the legs with an underhanging cockpit so I can move it around, though I haven't tried driving it quite yet. I have piston outriggers with landing gear so that I can raise and lower them to attach/detach from the ground.

I'm gonna try to take the middle cargo container out and builder pistons higher up through the middle so I can get the drill to go deeper to get to the ores. I was thinking some kind of rotor/piston set up that will change the rotor angle and piston length at the same time to raise/lower the drill. Problem is gonna be getting the math right to make sure the pistons are pistoning and rotors rotoring at just the right time to not break stuff.

Thanks for the inspiration :D

[zamba]

I usually make a cargo truck with a build on site drill packed onto the bed of the truck.

I like this drill set-up, though. It will save space for more pistons

[DC_Joker]

So could you use pistons for the legs that can be lowered when the drill piston gets fully extended to continue to drill further down?

[eri_c]

Should you wish to save on some PCUs, I would suggest getting rid of the “legs”. Instead use the “convert to station” command when the rig is flown into the right position. I’m also using 1 drill operation mode! 👍🏻

[lamebubblesflysohigh]

This how I designed most of mine mining rigs since forever but instead of many cargo holds I have just 1 for whatever I am mining (lets say iron) and a basing refinery for mats from stone. Iron goes directly to storage stone goes via sorter to refinery and mats go from refinery same storage as iron. It is reusable just as yours but I am not wasting time with hauling stone.

[kinngrimm]

Are 2 batteries enough to fill up all containers or would you need to resupply them with power at some point? Have maybe a drone only do energy resupply runs :)

[brandonbailey]

new to the game. love the rig. for mining, should one aim for depth or breadth? i currently have a single head mining rig and havent found an elegant solution for introducing new pistons without destroying the head, adding a piston and re-adding the head. any thoughts appreciated!

[franklinshooter]

Man, all of these really great ideas. All i wanna do is swap out the LG for wheels but i have to learn to build a rolling vehicle first. Any chance you could help outwith that?

[ChristopherPisz]

Was there some math involved in figuring out your rotations?

[jackulousb]

Cool name. It does look like a bacteriophage virus.

[Rage_Spammer]

Much simpler than my single drill auto miner.

I use 2 pistons, vertical and horizontal, and 1 rotor. I do a full circle then extend the horizontal piston by 2.5m and do another circle. This goes on until after circling at 10m, where I extend the vertical piston by 0.5m. I repeat the process, but instead of extending the horizontal piston, I retract it. This is all controlled by like 12 event controllers so the process continues automatically until the vertical piston reaches its end or the containers are full.

While it is cool to watch it follow this tightly controlled process, its a bitch to set up in survival because there is a bug where event controllers that are tracking piston position WILL NOT FUCKING WORK when they are built from a projector hologram. The only way I have found to fix this is to tear down the event controllers and rebuild and reprogram them. Not fun to do when I need to do this to 10 of them and they each have 4 or more actions that need to be exact. Had to create a doc just to keep track.

My next build is going to be an oil rig style ice processing facility and its going to incorporate your drilling idea. I plan on playing with the drill dimensions to cover a larger area. Still need to experiment with that. I'll also be trying to implement a system that'll automatically add conveyor sections to extend the drill, like Kelevra's mining rig.

[Anvilshock]

What's an inertia "tensioner"? Also, do you actually know why you set it? And what the crap are you setting Braking Torque for?? Braking Torque ONLY applies when the rotor is OFF. You one of the "Hurr slider goes brrr" crowd? Don't play hard, play smart!